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Researcher, Enthusiast, Blockchain and Crypto Lover, Cryptography Lover, Ethereum is the King.
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In this research, we are going to study the zkSync project. We are studying this project from the aspects of fundamentals.
Zero-knowledge rollups (ZK-rollups) bundle (or "roll-up") hundreds of transfers off-chain and generate a cryptographic proof. These proofs can come in the form of SNARKs (succinct non-interactive argument of knowledge) or STARKs (scalable transparent argument of knowledge). SNARKs and STARKs are known as validity proofs and get posted to layer 1.
The ZK-rollup smart contract maintains the state of all transfers on layer 2, and this state can only be updated with a validity proof. This means that ZK-rollups only need the validity proof instead of all transaction data. With a ZK-rollup, validating a block is quicker and cheaper because less data is included.
With a ZK-rollup, there are no delays when moving funds from layer 2 to layer 1 because a validity proof accepted by the ZK-rollup contract has already verified the funds.
Being on layer 2, ZK-rollups can be optimised to reduce transaction size further. For instance, an account is represented by an index rather than an address, which reduces a transaction from 32 bytes to just 4 bytes. Transactions are also written to Ethereum as calldata, reducing gas.
zkSync is a zero-knowledge rollup layer 2 solution for Ethereum. This protocol is trying to scale Ethereum blockchain using a rollup with zero-knowledge basis. Moving funds between Ethereum layer and zkEVM layer is almost instant. Moving funds in layer 2, swaps and other things is not that instant but takes a very little time. zkSync and other ZK-Rollups are a bit more expensive than optimistic rollups.
Informally, zkSync works as follows:
Users sign transactions and submit them to validators.
Validators roll up thousands of transactions together in a single block and submit a cryptographic commitment (the root hash) of the new state to the smart contract on the mainnet along with a cryptographic proof (a SNARK) that this new state is indeed the result of the application of some correct transactions to the old state.
Additionally to the proof, the state ∆ (a small amount of data for every transaction) is published over the mainchain network as cheap calldata. This enables anyone to reconstruct the state at any moment.
The proof and the state ∆ are verified by the smart contract, thus verifying both the validity of all the transactions included in the block and the block data availability.
The protocol team is good and they have the potential to make zkSync one of the greatest layer 2 solutions in the world.
Also, they have got some big investors such as a16z and Ethereum Foundation, and many others to help them bring up zkSync and make it happen.
zkSync has no token, but there will eventually be a token and there is a high probability that they airdrop some tokens to zkEVM users.
Now if you want to know more details about how zkSync works, you can read below.
zkSync is a trustless Layer 2 protocol for scalable low-cost payments on Ethereum, powered by zkRollup technology. It is a user-centric zk rollup platform from Matter Labs, with security, user experience, and developer experience as the core focus. zkSync Version 1.0 launched on the Ethereum mainnet on June 15th 2020, enabling transaction throughput of ~300 TPS.
Matter Labs is currently focused on the development of zkSync 2.0 which has a twofold goal; firstly, arbitrary smart contract capabilities through the support of both Solidity (via zkEVM) and Zinc (the rollup’s internal programming language); and secondly, an exponential increase in throughput, in the order of 20,000+ TPS, via zkPorter - a protocol combining zkRollups and sharding.
With zkSync, Matter Labs is solving the problem of bringing mass-adoption ready scalability to accommodate a mainstream user base on the blockchain. Without real mass adoption, the value propositions of many ‘promising blockchain ideas’ are deemed to remain largely unfulfilled.
For Matter Labs, scalability is thought of not only in terms of transaction throughput, but the overall readiness of blockchain systems to meet the demands of millions of users. Matter Labs’ solution is zkSync, whose value proposition is based on trustlessness, confidentiality, and speed.
