zkSync Era tightens its proof pipeline

zkSync Era published core version 31.0.0 of its network software on June 18. This is not a visible product launch for end users, but an infrastructure release. Matter Labs’ official repository lists two functional additions and several fixes affecting the proof pipeline, data availability configuration, and API behavior used by operators and developers.

The first signal is in Airbender, the project’s proving system. The release adds support for submitting proof failures and bounding proving retries, meaning the software can better frame what happens when a cryptographic proof does not succeed on the first attempt. In a rollup, these proofs summarize and secure off-chain execution before a verifiable state is posted. The detail is technical, but it matters: a proving pipeline that is more observable and better limited gives operators fewer opaque waiting states when something goes wrong.

The second feature allows l2_da_commitment_scheme to be set before an upgrade. Data availability is the way a network ensures that the data needed to verify activity remains accessible. Preparing this setting before an upgrade gives teams another configuration handle, which is useful as ZK chains keep moving toward more modular designs and more explicit data-availability choices.

The rest of the release note is largely defensive engineering. Matter Labs fixes bounded reward percentiles in eth_feeHistory, an operator-precedence bug in max_connections, Solidity compiler paths, state keeper mempool synchronization, and partial-match rejection for metadata-less EraVM bytecode. Each item looks like maintenance in isolation. Together, they show where much of the important L2 work sits in 2026: not in louder announcements, but in removing small failure modes for nodes, tools, and applications that depend on these networks.