Babbitt News, Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin’s latest article “How will Ethereum’s multi-client concept interact with ZK-EVM? " emphasizes the importance of Ethereum's multi-client concept in maintaining its security and decentralization. Ethereum does not have a default "reference client" that everyone runs, instead there is a collaboratively managed specification and there are multiple teams implementing the specification (i.e. "clients").
In the long run, ZK-EVM will not only be used for ZK Rollup, but will also be used to verify the execution of Layer 1, and ZK-EVM will become the third client of Ethereum. But the challenge of ZK-EVM lies in how it interacts with Ethereum's multi-client concept. To solve this problem, Vitalik suggested that each client wait for a proof that it is compatible with its own implementation before accepting a valid block. This approach sacrifices some of the benefits of the multi-client paradigm, but it is ideal until all ZK-EVM implementations can be formally proved to be equivalent to each other. However, this approach also has some challenges, including delayed block release and data inefficiency.
