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Ethereum (ETH) founderVitalik Buterin has explained how the blockchain prevents denial-of-service (DoS) attacks. Buterin’sexplanation comes as a response to a question from a user who expressed frustration with the contract size limit on Ethereum. Network stability depends on data efficiency According to Buterin, the limit on Ethereum exists as a safeguard to prevent DoS attacks. Notably, very large contracts are expensive to store in nodes, transmit or process. Thus, if there is no limit, a malicious attacker could easily deploy huge contracts that deliberately slow down the network. Once the network is destabilized, it could give the attacker ample time to carry out fraudulent acts on-chain. Buterin is emphasizing that the size limit is not an arbitrary rule but a safety and scalability constraint to protect users. It's a DoS risk.When we change the tree ( https://t.co/TLmT2kOHoC ), we will be able to fix this and potentially have unlimited size contracts.(Though to do that we would also need to figure out the gas mechanics of how very large contracts get published, as today the…— vitalik.eth (@VitalikButerin) December 23, 2025 The Ethereum founder, however, hinted at a possible change in the future. This will depend on improvements to the Merkle Patricia Trie, which currently has efficiency limitations. "When we change the tree…we will be able to fix this and potentially have unlimited size contracts," he stated. Buterin suggests that plans are on to change how Ethereum stores its data to the EIP-7864's unified binary tree upgrade. This will make state access and storage more efficient while reducing the DoS risk caused by large contracts. This is different from theEIP-7907, which has increased the contract size limit by about 10 times the original size. Ethereum gas costs will apply despite future upgrades It is worth pointing out that even when the size limit is resolved, users will still have to deal with gas costs. For clarity, deploying a contract costs gas per byte of code. The cost, as per Buterin’s explanation, is approximately 82kb. This signals that if users get an "unlimited contract size" on Ethereum, it does not mean that it would be free. The developers might have to rethink deployment gas pricing to fit the new reality. Meanwhile, the blockchain is already planning the nextupgrade for 2026, termed "Hegota. Part of the key focus of the upgrade will include state management, execution-layer optimization, and Verkle Trees.

Binance, a leading cryptocurrency exchange, has announced a scheduled wallet maintenance for the Ethereum $2,937.05 network. The maintenance process is set to begin on December 25, 2025, in the early hours and will involve a short technical interruption. During the maintenance, certain transactions on the Ethereum network will be temporarily suspended. Contents How Will the Maintenance Process on Ethereum Network Proceed? Users and Trading Operations Will Not Be Affected How Will the Maintenance Process on Ethereum Network Proceed? According to Binance’s announcement, the maintenance on the Ethereum network wallet is set to commence at 9:00 AM Turkish Standard Time. The technical intervention is projected to last approximately one hour. Prior to the maintenance, deposits and withdrawals on the Ethereum network will be suspended at 8:55 AM for preparation purposes. This maintenance work focuses directly on ensuring the technical stability of the wallet infrastructure. Once maintenance is completed, deposits and withdrawals on the Ethereum network will resume. Binance has clarified that no separate notification will be issued for reopening; transactions will automatically commence once the network is considered stable. The information shared by the exchange emphasized that the maintenance process aims to create a brief and controlled disruption for users. By announcing the technical timing beforehand, users are encouraged to adjust their transfer plans accordingly. Users and Trading Operations Will Not Be Affected Binance made it clear that the maintenance only affects deposit and withdrawal transactions conducted via the Ethereum network. Trading activities involving ETH and coins on the Ethereum network will continue uninterrupted throughout the maintenance. Therefore, there is no anticipated pause in market operations. The statement also included that any technical requirements arising during the maintenance would be managed by Binance on behalf of the users. The process will be handled directly by the platform without requiring any additional actions from users. The restart of deposit and withdrawal transactions will depend on confirming the network’s stable operation. Binance highlighted that no further announcements will be shared at this stage, urging users to monitor their transaction statuses directly through the platform.

