Let's go over what happens when you swap some ETH for USDC today: Your transaction gets picked up and packed into a block alongside a few hundred others. That block goes out to every node on Ethereum, which is thousands of machines scattered across the world. Every one of them executes your swap from scratch, start to finish, exactly as you did. Then they compare answers. Your one swap, run thousands of times over, so that nobody has to trust whoever ran it first. That redundancy is where the security comes from, but It's also the ceiling. The network can never do more work in a block than every single validator is able to redo on its own. Ethereum's roadmap changes this arrangement. Under the L1-zkEVM plan, a block arrives carrying a zero-knowledge proof that it executed correctly, and validators check the proof rather than re-running the contents. ⚙️ today → every node re-runs your swap ⚡ the plan → every node checks one proof Checking costs roughly the same whether the block held ten swaps or ten thousand. One thing had to become true before any of that was realistic. Your swap was confirmed in a single block, and blocks arrive every 12 seconds, so a proof of that block has to be ready inside the same window. The bar for real-time sits under 10 seconds. Pico Prism 2.1 proves 99.9% of Ethereum mainnet blocks in under 10 seconds, averaging 4.87. Learn more 👇