Polygon co-founder Jordi Baylina and a core team of seven developers have spun off from Polygon to launch ZisK, an independent project focused on developing a high-performance, fully open-source zero-knowledge virtual machine (zkVM) stack designed for low latency proving. The intellectual property related to ZisK has been transferred to Baylina's wholly owned Swiss company. The project emerged from Polygon Labs' Agglayer Breakout Program and aims to advance zero-knowledge proof infrastructure, enhancing internet-level scalability and aggregated security. Concurrently, zkSync has introduced Airbender, the world's fastest open-source RISC-V zkVM, capable of proving Ethereum blocks in approximately 35 seconds on a single GPU. This represents a substantial improvement over previous zkVM benchmarks, reducing proof costs to $0.0001 per transfer, which is over ten times cheaper than before. The Airbender technology is expected to significantly cut proving costs and improve performance for projects such as Caldera chains. Additionally, other developments in the zero-knowledge space include Nexus Labs' S-two, a modular zkVM focused on performance and developer usability, and Inference Labs' Subnet 2, which applies zero-knowledge proofs to verifiable AI with enhanced privacy and control.