Major cryptocurrency prices are trading sideways this Wednesday as investors exercise caution. This market stagnation is driven by light holiday trading volumes, anticipation of upcoming U.S. economic reports, and a record options expiry this week. Summary Crypto prices are experiencing slight declines on Wednesday, amidst thin holiday liquidity. Traders are awaiting the release of a key U.S. economic data set for later today. A major options expiry event due Friday is adding to the caution. According to data from CoinGecko, the total crypto market cap fell slightly, by 0.7% to $3.02 trillion last check on Wednesday, Dec. 24, Asian time. Bitcoin (BTC), the world’s largest crypto asset by market cap, seesawed between $86,800 and $88,100 before stabilizing near $87,000 when writing, down by 0.5% in the past 24 hours. Ethereum (ETH) slid 0.8% to $2,940 while other large-cap cryptocurrencies such as BNB (BNB), XRP (XRP), Solana (SOL), and Tron (TRX) recorded losses between 1-2%. Some of the smaller-cap crypto assets, such as Midnight (NIGHT), Pump.fun (PUMP) and Uniswap (UNI) stood as the top laggards, posting losses of 14%, 8%, and 7%, respectively. Investors are maintaining a cautious stance and reducing exposure to risky assets ahead of the Christmas holiday period, which is typically characterized by lower trading volumes as traders realize profits. Data compiled by CoinGlass shows that the futures open interest of the total crypto market has declined by 1.3% over the past 24 hours to $128.1 billion. The volume in the spot market also dropped 10% to $101 billion. At the same time, investor appetite remains in check due to a confluence of macro headwinds and upcoming market events. When writing, the Crypto Fear Greed Index was at 24, indicating persistent “Extreme Fear.” Traders remain cautious ahead of US Jobless data Crypto prices have remained suppressed as traders have taken aback today as they wait for the release of U.S. jobless data later today. The data is expected to come slightly hotter at around 223,000–225,000 new claims. As such, hotter-than-expected data could tend to put more pressure on the Fed to cut rates. However, comments from several Fed officials and the Fed chair himself have lately set a more hawkish tone for rate cuts, at least for early 2026. Cryptocurrencies tend to rally on expectations of rate cuts and pull back when they are delayed or deemed less likely to occur in the near future. The market had turned bearish just days before after the Bank of Japan raised interest rates to 0.75%, the highest in the past 30 years, a divergence from the Fed, which cut rates in December to a range of 3.50%-3.75%. Cryptocurrencies have historically been volatile when the BoJ ramped up interest rates, as it can strengthen the yen and potentially unwind “carry trades” that involve borrowing in Japan to invest in higher-yielding, riskier assets elsewhere. Record options expiry spooks investors Adding another layer of bearish pressure, traders are also preparing for nearly $27 billion to $28.5 billion of options expiry from Bitcoin and Ethereum contracts on Deribit that will take place on Friday, Dec. 26. If this record expiry comes to take place, it would mark the largest expiry in the exchange’s history. As such, the hedging from market makers around the “max pain” price (currently around $96,000 for BTC) could keep prices fixated until the options expire. However, it should be noted that once the record expiry takes place on Friday, it could trigger a post-expiry relief rally or increased volatility as mechanical hedging pressure dissipates and the market resets for 2026. Disclosure: This article does not represent investment advice. The content and materials featured on this page are for educational purposes only.

According to Hyperinsight via COINOTAG News, the trader 20 Million Bandit (0x880a) has been closing short exposure in ETH and HYPE over the past six hours, reducing the total short book to about $111 million and marking the largest short position on Hyperliquid. The ETH short sits near $68.3 million with an average entry of $3,132 and a liquidation price around $3,767; the HYPE short is around $41.97 million, with an average price of $31.7 and a liquidation price near $34.27. This address has pursued high-frequency multi-token arbitrage with an average holding period of about 20 hours. Since October, it has booked over $104 million in profit on roughly $20 million capital, with today contributing about $1.3 million in gains. Previously, exposure centered on PUMP, PAXG, and HYPE, but the mix has shifted toward ETH and HYPE shorts, now representing roughly 98.6% of the position.