Matter Labs was founded in 2018 by Alex Gluchowski. The matter labs team laid out its vision for the zkSync solution in late 2019, as the first trustless L2 scaling solution with L1 reorg-level security and guarantee of fund safety, supporting a fully zero-knowledge based smart contract ecosystem.
zkSync v1.0 was released on the Ethereum Mainnet on June 15th 2020. It currently utilizes PLONK as its zero-knowledge prover, which requires a "trusted setup" of a Common Reference String (CRS). In PLONK, this setup can be done once and be reused by any number of applications (this is called Universal CRS). If at least one participant deletes the entropy (randomness) used to provide their contribution, the setup is secure. Matter Labs participated in the global Ignition trusted setup ceremony for PLONK on BN256 elliptic curve, coordinated by AZTEC protocol. This limited the maximum size of the zk proof for a block, and thus the maximum throughput of zkSync was capped at ~300 TPS.
As part of zkSync 1.1’s release on August 1st 2020, which fulfilled most of the requirements of Reddit’s Great Scaling Bake-Off, the following additions were made:
Recursive ZK proofs were implemented, unlocking the full zkRollup capacity (up to 3,000 TPS).
Added support for automatic recurring payments (subscriptions).
Enabled transactions for batching and paying fees in a separate token.
Made burning and minting tokens possible inside zkSync.
On March 1st 2021, Matter Labs announced a 2M USD Series A financing round for strategic partners, to preserve the dominance of the community share in future zkSync network — in contrast to the anticipated distribution of other scaling solutions’ assets and governance.
In Matter Labs’ original announcement for the zkSync protocol’s vision four fundamental design choices are presented:
Security: zkSync is built upon ZK Rollups - a scaling solution in which funds are held on the main chain, but computation and storage are performed off-chain. ZK Rollups use validity proofs, which are computed on-chain and guarantee that transactions made within the rollup are valid.
Usability: In the rollup, transactions are real-time, enabled by subsecond consensus in block production by validators, which must post a significant security bond to the main chain to discourage malicious action.
Liveness: specialized roles are required to maintain a scaling solution’s liveness. In zkSync these are Validators, which produce blocks and generate corresponding zero-knowledge proofs, and Guardians - which will be responsible for making sure the rollup remains censorship-resistant. In zkPorter, Guardians will have the role of inviting a protocol’s stakeholders to participate as data availability guarantors on the protocol’s shard on zkPorter. Guardians-enabled shards will run a form of Proof of Stake consensus.
Programmability and privacy: zkSync must have both an appropriate long-term Zero-Knowledge proof system and a smart contract programming framework. With regards to the former, Matter Labs is developing RedShift, a transparent SNARK (though the current version is based on the PLONK prover), and for the latter, Zinc was developed as a framework for zero-knowledge based smart contracts. Solidity support will be added as of Version 2.0’s release.
zkRollup architecture provides the following guarantees:
Validators can never corrupt the state or steal funds.
Users can always retrieve the funds from the zkRollup smart contract even if validators stop cooperating because the data is available.
Neither users nor a single trusted third party needs to be online to monitor zkRollup blocks in order to prevent fraud.
The fundamental premise is that all funds are held by a smart contract on the main chain, while computation and storage are performed off-chain. Instead of verifying each transaction separately, transactions are "rolled up" to a single item (the rollup block), which is then being verified, approving all of them simultaneously.
Zero-knowledge proof (SNARK) verification is much cheaper than verifying every transaction individually, and storing the state off-chain is significantly cheaper than storing it on EVM. This enables an improvement in scalability (~100-200x mainnet capacity) and transaction cost savings. Funds placed into zkSync (v1) have the same security guarantees as if they are held in an Ethereum account without any additional requirements on the user’s part.
zkRollup (the core technology of zkSync) does not require any operational activity to keep user funds safe. Users may go offline for a certain extent of time, then upon resuming activity can be certain of being able to safely withdraw their assets without any external help, even in a scenario zkRollup validators become inactive.
Generally speaking, zkSync supports safely sending funds to any Ethereum address, including exchanges and smart contracts. The list of the Ethereum wallets that can be controlled from the zkSync web wallet can be inspected directly on the web front end. To control addresses programmatically, it is necessary to be able to perform message signing with it — either with native Ethereum signature or via EIP1271 in case of smart contracts.
zkSync can be used to transfer Ether and ERC20 tokens. New token listing is performed on a first-come, first-serve basis if the criteria presented at listing submission time are met. The listing process is set to become permissionless by the next system upgrade.
