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Wake up babe, Vitalik just dropped a new blog post. 

Here’s a summary: If I speak only Mandarin, a translator needs to tediously translate every word to an English speaker. That’s like today’s EVM: When you’re trying to run zk proofs on the L1, you need to “translate” every EVM opcode into a proof-friendly language. The solution: I should just learn English. In other words, align the EVM directly with how zk proofs work.

In other news…are you coming to Permissionless IV Brooklyn in June? Tickets are $399 (for now!), but you can get one for half price with a unique 50% off discount code if you successfully refer 10 new subscribers to the 0xResearch newsletter. Scroll down for details.

Zora the next pump.fun?

Is Zora the next pump.fun?

Tokens created on Base saw their first all time-high last Friday, largely due to controversy around an alleged pump and dump memecoin launched on Zora that was promoted by Base founder Jesse Pollak. This growth has surprisingly continued to sustain itself. Over the last four days, Zora has seen a daily average of ~23.4k tokens created.

For context, Solana’s pump.fun saw 32k tokens created on Sunday alone.

One thing’s for sure: People love trading tokens. Zora’s daily trader activity has soared, hitting a ~285k daily high on Sunday. Most of these are new traders, according to the team’s Dune dashboard.

In related news: Zora’s native token $ZORA is dropping on Wednesday. The token is “for fun only” and “does not entitle its holders to any governance rights or a claim on any equity ownership in Zora or its products.” 

— Donovan Choy

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Scaling the Ethereum L1

“ETH sucks, it has no value accrual, and the L1 is dead,” says everyone with an X account. “Want Ethereum to return to its glory days? Forget the L2 roadmap — scale the L1!”

It appears the Ethereum inner circles are finally listening.

A new Vitalik blog post published yesterday lays out an exploratory long-term and “radical” plan to scale the execution layer of the Ethereum L1. It’s a seemingly stark acknowledgement of all the past year’s complaints. 

The upgrade, if done, may bring efficiency gains of over 100x to the L1, Vitalik says.

How would it actually be done?

Vitalik’s proposal looks to replace the beloved Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) with a general purpose RISC-V virtual machine — all while maintaining the backward-compatibility of old EVM contracts.

What is a RISC-V virtual machine?

“RISC-V” is a hardware instruction set architecture (ISA). The simplest way to think of it is as a standardized language that defines communication between the hardware and software.

Though RISC-V was not originally built for blockchain purposes, its open design allowed crypto developers to leverage it for building virtual machines that could generate zero-knowledge proofs at far lower resource costs than the EVM.

The outcome is what’s known as a zero knowledge virtual machine (zkVM), which enables developers to write applications in high level languages like Rust without needing to be trained in cryptography.

In the absence of zkVMs, companies that want to leverage zk tech to build a privacy-secure application to process payroll/healthcare data would need to spend much more time writing custom zk circuits that cannot be easily changed after deployment (unlike a zkVM where devs could simply recompile RISC-V code).

Today, there are already several zkVMs built on top of RISC-V, including Succinct’s SP1, Risc Zero’s “RISC0,” a16z’s Jolt, Axiom’s OpenVM, Polygon’s Miden and more.

zkVMs have largely been talked about in the context of usage on L2 zkrollups. Vitalik’s latest blog post shifts the focus to L1 usage.

It’s an ambitious goal, given the obviously far more monumental task of implementation, given the coordination problems of upgrading the L1.

What about zkEVMs?

What does this mean, however, for zkEVMs — the interim solution for scalability? zkEVMs are more customized to an EVM instruction set, unlike the more general purpose zkVM.

Vitalik acknowledges in his post that zkEVMs will remain a “medium term” stopgap solution for L1 scalability. 

Yet, current zkEVM proving remains resource intensive. Based on data from Succinct’s zkEVM proving of the EVM execution layer, ~59% of time spent verifying transactions comes from executing EVM code — a bottleneck inherent to the EVM’s design.

Succinct co-founder Kshitij Kulkarni echoes this view, claiming that the EVM interpreter "adds up to an 800x overhead to zkVM proving times. The EVM is very inefficient for zk."

RISC-V based VMs would eliminate the need for the interpreter, thereby removing key bottlenecks in the EVM, which could reduce proving overhead by 50-100x.

Others question whether RISC-V is necessarily the better choice over Wasm.

“There are pros and cons for both RISC-V or Wasm. Wasm could be better because it offers the benefits that EOF (EVM Object Format) is trying to add i.e., better support for static analysis. It's a win for Ethereum L1 regardless of the exact approach,” 1kx research partner Wei Dai told Blockworks.

In conclusion

Ethereum’s major upcoming Pectra upgrade brings with it changes, including expansion of blob data availability (EIP-7691), account abstraction (EIP-7702), and raised ETH staking limits (EIP-7251). These are all welcome changes, but notably do not bring any tangible upgrades that will buttress ETH as an “ultrasound money” asset. 

But one can at least take heart in the fact that the Ethereum ship seems to be slowly turning in that direction. 

Don’t expect these changes — even if it gets buy-in from the community — to come any time soon. 

— Donovan Choy

Build Fast. Ship Loud. Before the Crowd Shows Up.

36 hours. $100K+ on the line.

Before Permissionless kicks off, builders will be deep in the code.
Push something onchain, on mainnet, in front of the right people.

We’ll cover:

• Food, caffeine, WiFi, vibes

• Technical mentorship, workshops

• A free ticket to Permissionless IV

• Eyes from top investors and protocols

📅 June 22–23 | Brooklyn, NY