ETH Scaling: Can Your Gaming PC Save the Blockchain? 🤯

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Right. So, it appears some clever chaps at a firm called Brevis (sounds like a particularly small breed of dog, doesn’t it?) have concocted something they’re calling Pico Prism. It’s meant to make Ethereum… faster. Apparently. Now, faster is good. Slower is generally frowned upon. Unless you enjoy watching digital paint dry, which, frankly, says a lot about your life choices. 😉

They’ve built a sort of… well, it’s a rather complicated “zero-knowledge Ethereum Virtual Machine” (zkEVM). Don’t worry, nobody actually understands what that means; it’s designed to sound impressive. It’s supposed to prove Ethereum blocks are doing what they’re supposed to be doing, without needing a room-sized supercomputer. They’re using gaming graphics cards. Yes, the same ones grown men argue about the framerate on while playing things involving orcs and spaceships. 🤷

Apparently, this Pico Prism thing can now “prove” these blocks near instantly with a collection of 64 Nvidia RTX 5090s, which are slick, shiny and cost more than a small car. A reassuring thought: our financial future might depend on whether someone has a decent graphics card. 💸

“Brevis has achieved real-time proving of Ethereum L1 using consumer-grade hardware,” the firm stated, presumably while polishing their RTX cards.

They managed to prove 99.6% of the blocks without taking all day about it (under 12 seconds, for the record). “Real-time proving” is apparently the new buzzword – it means the proving happens faster than more blocks are made. A simple concept, really. Although it took a team of highly-paid engineers to work that one out.

A Step Towards… Something Big, Apparently

So, the big idea? Stop everyone having to re-do all the sums every time a transaction happens. It’s currently rather like everyone in a pub independently recalculating the bar tab. Wasteful, really. Instead, one person does it (the “prover”), and everyone else just checks the answer. It’s basic arithmetic, people. 🤓

“Real-time proving breaks this model. One prover generates a proof, and everyone else verifies it in milliseconds.”

The 10,000 Transactions Per Second Dream

The target, as everyone is terribly excited about, is 10,000 transactions per second. According to one Mr. Ryan Sean Adams of Bankless (a name that suggests a lack of sensible financial planning), at the current rate of improvement, we’ll get there by April 2029. That’s… a while. Still, it gives the engineers something to do. 🗓️

And apparently, something called the Fusaka upgrade (sounds suspiciously like a rare tropical disease) is going to make all this even easier. A Bitcoin security researcher – and those are a fussy bunch – named Justin Drake says it’ll enable more “parallel proving” through “subblocks”. Honestly, it’s best not to ask.

Phones as Nodes? Is Nothing Sacred?

The Ethereum Foundation is positively beaming. They claim this will allow Ethereum to scale and stay trustworthy. Which is good. Mostly. They’re talking about being able to run a node – basically, a vital part of the Ethereum network – on a *phone*. A phone! Whatever happened to good old-fashioned server farms? 📱

A tech entrepreneur, Mike Warner, declared the “phone-as-a-node future just got real.” Which sounds… slightly terrifying, if you ask me. Adams envisions layer-1 handling “global DeFi” at a blistering 10,000 TPS, while layer-2 handles everything else. A beautifully complex system built on the promise of scalable blockchains.

It’s all a bit like building a castle in the air, really. But a castle built with gaming PCs and fancy acronyms. We’ll see if it holds. 🤔

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2025-10-16 06:49