One of the most frequently asked questions lately is: how should we view the Ethereum narrative?
Admittedly, Ethereum focused on ICOs and world computing in 2017, and DeFi and financial settlement layers in 2021. However, in this cycle of 2025, there seems to be few new narratives that can rival the old ones in terms of their sophistication.
ETFs and staking ETFs might count as half, but these are not under the control of Ethereum developers. If we're talking about the other half, it would have to be ZK.
Ethereum is undoubtedly the public blockchain with the most bets on ZK in the entire crypto world.
A few days ago, Vitalik was quite excited and officially announced on Twitter that ZKEVM has now entered the Alpha stage.
Why is Ethereum so fixated on ZK?
In fact, Ethereum's TPS is already quite high, with the theoretical peak reaching over 200 TPS. The reason for this is that Ethereum has repeatedly increased the gas cap.
However, increasing the gas limit comes at a cost and cannot be done indefinitely. The cost is that nodes need more expensive servers to run it.
However, Ethereum wants to retain its proud high degree of decentralization, so it cannot push the server performance of its nodes too high (for reference, a single Solana server is about 5-10 times more expensive than a single ETH server).
Therefore, the mainnet must be ZooKeeper-ized. Note that this is not as simple as setting up a few ZooKeeper L2 instances; it involves completely ZooKeeping the L1 mainnet.
So what are the benefits of ZK?
Those ETH nodes can easily verify these ZK proofs without having to painstakingly verify each transaction one by one as in the past.
To give an analogy, if you were the teacher grading the papers (node), those transactions would be like the students' papers.
In the past, grading papers manually was definitely very slow. But since the advent of the ZK-based answer sheet system, which calculates a student's total score in a second, wouldn't that make things much easier for you as a teacher?
You're much more relaxed now. In the past, one person could only grade 50 papers, but now they can grade 1,000. It's still the same person, but the efficiency has increased dramatically.
Therefore, Ethereum must first implement ZK on mainnet before it can continue to significantly increase the gas limit.
ZK-ification itself doesn't directly increase TPS; it's a prerequisite. Improving performance still requires increasing the gas cap, but with ZK-ification, nodes don't need to increase server costs significantly, making the cost negligible.
After the last Fusaka upgrade (especially the PeerDAS upgrade), which ran smoothly, Ethereum has taken another step closer to mainnet ZKization, which is why Vitalik is so excited.
Imagine a mainnet with a TPS exceeding 1,000; for Ethereum, that would indeed be a pretty good narrative.
If Ethereum itself builds ZK-EVM for the mainnet, then what's the point of having other ZK teams?
To put it simply, it still has significance.
Why?
First of all, ZK is one of the most difficult projects to develop on the entire internet, and it's on par with FHE. It requires a large number of cryptography talents.
The Ethereum Foundation likely has some reserves in this area, but as an open-source community, Ethereum adheres to the principle that many hands make light work, requiring numerous third-party ZooKeeper teams to conduct trial and error and innovate. In return, Ethereum will provide substantial support.
Secondly, ZK-EVM has four types, from type 1 to type 4. Several teams, including Polygon, Scroll, ZKsync, and Taiko, are working on implementing one of these types, almost like each person taking on a task.
In addition, there are ZK-VMs, such as Brevis.
In fact, ZK-VM's position is even more stable than ZK-EVM's.
The reason is that, among the four ZK-EVM types mentioned above, it is highly likely that the most cost-effective solution will ultimately be chosen and become part of the Ethereum mainnet's ZK-EVM solution, which may affect the other three.
However, ZK-VM itself is not EVM compatible, so it must be part of Ethereum's diversity strategy.
Furthermore, since VMs are not subject to the limitations of EVMs, their performance can be very high. Ethereum's ZK-EVM poses no threat to them; on the contrary, the Ethereum team will continue to encourage it.
For example, Vitalik previously mentioned the performance of Brevis's ZK-VM and expressed his expectation that it would enter the ZK-EVM field.
What about L2?
It might have some impact, but it's still not significant.
Vitalik once said when discussing Polygon that ZK and L2 should be separated.
The adoption of ZK-based L1 will likely attract some users back to ZK L2, since if L1 becomes cheap enough, fewer users might switch to L2.
However, if we think of it the other way around, let's use an analogy: L1 is the foundation, and L2 is the skyscraper. The stronger the foundation, the better. So, if the L1 mainnet is ZooKeeper-ized, L2 will also see a reduction in costs, which is also beneficial.
Furthermore, in that tweet, Vitalik specifically mentioned Brevis, who works on ZK-VM. The reason is that much of Brevis's ZK work is not limited to L2, meaning that "ZK research and L2 research are separate."
For example, they have a market for ZK computing power and help Uniswap's hooks with ZK-based reward distribution, which can be considered application-driven.
In conclusion, Ethereum has been online for 10 years, and the slogan of ZK-ification has been around for five or six years. After years of hard work, ZK-ification has finally entered the Alpha stage. This is inseparable from the continuous investment of Ethereum and many third-party ZK teams, including Brevis and Polygon.
