Ethereum Declares End of ‘Speed War’; Mandates 128-Bit Security for zkEVMs

The race for sub-second zero-knowledge proofs is officially over. In a definitive pivot announced December 18, the Ethereum Foundation (EF) declared that future zkEVM development must prioritize cryptographic soundness over raw performance, citing critical vulnerabilities in existing STARK-based assumptions.

This directive forces Layer 2 teams to restructure their 2026 roadmaps immediately. The Foundation has deprecated the “speed at all costs” metric, which recently achieved 16-second proof times, in favor of a non-negotiable 128-bit security standard. The shift follows internal research revealing that several “100-bit secure” systems effectively offered only 80 bits of protection due to flawed mathematical conjectures.

The ‘Soundcalc’ Ultimatum

To enforce this standard, the EF introduced soundcalc, a mandatory security estimation tool. By the end of February 2026, every zkEVM team must integrate their proof systems with this validator. The message is clear: if your math doesn’t pass soundcalc, you don’t ship.

For an L1 zkEVM securing hundreds of billions of dollars, the security margin is not negotiable. If an attacker can forge a proof, they can forge anything: mint tokens from nothing, rewrite state, steal funds.

Roadmap: Glamsterdam to H-Star

The new schedule imposes strict technical ceilings for the upcoming upgrades:

• May 2026 (Glamsterdam): Teams must demonstrate 100-bit provable security with proofs under 600 kilobytes.
• December 2026 (H-star): The bar rises to full 128-bit security with proofs compressed to 300 kilobytes, accompanied by formal verification of the recursion architecture.

Enter WHIR

To meet these constraints without crippling throughput, the Foundation is backing WHIR, a new cryptographic proof system. Unlike its predecessors, WHIR offers transparent, post-quantum security without a trusted setup. Early benchmarks suggest it generates proofs 1.95x smaller than current iterations, a necessary optimization to fit the 300KB “H-star” cap.

Market Reaction

ETH held the $3,030 level following the release, testing a multi-month trendline as the market digested the implications of a slower, safer rollout. While the pivot may delay the immediate gratification of sub-second L2 finality, it de-risks the eventual transition to a fully zk-snarked Layer 1, a trade-off institutional capital appears willing to accept.