All funds are held by a smart contract on the main chain, while computation and storage are performed off-chain. The main idea is that instead of verifying each transaction separately, transactions are "rolled up" to a single item (the rollup block), which is then being verified, approving all of them simultaneously.
Informally, it works as follows:
Users sign transactions and submit them to validators.
Validators roll up thousands of transactions together in a single block and submit a cryptographic commitment (the root hash) of the new state to the smart contract on the mainnet along with a cryptographic proof (a SNARK) that this new state is indeed the result of the application of some correct transactions to the old state.
Additionally to the proof, the state ∆ (a small amount of data for every transaction) is published over the mainchain network as cheap calldata. This enables anyone to reconstruct the state at any moment.
The proof and the state ∆ are verified by the smart contract, thus verifying both the validity of all the transactions included in the block and the block data availability.
SNARK verification is much cheaper than verifying every transaction individually, and storing the state off-chain is significantly cheaper than storing it on EVM. Hence enabling a huge boost of scalability (~100-200x mainnet capacity) and tx cost savings.
Transactions in zkSync reach the finality of Ethereum once the SNARK proof of the zkSync block is generated and accepted by the smart contract. The proof time generation is expected to be about 10 minutes, i.e. 10 minutes after submitted, the zkSync (proof) transaction is as final as any L1 Ethereum transaction included in the same Ethereum block as the transaction with the proof. At the moment, when a user sends a transaction, we wait for the block to get filled, and so we don't generate the proof immediately. With higher throughput on the zkSync system, the time between blocks will decrease.
In contrast, fraud-based scaling solutions (e.g. optimistic rollup) require at least 2 weeks of a lockout period to operate more or less securely, which results in 2 weeks of objective tx finality time.
It should be added that Matter Labs and other companies in the ZKP space are constantly working on improving the prover efficiency, which will result in lower finality times (potentially down to under 1 minute).
Even though the time to finality is about 10 minutes, it does not affect the usability of the network. Transactions submitted to zkSync by users are instantly confirmed, instantly displayed to the receiving party in the UI and API (although they are marked as unconfirmed), and the transferred assets can immediately be used to make further transfers (which might even end up in the same zkSync block).
At the moment, instant confirmations are pure promises on the side of zkSync validators to include the transaction in the next block. Users who do not trust the validator should await full finality before considering the assets as received.
In the future, a security bond will be added to zkSync by the validators. This will provide instant economic finality guarantees. It will work as follows.
Validators elected to participate in the zkSync block production will have to post a significant security bond to the zkSync smart contract on the mainnet. A consensus run by the validators provides a subsecond confirmation to the user that their transaction will be included in the next zkSync block, signed by a supermajority of (more than) ⅔ of the consensus participants (weighted by stake).
If a new zkSync block is produced and submitted to the mainchain, it cannot be reverted. However, if it doesn’t contain the promised transactions, the security bond of the intersection of the signers of the original receipt and the signers of the new block will be slashed. This intersection is guaranteed to have more than ⅓ of the stake. This guarantees that at least ⅓ of the security bond can be slashed and that only malicious validators will be punished.
A portion of the slashed funds will be used to compensate the tx recipient. The rest will be burned.
I had time to read some of them and those I understood do the work as they should. Others that I didn't understand require a really high-level education about Zero-Knowledge proofs and how they are coded.
The smart contract side has no recent commits but it has been updated since the beginning. But the core side has been constantly upgraded by the developers and it has a great rate of commits.
The contracts have been audited 4 times by ABDK. In some of them, they have found some critical issues which were fixed and in others, there were no issues. In conclusion, I see it as a safe and secure protocol.
Co-Founder & CEO
Alex Gluchowski
Formerly director R&D in Entropy Labs, co-founder & CTO at PaulCamper, co-founder & CTO at Somuchmore GmbH, and CTO at ExpoGlobus.com.
Head Of Business Development
Marco Cora
Formerly worked at Azimut Group, RM Partners, DekaBank, Depfa Bank, UBS Investment Bank, and Bocconi University.
