2026 Is The Year Ethereum Starts Scaling Exponentially With Zk Tech

The lowdown on how the switchover to ZK-proofs is expected to work this year as part of Ethereum’s plan to scale to 10,000 TPS.

2026 is a pivotal year for Ethereum. The first Ethereum validators will process tiny zero-knowledge (ZK) proofs instead of reexecuting transactions. This unlocks immediate scaling benefits for the layer 1 and sets it on the path toward 10,000 transactions per second (TPS).

Researcher Justin Drake demonstrated that validating proofs on an old laptop is already possible at EthProofs Day at Devconnect in November. One in 10 validators are expected to make the switch to ZK before the end of the year.

It’s a complete overhaul of the fundamental way the blockchain works: comparable in scale to the Merge in 2022, when Ethereum successfully switched from proof-of-work to proof-of-stake.

At present, every validator reexecutes every single transaction, and while the introduction of perfect parallel processing in Glamsterdam will make that process more efficient, it’s only a step along the road.

The plan is to generate a ZK-proof for each block — magical math that proves the block executed properly — and then validators simply check if the proof is legit.

This neatly solves the blockchain trilemma because it’s so easy to validate a ZK-proof that you can theoretically do it on your smartphone or even on a smartwatch. That ensures the network can remain highly decentralized while being unburdened by the lowest-spec devices in the network. Ethereum can manage about 30 TPS at present (it currently does fewer), but the requirements for home validators are already at gaming laptop level.

“It’s a way to scale the network and scale the traffic with just fewer resources having to work harder,” said Gary Schulte, senior staff blockchain protocol engineer on the Besu client. He explained the gas limit can’t be raised much further without increasing the minimum specs for the validator hardware. But under the new system, most of the difficult work that requires beefy equipment is carried out by block builders and ZK provers.

“If we have a small handful of machines that are building these blocks, executing and proving these blocks, and all of our downstream validator network is doing very light work …. it allows us to scale,” said Schulte.

Drake expects around 10% of the network to switch over to validating ZK-proofs this year as part of “phase 1” of Lean Execution. Given that the validators most likely to switch over are the lowest spec home val

Source: CoinTelegraph