Blockchain technology has done wonders for humans; in recent years, it has gone mainstream. From Decentralized Finance to Art, technology has transformed the way we do many things, and because of that, we have seen technology receive funding to further its development. While the technology is not new to funding, this latest round of funding presented to further it is more than impressive. 

An X post on November 29 from Justin Drake, a researcher at the Ethereum Foundation, revealed that the foundation would be investing “tens of millions into zkVMs.” According to Drake, the investment plan contains three vital entities that will leverage the opportunity. 

Zero-knowledge Virtual Machines, or zkVMs, are a kind of blockchain virtual machine that uses zero-knowledge proofs (ZKPs) to ensure the privacy and integrity of computations. Many big crypto companies, like a16z Crypto and Polygon Labs, have already incorporated this technology into their services and offerings.

Drake revealed the three key players leveraging the massive investment Ethereum Labs is offering. The first is zkevm.org, the zkRISC-V formal verification platform. The second is Poseidon cryptanalysis, while the third named beneficiary of the funding will be ethproofs.org, specifically its zkVMs by L2beat. It is suggested that there might be more beneficiaries. However, these are the only organizations Drake specifically mentioned. 

This investment will reportedly touch on many significant parts of zkVM technology, from formal verification to cryptographic analysis. The investment announcement has attracted massive attention as many see it as part of Ethereum’s larger initiative to streamline the blockchain’s ecosystem and enhance its scalability and security.

zkVM has always been expected to be a key part of efforts at improving many features of the Ethereum ecosystem, such as transaction efficiency and even privacy. Thus, funding of initiatives such as the zkRISC-V formal verification is a huge step in ensuring the reliability and correctness of these virtual machines. 

The investment in Poseidon’s cryptoanalysis shows the Ethereum Foundation’s dedication to improving cryptographic techniques utilizing zkVMs. Poseidon’s cryptographic hash function is designed to help optimize zero-knowledge proofs, which are integral to zkVMs' operation. Funding this aspect means that the cryptographic infrastructure zkVMs need for better performance might be coming much sooner than expected.

ethproofs.org’s upcoming L2beat for zkVMs is another important part of this investment plan that holds great potential in terms of the results it can generate. L2beat is perhaps the most well-known in layer 2 solutions. The solution helps enhance Ethereum’s scalability by taking transactions off-chain to process them all while maintaining the security of the main Ethereum blockchain. L2beats have already helped improve Ethereum’s blockchain a lot, but an improvement from this funding is expected to improve transaction throughput further and reduce costs while making Ethereum more accessible.

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