// the find
lambdaclass/ethrex
Minimalist, stable, modular, fast, and ZK native implementation of the Ethereum protocol in Rust. L1 and L2 execution client.
ethrex is a from-scratch Ethereum execution client in Rust, built by LambdaClass with ZK proving as a first-class concern rather than an afterthought. It targets both L1 node operators who want to prove block execution and L2 teams building ZK rollups, supporting SP1, RISC Zero, OpenVM, and ZisK as proving backends. At 887 stars it's still niche, but it has production audits and active development.
The multi-prover design is genuinely thoughtful — guest programs for each zkVM live in separate crates with their own Cargo.lock files, so a breaking change in SP1 doesn't poison your RISC Zero build. The codebase is meaningfully smaller than Geth or Nethermind (the LOC chart in the README is honest, not marketing — you can verify it). LambdaClass ships two independent Least Authority security audits, which is more than most Rust blockchain projects at this stage. The philosophy against premature abstraction ('repeating code two or three times can be fine') actually shows in the source tree — no generic soup, relatively flat module hierarchy.
It is not Ethereum mainnet-ready as a standalone client — the L1 support is incomplete enough that you'd be running it alongside a proven client, not replacing one. The L2 stack requires Solidity contracts, a sequencer, a prover, and Aligned Layer integration to function end-to-end, which is a significant operational surface area before you see a working rollup. Based sequencing is listed as 'in the works', so if that's your use case, you're waiting. The docs site exists but the getting-started path for L2 involves multiple moving pieces that aren't wired together in a single runnable example.