ZKsync token climbs 6.2% after Vitalik Buterin praises Airbender Prime

ZKsync’s ZK token rose 6.2% after Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin publicly praised Airbender Prime, the project’s new Ethereum prover. What Airbender Prime actually does ZKsync unveiled Airbender Prime on October 13, 2026. The pitch is real-time Ethereum proving without a rack of specialized hardware. A prover is the machine that produces cryptographic receipts showing that a batch of transactions was processed correctly. Anyone can check those receipts quickly without redoing the original work. In ZKsync’s test run, Airbender Prime proved 99% of 7,200 consecutive Ethereum mainnet blocks in under 10 seconds each. Every single block in that stretch was proven in under 12 seconds. The hardware behind those numbers was one NVIDIA RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell GPU. ZKsync also leads the ETHproofs.org public leaderboard on average proving time, GPU efficiency, and cost. Under the hood, Airbender Prime is built on hash-based STARKs, a proof system chosen with post-quantum security in mind. ZKsync plans to implement Keccak-256 for Layer 1 proofs. The system also supports multi-GPU configurations, so one card is the floor rather than the ceiling. Buterin’s compliment came with homework Buteri...