COO
Zoé Gadsden
She is also an advisor at Tech Open Air, a founding member at Female Narratives. She formerly worked at Google, IRL Production, Jack Morton Worldwide.
There are numerous investors investing in this project such as 1kx, Dekrypt Capital, Dragonfly Capital, Ethereum Foundation, HASHED, Placeholder VC, Union Square Ventures, a16z Crypto.
On November 8th 2021, a 50M USD round led by Andreessen Horowitz was announced, which included investors from the previous round and increased the number of strategic partners.
zkSync has a good set of investors.
There are some partners for zkSync like Curve, Aave, Loopring, Balancer, 1inch, Paraswap, Coinbase, Huobi, Binance, MoonPay, ripio, and argent.
The most noticeable competitors of zkSync are ZKSpace which is using zkSync underlying, Loopring which is mainly a DEX, not a layer-2, Arbitrum and Optimism which have some merits and demerits to zkSync, StarkNet which is using another Zero-Knowledge Proof named STARK, and maybe we can name Polygon (Matic).
In this list, I believe zkSync is not at the very top but in a maximum of 5 years time I see this project and other ZKP projects at the very top.
For now, I see Polygon (Matic), Arbitrum, and Optimism a little bit ahead in the matter of technology.
Finalizing the Atomic Swap library(opens new window)
Proof recursion has been integrated
Checkout option in Gitcoin Round 7 (opens new window)and Round 8
Security audits are being conducted before each major update
Testnet version is available on Rinkeby (opens new window)and Ropsten(opens new window)
Zinc (opens new window)smart contract framework is under active development
They highlight some of our future plans — more details will be given at a later time.
Permissionless token listing
Integrations of zkSync with a variety of wallets
Integrations of zkSync with exchanges
Proof-of-stake consensus protocol on L2 as part of the decentralization process
zkSync token launch
zkSync has no token but as it can be seen in the roadmap they will have a token in the future. There will probably be an airdrop of the token for zkSync users. I recommend to use zkSync bridge, Pay in gitcoin with zksync (use ZkSync Checkout), mint an NFT, use Testnet V1, V2, and finally hold POAP to participate in the potential airdrop coming.
zkSync — Rely on math, not validators, https://zksync.io/. Accessed 2 February 2022.
Matter Labs — an engineering team passionate about liberty, blockchain, and math. You might know us as humble creators of zkSync, https://matter-labs.io/. Accessed 2 February 2022.
L2BEAT – The state of the layer two ecosystem, https://l2beat.com/. Accessed 2 February 2022.
L2Fees.info, https://l2fees.info/. Accessed 2 February 2022.
Amphi St Germain. “Alex Gluchowski : zkSync — first EVM-compatible zkRollup.” Youtube, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zknVgruhjnU&list=PL-Bw34ynlUOP3r0zFeM48JnNZyun2E6Bt&index=4.
“Best zkSync Alternatives & Competitors.” SourceForge, https://sourceforge.net/software/product/zkSync/alternatives. Accessed 2 February 2022.
Crypto Empire. “How To Get The zkSync Airdrop! zkSync Airdrop Will Be Huge!” YouTube, 9 December 2021, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dDuzw2ntqQU. Accessed 2 February 2022.
Dapp University. “This is a Game Changer for Ethereum | ZK Sync Explained.” YouTube, 19 October 2021, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gxjKrcJ11TY. Accessed 2 February 2022.
ETHGlobal. “'zkEVM' - Alex Gluchowski.” YouTube, 5 May 2021, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6wLSkpIHXM8. Accessed 2 February 2022.
ETHGlobal. “'zkSync — zkPorter: Why Rollups Are Not Enough' - Alex Gluchowski.” YouTube, 20 April 2021, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MstuXYewtXs. Accessed 2 February 2022.
HOSKsCLIPS. “Charles Hoskinson on What are your thoughts on rollups ZKSync and Starkware like solutions for Carda.” YouTube, 21 November 2021, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GbR8B4OlT0w. Accessed 2 February 2022.
