According to Foresight News, Vitalik Buterin has published an article titled 'Exploring Circle STARKs,' highlighting significant advancements in the field. Buterin notes that Starkware can prove 620,000 Poseidon2 hashes per second on an M3 laptop. This capability suggests that if Poseidon2 is trusted as a hash function, one of the most challenging aspects of creating an efficient ZK-EVM has been addressed.

Buterin explains that compared to conventional STARKs, circle STARKs do not add much complexity for developers. The mathematics behind the 'polynomials' operated by circle FRI is counterintuitive and takes time to understand. However, this complexity is encapsulated and hidden from developers, making it easier for them to work with the system.

He believes that combining technologies like Mersenne31, BabyBear, and binary field techniques such as Binius is pushing the efficiency limits of STARKs at the foundational level. The future of STARK optimization is expected to focus on the most efficient arithmeticization of primitives like hash functions and signatures, creating recursive structures for more parallelization, arithmeticizing virtual machines to improve developer experience, and other higher-level tasks.