At the Permissionless conference, Matter Labs unveiled Airbender, a cutting-edge cryptographic prover designed for the layer-2 network ZKsync. This innovative prover generates zero-knowledge proofs, which are then posted to the Ethereum blockchain, playing a vital role in securing the connection between the two chains. According to the ZKsync team, Airbender is the fastest prover of its kind, capable of verifying Ethereum blocks in just 35 seconds using a single GPU, outperforming its competitors.
The significance of this speed lies in its potential to reduce transaction fees, making it possible to enter the realm of fraction-of-a-cent transactions, which is crucial for applications such as micropayments, high-frequency trading, and decentralized social platforms. Alex Gluchowski, co-founder of Matter Labs, emphasized the importance of fast proof generation, stating that it unlocks faster finality, cheaper applications, and enables proof generation beyond massive GPU farms.
Airbender, an open-sourced zero-knowledge virtual machine, is built on the RISC-V framework, which Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin has suggested could replace the current EVM to enhance blockchain efficiency. The development of Airbender began over a year ago, with the goal of meeting the future demands of ZK applications and Ethereum's evolution. While still in its early stages, Matter Labs has released an application allowing developers to test the new prover, with plans to include it in a protocol upgrade later this summer, pending approval from the ZKsync governance process. Gluchowski envisions Airbender as the foundation for a groundbreaking shift towards home-proving, real-time cross-chain user experience, and ZK applications that can verify data on the fly, ultimately paving the way for an internet of verifiable, interconnected chains.