Ivan on Tech. “ZK-SYNC Interview with Alex Gluchowski - Scaling Ethereum with Zero Knowledge Rollups.” YouTube, 21 October 2021, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0xiiY8r8eX4. Accessed 2 February 2022.
Matter Labs. “L2 scalability and zkSync (Edcon talk).” YouTube, 10 August 2020, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=el-9YYGN1nw. Accessed 2 February 2022.
Matter Labs. “Matter Labs · GitHub - zksync.” GitHub, https://github.com/matter-labs. Accessed 2 February 2022.
“Tokens | zkSync Block Explorer.” zkScan, https://zkscan.io/explorer/tokens/. Accessed 2 February 2022.
“zkSync Security Audits.” zkSync, https://zksync.io/updates/security-audits.html. Accessed 2 February 2022.
“zkSync (ZKSYNC) Price, Market Cap, Live Charts, Research.” Messari, https://messari.io/asset/zksync. Accessed 2 February 2022.
In this research, we are going to study the zkSync project. We are studying this project from the aspects of fundamentals.
Zero-knowledge rollups (ZK-rollups) bundle (or "roll-up") hundreds of transfers off-chain and generate a cryptographic proof. These proofs can come in the form of SNARKs (succinct non-interactive argument of knowledge) or STARKs (scalable transparent argument of knowledge). SNARKs and STARKs are known as validity proofs and get posted to layer 1.
The ZK-rollup smart contract maintains the state of all transfers on layer 2, and this state can only be updated with a validity proof. This means that ZK-rollups only need the validity proof instead of all transaction data. With a ZK-rollup, validating a block is quicker and cheaper because less data is included.
With a ZK-rollup, there are no delays when moving funds from layer 2 to layer 1 because a validity proof accepted by the ZK-rollup contract has already verified the funds.
Being on layer 2, ZK-rollups can be optimised to reduce transaction size further. For instance, an account is represented by an index rather than an address, which reduces a transaction from 32 bytes to just 4 bytes. Transactions are also written to Ethereum as calldata, reducing gas.
zkSync is a zero-knowledge rollup layer 2 solution for Ethereum. This protocol is trying to scale Ethereum blockchain using a rollup with zero-knowledge basis. Moving funds between Ethereum layer and zkEVM layer is almost instant. Moving funds in layer 2, swaps and other things is not that instant but takes a very little time. zkSync and other ZK-Rollups are a bit more expensive than optimistic rollups.
Informally, zkSync works as follows:
Users sign transactions and submit them to validators.
Validators roll up thousands of transactions together in a single block and submit a cryptographic commitment (the root hash) of the new state to the smart contract on the mainnet along with a cryptographic proof (a SNARK) that this new state is indeed the result of the application of some correct transactions to the old state.
Additionally to the proof, the state ∆ (a small amount of data for every transaction) is published over the mainchain network as cheap calldata. This enables anyone to reconstruct the state at any moment.
The proof and the state ∆ are verified by the smart contract, thus verifying both the validity of all the transactions included in the block and the block data availability.
The protocol team is good and they have the potential to make zkSync one of the greatest layer 2 solutions in the world.
Also, they have got some big investors such as a16z and Ethereum Foundation, and many others to help them bring up zkSync and make it happen.
zkSync has no token, but there will eventually be a token and there is a high probability that they airdrop some tokens to zkEVM users.
Now if you want to know more details about how zkSync works, you can read below.
zkSync is a trustless Layer 2 protocol for scalable low-cost payments on Ethereum, powered by zkRollup technology. It is a user-centric zk rollup platform from Matter Labs, with security, user experience, and developer experience as the core focus. zkSync Version 1.0 launched on the Ethereum mainnet on June 15th 2020, enabling transaction throughput of ~300 TPS.
Matter Labs is currently focused on the development of zkSync 2.0 which has a twofold goal; firstly, arbitrary smart contract capabilities through the support of both Solidity (via zkEVM) and Zinc (the rollup’s internal programming language); and secondly, an exponential increase in throughput, in the order of 20,000+ TPS, via zkPorter - a protocol combining zkRollups and sharding.
