Some of the biggest names in decentralized finance, including Uniswap, Sushi, Maker, and Curve, will launch zero-knowledge proof rollup zkSync Era on March 24.
After four years of development, the Ethereum Layer 2 scaling network is finally open to users in the alpha phase, enabling faster and cheaper transactions. It is the first Ethereum Virtual Machine-compatible zk-Rollup (competitor StarkWare uses a custom language called Cairo) to launch on mainnet, allowing most Ethereum DApps to be simple with minimal changes. to transplant.
Between 32 and 50 projects are expected to go live by March 24 or the weekend, including Balancer, Pyth Network, Mute, Redstone, Graph, and Argent. Banxa, Yearn Finance, Celer, Chainlink, Aragon, Woo Network, and Tracer DAO are also being ported to the network.
Anthony Rose, director of engineering at zkSync developer Matter Labs, told Cointelegraph earlier this week: “Friday is a big day for us, it’s the full alpha launch.” "But the system is very complex, and we have a million other things to do." While zkSync Era could offer "orders of magnitude" greater scaling than ethereum's current 10 to 12 transactions per second (TPS), Rose said it would initially offer "dozens of TPS" and scale as needed.
The project launched a "fair onboarding alpha" on February 17, allowing projects to port and test security and optimizations. Matter Labs said it spent $3.8 million on security testing, seven independent security audits and a bug bounty program to reduce the risk of any incident.
zkSync also enables native account abstraction, meaning that every account in the network is a "smart account" that can use two-factor authentication (2FA), social recovery, automated payment transactions, and more via smart contract wallet providers like Argent .
“This was and probably still is my favorite feature,” Ross said, explaining that it’s an improvement to ethereum’s ERC-4337 implementation that will help remove the “clumsiness” of new crypto users entering the space. zkSync Era will not be fully decentralized at launch, so the team can implement quick fixes for any security or technical issues. However, a time lock will be implemented later so that the Security Council and the community can sign off on decisions.
Like competitor StarkWare, zkSync relies on centralized orderers and provers, which are faster but provide centralized points of failure. However, running a prover requires purchasing expensive hardware or renting cloud capacity for $10,000 per month, making this aspect of the decentralized network trickier. Underscoring the challenge is the fact that StarkWare's decentralized version, called StarkNet, currently runs at a paltry 0.11 TPS.
A new attestation system is already in development that dramatically reduces hardware requirements and should be available on mainnet this year, Rose said.
“So the idea is to fix that and then start talking about how we can upgrade the proof system so we can decentralize meaningfully,” he said. "There are a lot of hard problems that need to be solved to make the system a reality."
