Vitalik Buterin Calls for Scrapping Ethereum’s ‘Most ZK-Unfriendly’ Feature

November 4, 2025

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin has proposed eliminating a key blockchain feature he originally invented, claiming it severely hampers the network’s scaling efforts.The modular exponentiation precompile, known as modexp, creates verification bottlenecks up to 50 times worse than average blocks when generating zero-knowledge proofs, according to Buterin’s recent statement on X.The …