With zkSync, Matter Labs is solving the problem of bringing mass-adoption ready scalability to accommodate a mainstream user base on the blockchain. Without real mass adoption, the value propositions of many ‘promising blockchain ideas’ are deemed to remain largely unfulfilled.
For Matter Labs, scalability is thought of not only in terms of transaction throughput, but the overall readiness of blockchain systems to meet the demands of millions of users. Matter Labs’ solution is zkSync, whose value proposition is based on trustlessness, confidentiality, and speed.
Matter Labs was founded in 2018 by Alex Gluchowski. The matter labs team laid out its vision for the zkSync solution in late 2019, as the first trustless L2 scaling solution with L1 reorg-level security and guarantee of fund safety, supporting a fully zero-knowledge based smart contract ecosystem.
zkSync v1.0 was released on the Ethereum Mainnet on June 15th 2020. It currently utilizes PLONK as its zero-knowledge prover, which requires a "trusted setup" of a Common Reference String (CRS). In PLONK, this setup can be done once and be reused by any number of applications (this is called Universal CRS). If at least one participant deletes the entropy (randomness) used to provide their contribution, the setup is secure. Matter Labs participated in the global Ignition trusted setup ceremony for PLONK on BN256 elliptic curve, coordinated by AZTEC protocol. This limited the maximum size of the zk proof for a block, and thus the maximum throughput of zkSync was capped at ~300 TPS.
As part of zkSync 1.1’s release on August 1st 2020, which fulfilled most of the requirements of Reddit’s Great Scaling Bake-Off, the following additions were made:
Recursive ZK proofs were implemented, unlocking the full zkRollup capacity (up to 3,000 TPS).
Added support for automatic recurring payments (subscriptions).
Enabled transactions for batching and paying fees in a separate token.
Made burning and minting tokens possible inside zkSync.
On March 1st 2021, Matter Labs announced a 2M USD Series A financing round for strategic partners, to preserve the dominance of the community share in future zkSync network — in contrast to the anticipated distribution of other scaling solutions’ assets and governance.
In Matter Labs’ original announcement for the zkSync protocol’s vision four fundamental design choices are presented:
Security: zkSync is built upon ZK Rollups - a scaling solution in which funds are held on the main chain, but computation and storage are performed off-chain. ZK Rollups use validity proofs, which are computed on-chain and guarantee that transactions made within the rollup are valid.
Usability: In the rollup, transactions are real-time, enabled by subsecond consensus in block production by validators, which must post a significant security bond to the main chain to discourage malicious action.
Liveness: specialized roles are required to maintain a scaling solution’s liveness. In zkSync these are Validators, which produce blocks and generate corresponding zero-knowledge proofs, and Guardians - which will be responsible for making sure the rollup remains censorship-resistant. In zkPorter, Guardians will have the role of inviting a protocol’s stakeholders to participate as data availability guarantors on the protocol’s shard on zkPorter. Guardians-enabled shards will run a form of Proof of Stake consensus.
Programmability and privacy: zkSync must have both an appropriate long-term Zero-Knowledge proof system and a smart contract programming framework. With regards to the former, Matter Labs is developing RedShift, a transparent SNARK (though the current version is based on the PLONK prover), and for the latter, Zinc was developed as a framework for zero-knowledge based smart contracts. Solidity support will be added as of Version 2.0’s release.
zkRollup architecture provides the following guarantees:
Validators can never corrupt the state or steal funds.
Users can always retrieve the funds from the zkRollup smart contract even if validators stop cooperating because the data is available.
Neither users nor a single trusted third party needs to be online to monitor zkRollup blocks in order to prevent fraud.
The fundamental premise is that all funds are held by a smart contract on the main chain, while computation and storage are performed off-chain. Instead of verifying each transaction separately, transactions are "rolled up" to a single item (the rollup block), which is then being verified, approving all of them simultaneously.
