zkSync from Matter Labs is a scaling solution for ETH, already live on ETH mainnet.
This episode of State of the Nation is hosted by David Hoffman, the co-owner of Bankless and Ryan Adams, founder of Bankless. Their guest today is Steve Newcomb, CPO of Matter Labs, the creators of zkSync.
They touch on the topic of the design of zkEVM, the progress of the project and the concept of L3s.
Read our notes below to learn more.
What is zkSync?
● The first EVM compatible zk rollup on mainnet.
● The end game for scaling ETH.
● zkEVM, which is EVM compatible, supports Solidity.
● Mainnet in 31 days.
zkEVM Design Choices
● The mission is to scale ETH.
● The 5 main criteria are: General purpose, EVM compatibility, open-source, supported from a reasonable token model, and allowing developers to use Solidity.
● Their goal is to be the number 1 choice among developers in terms of L2s.
● The team thinks they’ve optimized for the most compatible and highest performance, which allows scaling better than any other solution.
● It took the team 9 months to go through the testnet to make sure the project is secure.
● They are going through 2 multi-million dollar security audits.
Why zkEVM is Progressing Fast
● It took 8 years for ETH to go from PoW to PoS.
● It was 4 years since the team began working on an EVM-compatible rollup.
● Progress when working with technology is not smooth and even. Whenever you unlock certain things, it allows you to progress faster.
Optimistic Rollups vs. zkEVMs
● It’s easy to see how an optimistic rollup could be a single order of magnitude improvement to ETH.
● How do you get many orders of magnitude improvement, without degrading centralization and security?
● There is the 7-day settlement problem and the risk of centralizing as you scale up in optimistic rollups.
● Optimistic rollups aren’t the end-game solution because when you go into L3, it is functionally inelegant and isn’t as clean.
The L3 Ecosystem
● Whenever a 10x innovation moment occurs, the use cases grow by 100x.
● PoW to PoS is a 10x moment with reduction of energy consumption.
● The next 10x moment is the L2 e.g. Arbitrum.
● zk rollups will be the next step with 10x to 100x.
● In L3 it’s not one 10x moment, those are many 10x moments that revolve around either increased speed, reduction in costs, being easier to use, more featureful to use, or increased security.
● A fractal hyperchain means that each use case can customize a blockchain to its own purpose.
You can choose between 1 of 3 structures.
● 1. zkRollup - the most security, but most expensive.
● 2. zkPorter - some data goes to ETH, and some goes off-chain. Gaming companies could use this to do all financial transactions on ETH but the rest off the chain.
● 3. Validium - millions of transactions per second, low fees, security is not as important.
● Once the structure is set, you can secure your blockchain with your own token.
● All fractal hyperchains in L3 are on the same circuit technology which means they are proven by the same prover.
● Interaction between two blockchains could be done with a native bridge (which technically is not a bridge).
Prover Competition
● All the provers have the same goal.
● If there will be data that the approach of the other provers is better, Steve will then listen to that data.
Same Circuit & Hyper Bridges
● If everyone is using the same prover, it creates the native bridge ecosystem.
● What do we choose to standardize and commoditize?
● There are many cases where one of the L2s is saying that it should be the standard.
● If optimism becomes an L3 hyperchain, Steve knows that it would work.
● Bedrock is a potential technology that could become standard but Steve doesn’t know how it would work.
The Cosmos Vision
● Cosmos is functionally the MySpace of blockchains.
● This structure is what’s needed.
● zkRollup is an experiment to provide a level of structure, where you have three different levels of hyperchain and everybody must be on the same circuit to have security.
● Steve admires Cosmos’ vision, but not the implementation.
L1s to L3s
● Many L1s and DeFi project have approached Matter Labs.
● zkSync aims for many tier 1 ecosystem projects coming together and working with them.
● Be on the lookout for a moment where a group of tier 1 projects come together to accelerate the next 10x moment.
Onboarding Strategy
● For one month only the team will be using the system to perform different security tests.
● The second phase will allow developers to start building dApps, however, only developers will be able to use these dApps. More testings will be done at this stage.
● Once the zkSync team is satisfied, users can be onboarded.
Open Source
● When zkSync launches on mainnet everything will be open-sourced and able to protect all three freedoms (to view the code, change the code, fork the code).
● The node implementation of their prover and the method by which the team was able to get the prover to work efficiently on regular old GPUs will not be open-source.
● If the technology has been delivered securely to the intended end user, that is the moment in which the team will make it fully open-source.
● The team wants to avoid bad actors trying to fork something that is not fully secured.
Token
● 1/3 is allocated for insiders and 2/3 for public.
● Date is not yet announced.
● The team will innovate on the distribution.
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