Matter Labs Launches Airbender Prime Prover, Drawing Praise from Vitalik Buterin

Matter Labs introduced Airbender Prime, an open-source zero-knowledge prover that achieved real-time Ethereum block proof generation on a single NVIDIA RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell GPU. In benchmark tests across 7,200 consecutive Ethereum mainnet blocks, the system proved 99% of blocks in under 10 seconds and 100% within 12 seconds, topping the ETHproofs.org leaderboard. Operating within Ethereum's 12-second block interval, the tool lowers hardware barriers and operational costs for Layer-2 validation. Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin praised the breakthrough, stating the raw proving speed race is won while urging a focus on formal verification and prover cost bounds.