Ethereum and Zero Knowledge: Key Highlights from 2025

Here at Aligned we’ve been publishing a weekly report covering news related to Ethereum and Zero Knowledge, delivered through what we’ve been calling ZK News. 

Starting in 2026, ZK News will be rebranded to reflect a broader and more consistent view of the ecosystem, expanding into a weekly roundup of Ethereum industry and technology news. This new format will continue to highlight the most important developments in zero-knowledge and applied cryptography, while also covering the wider trends shaping Ethereum as a foundational platform for global finance.

This recap is meant to highlight and frame the key developments of 2025 that we covered in our weekly ZK News series. This year brought meaningful regulatory clarity in the United States, accelerating institutional participation and further legitimizing Ethereum as financial infrastructure. Stablecoins continued their march toward mainstream adoption, while enterprises, governments, and global institutions increasingly built directly on Ethereum. At the same time, privacy finally received the attention it deserves, moving from research into real-world use cases. These trends closely mirror our own trajectory: doubling down on Ethereum and working with customers who are building scalable, compliant, and privacy-preserving applications.

The developments below are not isolated events; they are signals of a maturing ecosystem and a clear guide for where we are focusing our energy going forward.

Notable Announcements

These announcements reflect how Ethereum continues to evolve as global infrastructure: improving scalability, usability, and resilience while maintaining its core guarantees. Together, they signal a protocol that is no longer experimental, but operational at global scale, with upgrades that directly impact developers, users, and rollup ecosystems.

Ethereum Core

Ethereum, The World Computer, celebrates 10 years.

Ethereum has been online for 10 years with zero downtime. This achievement was made possible by millions of users, devs, and stakers worldwide.

Upgrades

• Pectra: It provided enhanced smart wallet UX, 2x L2 scaling blobs, and improved validator UX.
• Fusaka: It introduced 13 EIPs that enhance blob scaling, performance, and user experience. Key upgrades include PeerDAS, enabling 8x data throughput for rollups, UX improvements through the R1 curve and pre-confirmations, and preparation for L1 scaling with a gas limit increase.

Ethereum Foundation News

The Ethereum Foundation’s initiatives this year reveal a deliberate shift toward long-term stewardship of the ecosystem. Beyond protocol research, the Foundation increasingly acts as a coordinator: supporting institutional adoption, advancing privacy, restructuring internal R&D, and fostering global developer communities. These efforts aim to ensure Ethereum remains credible, neutral, and adaptable as usage expands across industries and geographies.

• The Ethereum Foundation has announced Devcon VIII in Mumbai, India, scheduled for Q4 2026

India was chosen for its strong crypto adoption and rapidly growing developer community. The foundation invites the community to help shape the event by submitting Devcon Improvement Proposals (DIPs).

• In addition, the Ethereum Foundation launched:
  • An Institutional Resource Hub to support business adoption of Ethereum
  • The Kohaku Wallet Privacy Roadmap
  • The dAI Team to make Ethereum the go-to platform for AI and the machine economy
  • Protocol, a new structure for its R&D teams

Advancements in Ethereum Clients

Client diversity and efficiency are critical to Ethereum’s decentralization and security. These advances reduce operational complexity while strengthening Ethereum’s resilience against systemic risk.

• Ethrex is now live on Ethproofs
• LambdaClass is launching ethlambda, a minimalist lean Ethereum consensus client

Articles

The articles collected here provide context for Ethereum’s evolving role as financial infrastructure and a coordination layer for institutions. They help bridge the gap between protocol mechanics and real-world adoption, clarifying why Ethereum matters at a macro level.

• Aligned shared our thoughts on why we are building on Ethereum
• Federico Carrone and Roberto Catalan posted articles explaining:
  • How Ethereum is emerging as the new financial backend
  • How Ethereum addresses the missing institutional layer of the internet

This year, Ethproofs was launched, an L2BEAT for zkVMs

Ethproofs is a public measurement and coordination platform designed to support Ethereum’s path toward secure, decentralized, and continuous real-time proving of L1 execution blocks. It provides a shared, transparent surface where zkVM teams and prover operators can submit proofs against common metrics, making performance, security, cost, and trade-offs visible and comparable in public.

Ethproofs at Devconnect

Ethproofs had a strong presence at Devconnect, showcasing the progress being made toward real-time, production-ready zero-knowledge proving for Ethereum.

During Ethproofs Day at Devconnect, Justin Drake presented a live demo of a zkEVM attestation running directly on Ethereum mainnet without relying on an execution-layer client. Using real-time zkEVM proofs, the demo visualized Ethereum block execution live on the Ethproofs dashboard, highlighting a concrete path toward verifiable execution and trust-minimized infrastructure for Ethereum.

In addition, Ethproofs brought together key voices from across the proving ecosystem. Mauro Toscano, Head of Engineering and Co-Founder at Aligned, delivered a talk on Security and Diversity in Virtual Machines, emphasizing the importance of multiple independent implementations for Ethereum’s long-term resilience. This was followed by Leandro Ferrigno from LambdaClass, who presented Expanding Ethereum’s Proving Landscape with Ethrex, showcasing how new client designs contribute to greater decentralization and robustness in the zkVM ecosystem.

Cambridge Ethereum Workshop

The Cambridge Ethereum Workshop gathered researchers and engineers to advance Ethereum’s Lean Roadmap, blending theory with real-world implementation. Key topics included new clients, zkVMs, formal verification via the open-source Arklib library, and post-quantum security. Teams debated quantum-resistant signatures, efficiency targets, and proof systems like FRI. Overall, the event highlighted Ethereum’s collaborative R&D approach and its ambition to set future cryptographic standards for the entire blockchain industry.

