Ethereum's Last Big Upgrade: The zkEVM | Ansgar Dietrichs
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ZKVM is this fundamental insight that what you can do is you can basically allow nodes to verify that a block followed all the rules without having to re execute the block. It's a very non intuitive thing, right? A blockchain, by its nature, is a very symmetrical thing. Every node basically does the same thing. Of course, you have block producers, but then every node kind of has to download, re execute. You're duplicating the effort across the network. And now you're jumping to this like through this very fancy cryptography. You're jumping to this world where you still have the same effort to
Bankless nation. I'm here with Anzgar Dietrichs. He's a researcher at the Ethereum Foundation. We're gonna talk about the ZK EVM today on the show. Anzgar, welcome to Bankless.
Hey. Great to be here again.
Pretty ambitious subject, Anzgar. Ethereum has had this history of very big forks hard for hard forks that have upgraded Ethereum from this early primitive proof of concept, where it started in 2015 to what it is today, which is fundamental infrastructure, the backbone of Internet money and Internet finance. We had the merge, which did proof of work to proof of stake. We had EIP one five five nine that upgraded ether economics and transaction you you user experience. There's also 4844, which just enabled Ethereum's roll up environment to become its best self. With each of these forks, they all
I personally share your excitement on on this topic. I really think that it's one of those changes that are really Ethereum at its best. It's it's it's one of those really ambitious technical projects that I think Ethereum is in a unique position to deliver. It will have a huge impact primarily through scaling, but in many ways. I'm sure we'll talk about all of this. And I really think it's something we can look forward for, we can be proud of. And, yeah, I'm excited to talk about the details. I will say, by the way, you said hard fork. And the interesting thing here is, like, similar to if yo
So it is the introduction of an era of Ethereum rather than an acute hard fork. And I think the ZK EVM era will be has the potential to be Ethereum's best era because of what the ZK EVM does for Ethereum. So let's let's stop hyping it up and start to get into the technical details. What do we need to know about what a ZKEV is? What is it? And then we can talk about, like, why what it is that's so significant to Ethereum.
Yeah. So I think, in order to understand this, like, really kind of you have to start from the problem statement. Right? So ZKVM really arose in the context of scaling. And basically, the fundamental point is that a blockchain if you run a blockchain, you have these three primary constraints. You have the data, right? You have to first like any new block you create, it has to get to the user. Then you have the IO. You have to like then go to disk. You have to get all the data you need to actually like then verify the block. And then you have the actual verification, the execution, the compute.
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