Okay, my name is Yi. I am one of the founders and CEO of Axiom. Today I will tell you about how zero- disclosure proofs are getting ready for production and how they are key to the future scaling of Ethereum. So, first of all, the reason we're all here together in New York today is because Ethereum is experiencing an institutional moment in 2026. So, there are a number of important use cases for institutions that are gaining momentum.
Payments, tokenization and trading. And all these institutions choose Ethereum for the reason that Ethereum has the best security, neutrality, and normal scalability to support these financial applications. And so as these use cases grow, Ethereum really needs to scale throughput while maintaining the core properties of security and neutrality that these use cases actually bring to the blockchain. And the main problem here is that if we just naively scale the gas limits, then what happens is that validators will have much higher hardware requirements and will start to affect decentralization, and therefore the security and neutrality of the blockchain. And the main problem here is that in the current design of Ethereum and, in fact, all blockchains, each validator must re- execute every transaction on the chain.
And so the only way to get around this scaling problem is to solve this bottleneck by eliminating the need for re-execution when checking the chain. Now, Ethereum's roadmap to achieve this goal, and this is unique among blockchains, is to prove execution with zero- disclosure proofs, so that validators only need to verify proofs, rather than re- executing entire blocks. Now, to dive a little deeper into how this works, a zero- disclosure proof is a piece of cryptography that allows anyone to prove that a program, in this case the Ethereum state transition function, was executed correctly, so that anyone else can verify that proof very cheaply. This allows Ethereum consensus to prove Ethereum execution once and then verify it with a constant value by all validators. And the main thing this gives Ethereum is the ability to separate gas limits from validator hardware requirements.
And this will allow Ethereum to scale without compromising the decentralization and neutrality that are so important. Okay, so how do we actually achieve this in ZK? The main innovation in zero- disclosure proofs over the last two to three years is the introduction of the so- called ZK virtual machine. It is a technology that abstracts the cryptographic complexity of zero- disclosure proof deployment and allows developers to verify the execution of arbitrary computer programs. In particular, for Ethereum clients, this allows for direct proof of existing state transition functions that have been tested in a production environment for years, under zero- disclosure conditions.
And for other Ethereum-based applications, it allows developers to write the logic of their applications in a regular programming language and directly test it in a zero- disclosure environment. The implication of this is that ZK virtual machines make zero- disclosure proofs available to both Ethereum and applications on Ethereum. We're in New York now, so I think the broader trend in zero- disclosure over the last few years is that ZK is now becoming institutionally ready institutionally ready . And that's why at Axiom we're developing a ZK virtual machine called Open VM. And we believe that the key characteristics important for institutions to rely on this type of cryptography are performance, security, and versatility.
So by the end of the conversation, I'll tell you how we're doing on each of these fronts and how we're meeting the highest institutional standards. When it comes to performance, one of the most important milestones for ZKVM, and OpenVM in particular, is the ability to keep up with Ethereum itself. This means proving the execution of an Ethereum block within the Ethereum block time, namely in real time. And with OpenVM, I'm happy to say that we're now comfortably within that timeframe. What you see here is a histogram of how long it takes OpenVM to verify the execution of Ethereum blocks for an entire day.
You can see that the verification time ranges from just over 1 second to a maximum of 10 seconds. And the average value is 4.7 seconds, which is quite consistent with the 12- consistent with the 12- second Ethereum slot time. So in OpenVM we are quite confident in testing Ethereum. But we believe ZK can do more.
In fact, OpenVM is capable of performing general- purpose computing, and we have benchmarked general-purpose computer processors. In this benchmark, OpenVM is capable of performing calculations at a frequency of 964 MHz. So for developers, this means that if you can run something on your CPU, and if it was good enough to run your application on a GHz CPU, it's good enough to be proven with OpenVM. This means that performance is no longer a bottleneck for deploying zero- disclosure proofs in production. Moreover, this performance scales quite quickly.
