Nicolas Liochon, the head of zkEVM Linea at ConsenSys, has emphasized the significance of zero-knowledge (ZK) proof solutions in the scalability of the Ethereum ecosystem. He noted that while Linea already offers transactions that are 15 times cheaper than Ethereum Layer 1, the introduction of raw danksharding, or Ethereum Improvement Proposal (EIP) EIP-4844, could potentially further reduce aggregation costs by a factor of 10.
Raw danksharding, a development still under ongoing testing by the Ethereum Foundation, is aimed at lowering the expenses associated with rollups. Rollups, which are commonly used to bundle off-chain transactions and data and then present computational proofs to the Ethereum blockchain, can be costly due to the way data is managed.
Currently, transaction data is published in call data in Ethereum blocks, and while aggregation has potential, it's limited because all Ethereum nodes process this call data, and it's stored on-chain indefinitely. However, the data is only needed for a short period. EIP-4844 would introduce data blocks that can be sent and appended to blocks, but this data can't be accessed by the Ethereum Virtual Machine and is deleted after a set time, leading to significant cost reductions.
Liochon explained that Linea primarily deals with off-chain computation, verifying, bundling, and creating cryptographic proofs for combined transactions at only a fraction of the cost, making ZK-rollups a compelling scaling solution for the Ethereum ecosystem. He also emphasized Linea's ambition to become a universal ZK-rollup solution catering to various decentralized applications and solutions within the Ethereum ecosystem, covering DeFi, gaming, social, and more.
