Justin Bonds warns that ZK-EVM could cause permanent damage to Ethereum

Cryptocurrency fund manager Justin Bonds said Ethereum’s promotion of the ZK-EVM design is a huge mistake that could cause permanent damage to the network.

In a detailed post, he argued that ZK proofs are extremely expensive to generate and impose hardware requirements, and do not scale well as demand grows.

According to Bons, generating ZK-EVM proofs already requires an array of high-end GPUs. At the current speed of Ethereum, builders will need dozens of top-tier cards just to keep up. Hardware costs alone can exceed $80,000, and with increased throughput, that number can exceed $200,000.

Builder costs raise centralization concerns

This critique focuses on Ethereum’s move towards proposer-builder separation (PBS) combined with ZK proofs. Bonds said this setup shifts power away from validators and concentrates it in the hands of a few builders who can afford to buy the hardware.

He warned that Ethereum faces forced trade-offs as costs increase linearly with speed and capacity. Performance remains limited or decentralization suffers. In his view, both outcomes undermine Ethereum’s core claims.

Bons compared ZK-EVM’s performance to competing networks. He noted that even with a large GPU setup, generating a ZK-EVM block can take 8 to 12 seconds.

Solana validators, on the other hand, operate with sub-second block times and have much lower relative hardware costs. This gap, he argued, explains why Ethereum isn’t even trying to compete at raw speed.

Slow block times remain a structural disadvantage, as high-frequency and perpetual transactions drive most of the on-chain revenue.

Buterin saves another goal

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin recently said that Ethereum was built to withstand censorship, outages, and deplatforming, rather than optimizing for latency.

He pointed to Ethereum’s long uptime and role as a tens of billions of dollars’ worth of payments layer in DeFi. On the other hand, Bons argues that ZK-heavy scaling risks introducing hidden centralization while failing to provide competitive throughput.

Intensifying debate

Ethereum’s 2026 roadmap includes upgrades aimed at increasing gas and increasing capacity using ZK proof. Bons argued that these changes were too slow and still failed to address core speed issues.

Bonds concluded that Ethereum was intentionally kept slow to accommodate ZK’s computational limitations, and criticized that choice as an abomination.

Meanwhile, debate in the cryptocurrency community intensified after users asked whether Ethereum could survive given the $100,000 hardware requirement for the ZK-EVM pass and still being trailed by Solana by a wide margin. Bonds responded that it is possible to survive, but growth is not guaranteed as ETH is 1/138th the capacity and 1/30th the speed of SOL.

Another developer claimed that future upgrades will allow ZK nodes to run on modest hardware. Bonds rejected that view, saying that the current benchmarks do not show a viable path forward, barring a major breakthrough in cryptography that developers have already been waiting for for years.

Related: Buterin urges ETH developers to focus on scalable decentralization. not a new meme