Cryptocurrency fund supervisor Justin Bonds stated Ethereum’s promotion of the ZK-EVM design is a large mistake that would trigger everlasting harm to the community.
In an in depth publish, he argued that ZK proofs are extraordinarily costly to generate and impose {hardware} necessities, and don’t scale effectively as demand grows.
In keeping with Bons, producing ZK-EVM proofs already requires an array of high-end GPUs. On the present velocity of Ethereum, builders will want dozens of top-tier playing cards simply to maintain up. {Hardware} prices alone can exceed $80,000, and with elevated throughput, that quantity can exceed $200,000.
Ethereum is dealing with a giant downside: The crowning jewel of ETH’s roadmap is a poison capsule:
ZK-EVM is horrible and can smash ETH except it corrects its trajectory.
Counting on ZK means ETH is catastrophically restricted and provides insane {hardware} necessities.
An instance of apparent over-engineering: 🧵…
— Justin Bons (@Justin_Bons) January 6, 2026
Builder prices elevate centralization issues
This critique focuses on Ethereum's transfer in the direction of proposer-builder separation (PBS) mixed with ZK proofs. Bonds stated this setup shifts energy away from validators and concentrates it within the palms of some builders who can afford to purchase the {hardware}.
He warned that Ethereum faces compelled trade-offs as prices improve linearly with velocity and capability. Efficiency stays restricted or decentralization suffers. In his view, each outcomes undermine Ethereum's core claims.
Bons in contrast ZK-EVM's efficiency to competing networks. He famous that even with a big GPU setup, producing a ZK-EVM block can take 8 to 12 seconds.
Solana validators, however, function with sub-second block instances and have a lot decrease relative {hardware} prices. This hole, he argued, explains why Ethereum isn't even making an attempt to compete at uncooked velocity.
Gradual block instances stay a structural drawback, as high-frequency and perpetual transactions drive a lot of the on-chain income.
Buterin saves one other aim
Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin lately said that Ethereum was constructed to face up to censorship, outages, and deplatforming fairly than optimizing for latency.
“Ethereum was not created to streamline finance or make apps handy. It was created to free folks.”
This is a vital and controversial line within the Trustless Manifesto ( https://t.co/1F1Fe9OQPh ), and it's price revisiting to raised perceive its contents.
— vitalik.eth (@VitalikButerin) January 5, 2026
He pointed to Ethereum's lengthy uptime and function as a tens of billions of {dollars}' price of funds layer in DeFi. However, Bons argues that ZK-heavy scaling dangers introducing hidden centralization whereas failing to offer aggressive throughput.
Intensifying debate
Ethereum’s 2026 roadmap contains upgrades geared toward growing gasoline and growing capability utilizing ZK proof. Bons argued that these modifications have been too gradual and nonetheless failed to deal with core velocity points.
Bonds concluded that Ethereum was deliberately saved gradual to accommodate ZK's computational limitations, and criticized that selection as an abomination.
In the meantime, debate within the cryptocurrency neighborhood intensified after customers requested whether or not Ethereum might survive given the $100,000 {hardware} requirement for the ZK-EVM move and nonetheless being trailed by Solana by a large margin. Bonds responded that it’s potential to outlive, however progress isn’t assured as ETH is 1/138th the capability and 1/thirtieth the velocity of SOL.
One other developer claimed that future upgrades will permit ZK nodes to run on modest {hardware}. Bonds rejected that view, saying that the present benchmarks don’t present a viable path ahead, barring a significant breakthrough in cryptography that builders have already been ready for for years.
Associated: Buterin urges ETH builders to concentrate on scalable decentralization. not a brand new meme
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