At the beginning of last year, we were over 75 times slower than OpenVM is today. And we see a very direct rhythm of performance improvement in the coming months. The bottom line for Ethereum is that with Ethereum’s current scaling roadmap, the performance improvements of zero-disclosure proofs directly translate into improvements in Ethereum’s throughput. So we at Axiom are very excited to start implementing increased gas limits for Ethereum. Historically, zero disclosure has been associated with performance issues.
It was simply too slow and too expensive. Now that this issue is resolved, we can turn to something that is perhaps even more important for institutions, namely security. So, at Axiom, we believe that the best zero- disclosure proof systems to be used in production should be built on extremely rigorous mathematical and cryptographic foundations. That's why we took a vertical approach to developing Open VM. We started with a new zero- disclosure evidence system called Swirl.
The proof system has proof- security, meaning that the cryptographic foundations depend only on mathematical theorems and not on theorems and not on any hypotheses, some of which have actually been proven false over the past year. Additionally, as many have seen, there is a rapid development of quantum computing that threatens certain cryptographic primitives. We designed Swirl as a post-quantum system at its core. This means that we only use the assumption that hash the assumption that hash functions are random oracles. And this is the most minimal cryptographic assumption that can be made that is expected to remain robust under quantum computing.
And finally, we strive for a strict level of security. Open VM has 100 bits of proof security today. And we expect to reach 128-bit security by the end of the year. Now, in addition to this foundation, as men, even if you have good math, you can still be broken by artificial intelligence. Therefore, we believe that anyone who creates cryptographic technology needs to innovate in defensive security in today's environment.
We take a multi-layered approach to actually securing Open VM. Of course, we have traditional internal and external security audits through our partners at Cantina and ZK Security. But we are also starting to innovate in new methods of protecting the system. First, we developed a continuous AI auditor that runs internally and scans all system updates to detect security vulnerabilities before they even enter our production process. And second, we begin to formally validate every element of OpenVM using Lean theorem testing.
We believe this is the only way to obtain fundamental guarantees of program correctness that cannot be broken by AI. So everyone has different myths related to both DeFi and basic cryptographic primitives. At OpenVM, we are excited to innovate to protect against them. So, now that we’ve covered performance and security as the core features that the ZK system can provide , we’re excited to talk about some of the applications we think it will bring to Ethereum. Fortunately for application developers, the maturity of ZK allows developers to take advantage of the same performance characteristics as Ethereum L1.
Through our partnership with Lighter, we are working to develop the Lighter EVM, an on- chain equivalent of EVM that can leverage the vast liquidity and markets available on Lighter’s spot and perpetual platforms. And we believe this can offer users the best of both worlds between Ethereum L1 and the Lighter exchange. Lighter is a ZK-verified, ultra-high-performance perpetual options exchange. We are also adding programmability to Lighter by adding an Ethereum virtual machine environment. Perhaps more traditionally, we also support, um, more universal collapsing, such as Scroll.
Where, by integrating with OpenVM, Scroll can become a ZK type 1 rollup and include EVM updates while writing them in regular Rust code. And in both of these use cases, the key feature that we find exciting is that the developers of these projects were able to focus more on the logic and features of their applications, and less on implementing them both productively and securely in ZK. So, with the advent of productive and secure ZK systems and secure ZK systems , we truly believe that this year is the year that zero- disclosure evidence will be ready for institutional use cases. We see the benefits they can provide to security institutions for scaling on- scaling on- chain applications that inherit Ethereum security to modalities such as trading, bridging, and aggregation hosted on Ethereum L1. Incorporating more privacy into apps for confidential payments or identity verification.
And also expanding the scope of cryptographic verification beyond what can traditionally be considered blockchain applications. So, in our opinion, zero-disclosure evidence is finally reaching institutional maturity. And at Axiom, we’re excited to help institutions actually deploy them. So in conclusion, there are two important conclusions that I want you to draw from this report. First, zero- disclosure ZK virtual machines are now one of the main drivers of Ethereum scaling, both securely and neutrally.
And with OpenVM at Axiom, we offer the benefits of institutional use of ZK value around Ethereum and even beyond the blockchain. So if you want to know more, you can visit our visit our website or email me directly. Thank you.
Automatic transcript — names and jargon may be misspelled.