Milestones from several zkVMs

2025 marked a turning point for zkVMs, as real-time proving of Ethereum blocks moved from theory to practice. Multiple independent teams demonstrated that zero-knowledge proofs can keep pace with live Ethereum execution, unlocking new possibilities for verifiable computation, light clients, and trust-minimized infrastructure.

• ZisK achieved real-time proving of Ethereum L1 blocks with version v0.13
• Brevis unveiled Pico Prism, their zkVM for real-time Ethereum proving
• ZKsync released Airbender, a new RISC-V zkVM
• Succinct announced SP1 Hypercube, the latest version of their zkVM, which is capable of proving Ethereum blocks in real time
• RISC Zero posted its path to the first formally verified RISC-V zkVM
• Lita released Valida zkVM 1.0.0
• Nexus announced the third iteration of its zkVM based on StarkWare’s Stwo prover
• Axiom released OpenVM v1.0.0 to Production
• ZKM announced zkMIPS 1.0: The first production-ready version of its MIPS-based zkVM
• A 6x speedup for Jolt, the zkVM from a16z crypto, has been achieved by fully integrating the new Twist and Shout memory-checking arguments

Bonus track:

• Aligned published an article on the evolution of zkVMs and real-time proving for Ethereum

Key developments

The developments listed here illustrate how Ethereum and zero-knowledge technologies are increasingly embedded in real-world systems. From governments and global institutions to financial markets and consumer platforms, Ethereum is being used as a neutral settlement and verification layer. These signals point to a broader trend: blockchain infrastructure moving from the periphery into the core of economic and digital activity.

• Google adopted zero-knowledge technology to enable age verification through Google Wallet
• Sovra showcased its Digital Trust Stack for governments and institutions
• The U.S. Department of Commerce and Chainlink are now bringing government macroeconomic data onchain
• The Sovra team joined Mexican government and ecosystem leaders to highlight the state’s role in advancing decentralized digital identity in Latin America
• Google Finance is integrating prediction markets data from Kalshi and Polymarket
• Lemon and LambdaClass have launched Sur Money to develop on-chain stablecoins for Latin American countries
• Introducing a New Cryptography & Distributed Systems Research Center, a collaboration between LambdaClass, FIUBA, and Exactas UBA
• IMF published a report on stablecoins, highlighting their potential to improve cross-border payments and financial inclusion
• JPMorgan is expanding into crypto by launching a tokenized money fund on the Ethereum blockchain
• Robinhood is now onchain with Arbitrum
• Pol Finance, LambdaClass, and Levenue released the Loom Finance whitepaper, a protocol that enables the tokenization of predictable real-world cash flows

Research

Research in 2025 continued to define the boundaries of what is possible for Ethereum and zero-knowledge systems. The work highlighted here addresses some of the hardest open problems in scalability, verification, and privacy, while also challenging long-held assumptions in ZK proving. By advancing both foundational theory and practical constructions, this research lays the groundwork for future protocol upgrades, more efficient zkVMs, and stronger security guarantees across the Ethereum ecosystem.

• Aligned shared an X article titled ‘zkVMs, Circuits, and the Optimization Game’ written by our co-founder and CTO, Mauro Toscano
• Vitalik Buterin published an article outlining the GKR Protocol
• Justin Drake shared the Lean Roadmap, his vision for the future of Ethereum
• Justin Drake and Federico Carrone discussed Ethereum’s Native Rollup Roadmap on The Rollup Podcast
• Justin Thaler published a blog post about the path to secure and efficient zkVMs
• Vitalik Buterin published an article on the importance of privacy
• Lita proposed the Valida ISA extension to replace EVM
• Justin Thaler outlines the design principles behind Jolt and fast-prover SNARKs, focusing on the sum-check protocol
• The Ethereum Foundation’s zkEVM team outlined benchmarking principles for zkVMs to ensure Ethereum’s scalability and security
• Aligned explained why Ethrex was chosen as the Rollup Stack for its RaaS platform
• LambdaClass published two blog posts on the basics and optimization of the Sumcheck protocol: The first one describes the fundamentals of multilinear polynomials, and the second explores an algorithm proposed by Bagad, Dao, Domb, and Thaler in “Speeding-up SUMCHECK Proving,” which shows how to make the Sumcheck protocol even more efficient.
  • Part 1: Multilinear polynomials: survival kit
  • Part 2: Optimizing Sumcheck
• LambdaClass published a blog post exploring Whirlaway: Multilinear STARKs using WHIR as polynomial commitment scheme
• Aligned shared an article outlining our new Rollup-as-a-Service (RaaS) platform
• Researchers claim to have shown that several conjectures currently used in ZK proving systems are not true
• Introducing Neo, a Lattice-based folding scheme for CCS over small fields and pay-per-bit commitments
• KZH and KZH-fold: a new PCS and a new pairing-based folding scheme
• DewTwo: a new transparent PCS
• Introducing Twist and Shout

Taken together, these developments mark 2025 as a defining year for Ethereum and for the maturation of ZK-enabled systems. What once lived primarily in research papers and testnets is now operating in production, supporting real users, institutions, and governments at global scale.

Ethereum has continued its transition from an experimental protocol into a resilient coordination layer for finance, computation, and digital trust, while zero-knowledge technologies have emerged as a practical foundation for scalability, privacy, and verifiability. As we look ahead, the signals are clear. The next phase of Ethereum will be shaped not by isolated breakthroughs, but by the steady integration of cryptography, infrastructure, and real world adoption, and we are building squarely in that direction.

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