Zero-knowledge proof (SNARK) verification is much cheaper than verifying every transaction individually, and storing the state off-chain is significantly cheaper than storing it on EVM. This enables an improvement in scalability (~100-200x mainnet capacity) and transaction cost savings. Funds placed into zkSync (v1) have the same security guarantees as if they are held in an Ethereum account without any additional requirements on the user’s part.
zkRollup (the core technology of zkSync) does not require any operational activity to keep user funds safe. Users may go offline for a certain extent of time, then upon resuming activity can be certain of being able to safely withdraw their assets without any external help, even in a scenario zkRollup validators become inactive.
Generally speaking, zkSync supports safely sending funds to any Ethereum address, including exchanges and smart contracts. The list of the Ethereum wallets that can be controlled from the zkSync web wallet can be inspected directly on the web front end. To control addresses programmatically, it is necessary to be able to perform message signing with it — either with native Ethereum signature or via EIP1271 in case of smart contracts.
zkSync can be used to transfer Ether and ERC20 tokens. New token listing is performed on a first-come, first-serve basis if the criteria presented at listing submission time are met. The listing process is set to become permissionless by the next system upgrade.
All funds are held by a smart contract on the main chain, while computation and storage are performed off-chain. The main idea is that instead of verifying each transaction separately, transactions are "rolled up" to a single item (the rollup block), which is then being verified, approving all of them simultaneously.
Informally, it works as follows:
Users sign transactions and submit them to validators.
Validators roll up thousands of transactions together in a single block and submit a cryptographic commitment (the root hash) of the new state to the smart contract on the mainnet along with a cryptographic proof (a SNARK) that this new state is indeed the result of the application of some correct transactions to the old state.
Additionally to the proof, the state ∆ (a small amount of data for every transaction) is published over the mainchain network as cheap calldata. This enables anyone to reconstruct the state at any moment.
The proof and the state ∆ are verified by the smart contract, thus verifying both the validity of all the transactions included in the block and the block data availability.
SNARK verification is much cheaper than verifying every transaction individually, and storing the state off-chain is significantly cheaper than storing it on EVM. Hence enabling a huge boost of scalability (~100-200x mainnet capacity) and tx cost savings.
Transactions in zkSync reach the finality of Ethereum once the SNARK proof of the zkSync block is generated and accepted by the smart contract. The proof time generation is expected to be about 10 minutes, i.e. 10 minutes after submitted, the zkSync (proof) transaction is as final as any L1 Ethereum transaction included in the same Ethereum block as the transaction with the proof. At the moment, when a user sends a transaction, we wait for the block to get filled, and so we don't generate the proof immediately. With higher throughput on the zkSync system, the time between blocks will decrease.
In contrast, fraud-based scaling solutions (e.g. optimistic rollup) require at least 2 weeks of a lockout period to operate more or less securely, which results in 2 weeks of objective tx finality time.
It should be added that Matter Labs and other companies in the ZKP space are constantly working on improving the prover efficiency, which will result in lower finality times (potentially down to under 1 minute).
Even though the time to finality is about 10 minutes, it does not affect the usability of the network. Transactions submitted to zkSync by users are instantly confirmed, instantly displayed to the receiving party in the UI and API (although they are marked as unconfirmed), and the transferred assets can immediately be used to make further transfers (which might even end up in the same zkSync block).
At the moment, instant confirmations are pure promises on the side of zkSync validators to include the transaction in the next block. Users who do not trust the validator should await full finality before considering the assets as received.
In the future, a security bond will be added to zkSync by the validators. This will provide instant economic finality guarantees. It will work as follows.
Validators elected to participate in the zkSync block production will have to post a significant security bond to the zkSync smart contract on the mainnet. A consensus run by the validators provides a subsecond confirmation to the user that their transaction will be included in the next zkSync block, signed by a supermajority of (more than) ⅔ of the consensus participants (weighted by stake).
If a new zkSync block is produced and submitted to the mainchain, it cannot be reverted. However, if it doesn’t contain the promised transactions, the security bond of the intersection of the signers of the original receipt and the signers of the new block will be slashed. This intersection is guaranteed to have more than ⅓ of the stake. This guarantees that at least ⅓ of the security bond can be slashed and that only malicious validators will be punished.
