Justin Drake on ZK Podcast — digging into what Ethproofs actually is

We asked Justin a simple question: what is Ethproofs? Meme, benchmarking infra, working group, or early-stage subculture (Flashbots vibes)?

Some takeaways from the discussion:

• Managed inside EF by a new zkEVM working group, but intentionally porous (calls, TG, site).
• Purpose: align zkVM innovation toward real-time proving on Ethereum.
• Past perf battles were “marketing benchmarks” on cherry-picked hardware → Ethproofs sets rules, reduces noise.
• zkVM teams are trending toward RISC-V ISA + GPU acceleration.
• EF is shaping benchmark categories; long-term path points to enshrined zkVM(s) at L1.
• Future scope may include privacy + client-side proving metrics.
• Hardware angle: speculation on Nvidia building zk-specific GPUs (“ZPUs”).
• EF posted a $1M bounty for proof of the correlated agreement conjecture.
• Current tally: 32 zkVM projects in scope.

Episode link: https://youtu.be/XpFAbamYqUk?si=b12iS4Oqhxry0PWE