Disclosure: The views and opinions expressed here belong solely to the author and do not represent the views and opinions of crypto.news’ editorial. You tried to bridge $50 from Ethereum (ETH) to a ZK-rollup, such as zkSync, expecting to pay a few pennies. Instead, a fee between $0.15 and $0.50 hits your wallet. That’s tough to swallow when you know that optimistic rollups vs ZK-rollups are often three times cheaper, and the Dencun upgrade slashed data costs by over 90%. The bottleneck isn’t network congestion. It’s the proof itself. Summary ZK-rollup fees are dominated by proving, not data or execution: Proof generation consumes 60–70% of fees due to GPU-inefficient cryptography, creating a ~$97M centralized prover market that keeps ZK fees high despite Ethereum’s Dencun upgrade. This creates a centralization and security trap: Over 90% of ZK-L2s rely on a few prover-as-a-service providers, introducing censorship, MEV extraction, outages, and web2-style rent extraction, undermining decentralization and adoption. The fix is specialized hardware + open prover markets: ZK-specific ASICs and competitive, on-chain prover auctions can cut costs by orders of magnitude, decentralize proving, and unlock sub-cent fees, making ZK scaling finally viable. Generating the zero-knowledge proof for a transaction batch is an intensive process. It involves trillions of mathematical operations, specifically elliptic curve multiplications, running on hardware not designed for the task. According to data from L2Beat, the proving process alone accounts for a staggering 60-70% of all fees on ZK-L2s. This has created a centralized market of “prover farms” that is estimated to be worth over $97 million. This is the billion-dollar bottleneck. It’s a centralized, power-hungry system that relies on mismatched hardware, and it’s the reason why ZK scaling still feels more like a promise than a reality. The solution is twofold. We need domain-specific ASICs and open prover markets. With these in place, sub-cent transactions can become the default, not the exception. This is not a fantasy. It’s an engineering reality waiting to be embraced. Where your fees really go A ZK-rollup transaction has several costs. L2 execution is nearly free. Posting data to the mainnet is also cheap now, thanks to blobs, costing a tenth of a cent per transaction. The real beast is the proving. A single proof for a batch of 4,000 transactions can take anywhere from two to five minutes to generate on a high-end A100 GPU. This costs between $0.04 and $0.17 in cloud computing fees alone, based on benchmarks from Brevis. When you amortize that cost, it comes out to about one to four cents per transaction. But under heavy load, it can easily spike to over ten cents. ZK proving is not the same as the matrix math used in AI. It relies on multi-scalar multiplications (MSMs) and number-theoretic transforms (NTTs) over elliptic curves. These operations are a heavy lift for GPUs, which are designed for parallel floating-point operations. A single Groth16 proof requires around 1012 field operations. According to tests by Ingonyama, about 80% of the GPU’s cycles are idle during this process. The hardware just isn’t a good fit. In Q1 2025, zkSync Era’s report showed that proving accounted for 65% of their $2.3 million in revenue. That’s $1.5 million that went straight to centralized clusters. Meanwhile, rollup teams pay AWS $1,000 to $5,000 per month per rig, and that cost scales linearly with volume. It’s no wonder that the total value locked in top ZK L2s is stuck at $3.3 billion, while optimistic rollups have surpassed $40 billion. But optimistic rollups (Base, Arbitrum, Optimism, etc.) are not a complete solution either, as they come with tremendous tradeoffs. Optimistic rollups require at least a seven-day withdrawal delay so that watchful validators can challenge invalid state transitions. In the fast-paced world of DeFi, this wait time is simply too long for most use cases. These networks also require users to trust these watchful validators. While this may be fine for low-value transactions like web3 gaming or social media, it leaves much to be desired when it comes to real-world assets and other high-powered financial use-cases. Therefore, the path to truly scalable, cheap, and secure transactions lies not in avoiding proof generation but in revolutionizing it. This is the core inefficiency: we pay a web2 premium, in both cost and centralization, to generate trust for a decentralized network. The proving fee isn’t just an expense; it’s the economic anchor holding back ZK adoption. Until proof generation becomes as cheap as execution, ZK-rollups will remain trapped in a system where their greatest strength, cryptographic security, is also their most costly