Octant introduced its ZK Vote Coprocessor, a system that runs trustless quadratic funding tallying onchain without a privileged admin. The coprocessor is built on Succinct's SP1 zkVM, which verifies the full vote computation and produces a proof that is checked directly on Ethereum.

Under the new system, voters sign gasless EIP-712 ballots and submit them to a sequencer. When a round closes, all ballots are posted to Ethereum as a blob. The zkVM then verifies signatures, removes duplicate votes by nonce, enforces per-voter budgets, and computes the pairwise quadratic funding allocation. The resulting proof is submitted onchain and checked by a TallyVerifier contract.

Once the proof is verified, valid results are recorded permanently and distributions become claimable directly, without further action from Octant. The design removes the need to trust an operator to tally votes honestly, replacing administrative discretion with a verifiable computation anchored to Ethereum.

Two limitations remain in the current version. Voter addresses and ballot choices are public rather than private, so the system does not yet support private voting. The sequencer can also omit ballots, though it cannot forge them. Octant plans to address both privacy and full trustlessness in future iterations.

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Brevis released Pico Prism 2.0, the latest rebuild of its real-time Ethereum block prover, achieving a 5.3x improvement in proving efficiency over its predecessor. Pico Prism 2.0 achieves 6.1 seconds per proof with 99.9% of blocks finalizing within the 12-second slot, running on 16 RTX 5090 GPUs across two machines, a quarter of the GPU count required by Pico Prism 1.0.

Pico Prism 2.0 brings four key upgrades, including a more efficient instruction set, a two-machine distributed architecture with dynamic load balancing across all 16 GPUs, a faster emulator that compiles programs natively rather than interpreting them at runtime, and a ground-up rewrite of the GPU-proving backend. The release meets the Ethereum Foundation's stated real-time proving targets of sub-10-second average latency and hardware costs of under $100K.

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Disclaimer: Content is for informational and educational purposes only and does not constitute financial, investment, legal, or other professional advice. No representations or warranties are made as to accuracy, completeness, or timeliness. Use of this content is at your own risk, and you should consult a qualified professional before making decisions. No fiduciary or advisory relationship is created