Ethereum: The first ZK application in the world?
Indeed, Ethereum is undergoing a major transition to Zero-Knowledge Proofs (ZK), with the ambition of becoming the largest ZK application in the world. This evolution aims to enhance the scalability, security, and decentralization of the network, gradually moving away from full block re-execution in favor of verifying succinct cryptographic proofs.
The change is very technical. However, the main idea of Ethereum is to integrate zkEVM technology directly into the core of the network. Thus, to simplify, instead of each validator on the network performing all the calculations to verify transactions (which is time-consuming and costly), it could simply quickly verify very lightweight 'proofs'.