bottleneck. And that cost doesn’t just inflate fees; it builds the centralized trap we must now escape. The centralization trap Over 90% of ZK-rollups outsource to a handful of “prover-as-a-service” companies. This creates a massive single point of failure. In March 2025, Blast operators froze attacker transactions and 12,000 innocent users for 48 hours. Centralized provers see plaintext batches, extract MEV, and refuse transactions. dYdX uses a 3-of-5 multisig, meaning three insiders could hijack the chain. This mirrors hardware dependency issues in other blockchain systems, like Solana’s consensus mechanism. This centralization creates fragility. Top provers have 99.2% uptime, but a single AWS outage can cascade. In Q2 2025, Starknet lost 20% throughput due to one node failure. These providers capture 80% margins, leaving rollups rent-strapped, while Ethereum’s L1 provides security. It’s an architectural contradiction. We have “decentralized” L2s dependent on Web2 data centers. As Vitalik Buterin said at Devcon 2024, “Outsource proving, and you’ve scaled nothing, just trusted a new oracle.” The fix is in To solve this problem, we need a one-two punch. We need silicon that is built for ZK, and we need a marketplace to distribute it. First, the hardware. GPUs are like race cars on a highway. They are great for the tensor operations used in AI, but they are terrible for the curve operations used in ZK. This is where domain-specific ASICs come in. The winners of the 2025 ZPrize competition were able to clock STARK proofs at 6-8 seconds on FPGAs. That’s 10-100 times faster per watt than a GPU, because they hardwired the MSMs and NTTs. Cysic is already taping out ASICs that can generate proofs for billion-gate circuits in under two seconds, and they do it with a 50x reduction in energy consumption. This is the same evolution that we saw with Bitcoin (BTC) mining. We went from CPUs to ASICs, but this time it’s for truth, not for hashes. Second, the markets. We need to ditch the SaaS model and treat provers as a commodity. Succinct’s 2025 mainnet exemplifies this. Rollups post jobs to Ethereum-based auctions, and specialized rigs bid on them in seconds. Brevis ProverNet achieved 20x CPU speeds via GPU clusters with slashing for lazy nodes. The result is 40% cost reduction, equitable value distribution, and censorship resistance. Anyone can prove, Ethereum verifies. ZPrize 2025 recursive aggregation verified proofs in under 200 milliseconds on-chain. A $10,000 DeFi bot can run private ZK-ML on an L2 for a thousandth of a cent per transaction. Unlocking the floodgates Cheaper proving will lead to predictable, sub-$0.01 fees at 15,000 TPS, per the zkSync Atlas roadmap. This unlocks pay-per-pixel NFTs, real-time gaming economies, and AI agents settling trades without frontrunning. L2s become neutral infrastructure, not prover fiefdoms. Developers focus on VM optimization instead of managing massive server farms. This sparks tenfold app innovation. ZK TVL grows from $28 billion in 2025 to over $100 billion. The real opportunity is systemic. When proving becomes cheap and decentralized, the entire value proposition crystallizes. Users get speed and cost. Developers get a platform that doesn’t require trusting a handful of operators. Ethereum gets a scaling solution that maintains security guarantees without compromise. The fight is here The biggest barrier to ZK adoption isn’t crypto or gaming, it’s engineering economics. Centralized infrastructure is choking the scalable truth. The war isn’t over a consensus. It’s in hardware and markets for verifiable compute. Ship decentralized, accelerated provers, and we deliver cheap, trustless transactions for billions of people. We don’t need prover overlords. We need a global bazaar for proofs, where anyone contributes, everyone verifies, and the open web is secure. Leo Fan Leo Fan is the founder and CEO of Cysic.xyz, the first full-stack compute network delivering real-time zero-knowledge proving, hardware-accelerated AI computation, and tokenized access to high-performance hardware through ComputeFi. With a PhD in cryptography from Cornell and a background spanning academic research, FPGA/ASIC design, protocol engineering, and next-generation hardware pipelines, Leo has helped transition zero-knowledge proofs from theoretical constructs to industrial-scale systems. At Cysic, Leo leads a multidisciplinary team designing ZK and AI-optimised ASICs, high-throughput GPU-proving clusters, and a decentralized compute network that transforms compute into a programmable on-chain asset. This conversation takes place the day after Cysic mainnet launch, making it a prime opportunity to go deep on what mainnet unlocks for performance, decentralisation, and real-world usage.