Reaching instant 27ms validation on Bitcoin will take 17 GPU years of compute power

Hazync's developer reports that a 1.7 MB standalone verifier checked a 226,434-byte cryptographic receipt covering the first 1,789 blocks of Bitcoin in 27 milliseconds. The Aug. 15 disclosure limits that result to an early stretch of Bitcoin's history. A complete genesis-to-tip proof campaign remains unfinished.

Hazync is a research prototype that uses RISC Zero's zero-knowledge virtual machine, or zkVM, to make Bitcoin validation reusable. The zkVM executes the validation program, and the resulting receipt gives other users a compact file to check. The developer's design concentrates proof generation among provers and leaves receipt verification to a much larger population.

Those two jobs have radically different costs. The developer estimates roughly 17 GPU-years for the historical backfill, followed by capacity equivalent to about six Nvidia L40S GPUs to keep pace with new blocks. Cheap receipt checks arrive after provers, auditors and archive operators have supplied the expensive work upstream.

Verification is cheap; proving is expensive

A conventional new Bitcoin node independently replays the chain. Hazync runs Bitcoin's rules inside the zkVM, proves that those rules accepted each covered block, and recursively folds block proofs into a single receipt.