Justin Bons Warns ZK-EVM Could Permanently Damage Ethereum

Crypto fund manager Justin Bons said Ethereum’s push toward a ZK-EVM design is a major mistake that could permanently damage the network.

In a detailed post, he argued that ZK proofs are extremely expensive to generate and impose hardware requirements that scale poorly as demand rises.

According to Bons, generating ZK-EVM proofs already requires arrays of high-end GPUs. At current Ethereum speeds, builders would need dozens of top-tier cards just to keep up. Hardware costs alone can exceed $80,000, with higher throughput pushing that number past $200,000.

Ethereum is in big trouble: The crowning jewel of ETH’s roadmap is a poison pill:

The ZK-EVM is terrible & will ruin ETH unless it corrects course!

Relying on ZK means catastrophically limiting ETH while adding insane hardware requirements!

A clear case of over-engineering: 🧵…

— Justin Bons (@Justin_Bons) January 6, 2026

Builder Costs Raise Centralization Concerns

The critique centers on Ethereum’s move toward Proposer Builder Separation (PBS) paired with ZK proofs. Bons said this setup shifts power away from validators and concentrates it among a small group of builders who can afford the hardware.

He warned that as costs scale linearly with speed and capacity, Ethereum faces a forced trade-off. Either performance stays limited, or decentralization erodes. In his view, both outcomes undermine Ethereum’s core claims.

Bons compared ZK-EVM performance with competing networks. He noted that even with massive GPU setups, ZK-EVM block production can take 8 to 12 seconds.

On the other hand, Solana validators operate with sub-second block times and far lower relative hardware costs. He argued this gap explains why Ethereum is not even attempting to compete on raw speed.

With high-frequency trading and perpetual exchanges driving most on-chain revenue, slower block times remain a structural disadvantage.

Buterin Defends a Different Goal

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

“Ethereum was not created to make finance efficient or apps convenient. It was created to set people free”

This was an important – and controversial – line from the Trustless Manifesto ( https://t.co/1F1Fe9OQPh ), and it is worth revisiting it and better understanding what it…

— vitalik.eth (@VitalikButerin) January 5, 2026

He pointed to Ethereum’s long uptime and its role as the settlement layer for tens of billions of dollars in DeFi. Meanwhile, Bons claims that ZK-heavy scaling risks creating hidden centralization while still failing to deliver competitive throughput.

Debate Intensifies

Ethereum’s 2026 roadmap includes upgrades aimed at higher capacity using gas increases and ZK proofs. Bons argued that these changes come too late and still fail to address the core speed problem.

Bons concluded that Ethereum is deliberately staying slow to fit ZK computation limits, calling that choice damning.

Meanwhile, the debate in the crypto community intensified after a user asked whether Ethereum can survive when ZK-EVM paths require $100,000 hardware, yet still trail Solana by wide margins. Bons replied that survival is possible, but growth is not guaranteed because ETH is 1/138th the capacity and 1/30th the speed of SOL.

Another developer claimed future upgrades would allow ZK nodes to run on modest hardware. Bons rejected that view, saying current benchmarks show no viable path without major cryptography breakthroughs that developers have already awaited for years.

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