Interop roadmap "accelerates": After the Fusaka upgrade, Ethereum interoperability may reach a key milestone

Chainfeeds Guide:

Without real-time ZK, it is difficult to achieve truly usable Interop UX.

Source:

Author:

imToken Labs

Opinion:

imToken Labs: On December 4, the Ethereum Fusaka upgrade was officially activated on the mainnet. However, unlike the highly publicized Dencun upgrade, the market spotlight was mostly focused on Blob scaling and PeerDAS, with much discussion about the further reduction of L2 data costs. Yet, beyond all this buzz, there is actually an inconspicuous proposal, EIP-7825, which has cleared the biggest obstacle for Ethereum to achieve L1 zkEVM and real-time proofs, and could even be said to be quietly paving the way for the ultimate Interop. In this Fusaka upgrade, almost all attention was on scaling: Blob capacity was expanded eightfold, and with PeerDAS random sampling verification, the cost narrative of the DA (data availability) track has become history. Indeed, cheaper L2 is a good thing, but for Ethereum's long-term ZK roadmap, EIP-7825 is the real game-changer, because it sets a gas limit (about 16.78 million gas) for a single transaction on Ethereum. As is well known, this year Ethereum's block gas limit has been raised to 60 million, but even as the limit keeps increasing, theoretically, if someone is willing to pay an extremely high gas price, they can still send a super complex "mega-transaction" that fills the entire block's 60 million gas capacity, thus clogging the entire block. So why limit the size of a single transaction? In fact, this change has no impact on ordinary users' transfers, but for ZK Provers (proof generators), it is a matter of life and death, and this is closely related to how ZK systems generate proofs. For example, before EIP-7825, if a block contained a "mega-transaction" that consumed 60 million gas, the ZK Prover would have to sequentially process this extremely complex transaction, unable to split or parallelize it. This is like a single-lane highway with a giant truck moving very slowly in front, forcing all the smaller cars (other transactions) behind to wait until it passes. This undoubtedly spells the death of "real-time proofs"—because the time required to generate the proof becomes completely uncontrollable, possibly taking tens of minutes or even longer. However, after EIP-7825, even if the future block capacity expands to 100 million gas, since each transaction is forcibly limited to within 16.78 million gas, each block is broken down into predictable, bounded, and parallelizable "small task units." This means that proof generation for Ethereum has shifted from a tricky "logic problem" to a pure "money problem": as long as enough parallel computing power is invested, we can process these split small tasks simultaneously in a very short time, thereby generating ZK proofs for massive blocks. However, although EIP-7825 has paved the physical path (parallelization) for real-time proofs by limiting the size of single transactions, this is only one side of the coin. The other side is how the Ethereum mainnet itself can utilize this capability. This involves the most hardcore narrative in the Ethereum roadmap—L1 zkEVM. For a long time, zkEVM has been regarded as the "holy grail" of scaling Ethereum, not only because it can solve performance bottlenecks, but also because it redefines the blockchain trust mechanism. Its core idea is to enable the Ethereum mainnet to generate and verify ZK proofs. In other words, in the future, after each Ethereum block is executed, it can output a verifiable mathematical proof, allowing other nodes (especially light nodes and L2s) to confirm the correctness of the result without redundant computation—if the ability to generate ZK proofs is written directly into the Ethereum protocol layer (L1), then every time a proposer packages a block and generates a ZK proof, validator nodes no longer need to re-execute transactions, but only need to verify this tiny mathematical proof.