A portion of the slashed funds will be used to compensate the tx recipient. The rest will be burned.
I had time to read some of them and those I understood do the work as they should. Others that I didn't understand require a really high-level education about Zero-Knowledge proofs and how they are coded.
The smart contract side has no recent commits but it has been updated since the beginning. But the core side has been constantly upgraded by the developers and it has a great rate of commits.
The contracts have been audited 4 times by ABDK. In some of them, they have found some critical issues which were fixed and in others, there were no issues. In conclusion, I see it as a safe and secure protocol.
Co-Founder & CEO
Alex Gluchowski
Formerly director R&D in Entropy Labs, co-founder & CTO at PaulCamper, co-founder & CTO at Somuchmore GmbH, and CTO at ExpoGlobus.com.
Head Of Business Development
Marco Cora
Formerly worked at Azimut Group, RM Partners, DekaBank, Depfa Bank, UBS Investment Bank, and Bocconi University.
COO
Zoé Gadsden
She is also an advisor at Tech Open Air, a founding member at Female Narratives. She formerly worked at Google, IRL Production, Jack Morton Worldwide.
There are numerous investors investing in this project such as 1kx, Dekrypt Capital, Dragonfly Capital, Ethereum Foundation, HASHED, Placeholder VC, Union Square Ventures, a16z Crypto.
On November 8th 2021, a 50M USD round led by Andreessen Horowitz was announced, which included investors from the previous round and increased the number of strategic partners.
zkSync has a good set of investors.
There are some partners for zkSync like Curve, Aave, Loopring, Balancer, 1inch, Paraswap, Coinbase, Huobi, Binance, MoonPay, ripio, and argent.
The most noticeable competitors of zkSync are ZKSpace which is using zkSync underlying, Loopring which is mainly a DEX, not a layer-2, Arbitrum and Optimism which have some merits and demerits to zkSync, StarkNet which is using another Zero-Knowledge Proof named STARK, and maybe we can name Polygon (Matic).
In this list, I believe zkSync is not at the very top but in a maximum of 5 years time I see this project and other ZKP projects at the very top.
For now, I see Polygon (Matic), Arbitrum, and Optimism a little bit ahead in the matter of technology.
Finalizing the Atomic Swap library(opens new window)
Proof recursion has been integrated
Checkout option in Gitcoin Round 7 (opens new window)and Round 8
Security audits are being conducted before each major update
Testnet version is available on Rinkeby (opens new window)and Ropsten(opens new window)
Zinc (opens new window)smart contract framework is under active development
They highlight some of our future plans — more details will be given at a later time.
Permissionless token listing
Integrations of zkSync with a variety of wallets
Integrations of zkSync with exchanges
Proof-of-stake consensus protocol on L2 as part of the decentralization process
zkSync token launch
zkSync has no token but as it can be seen in the roadmap they will have a token in the future. There will probably be an airdrop of the token for zkSync users. I recommend to use zkSync bridge, Pay in gitcoin with zksync (use ZkSync Checkout), mint an NFT, use Testnet V1, V2, and finally hold POAP to participate in the potential airdrop coming.
zkSync — Rely on math, not validators, https://zksync.io/. Accessed 2 February 2022.
Matter Labs — an engineering team passionate about liberty, blockchain, and math. You might know us as humble creators of zkSync, https://matter-labs.io/. Accessed 2 February 2022.
L2BEAT – The state of the layer two ecosystem, https://l2beat.com/. Accessed 2 February 2022.
L2Fees.info, https://l2fees.info/. Accessed 2 February 2022.
Amphi St Germain. “Alex Gluchowski : zkSync — first EVM-compatible zkRollup.” Youtube, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zknVgruhjnU&list=PL-Bw34ynlUOP3r0zFeM48JnNZyun2E6Bt&index=4.
“Best zkSync Alternatives & Competitors.” SourceForge, https://sourceforge.net/software/product/zkSync/alternatives. Accessed 2 February 2022.
Crypto Empire. “How To Get The zkSync Airdrop! zkSync Airdrop Will Be Huge!” YouTube, 9 December 2021, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dDuzw2ntqQU. Accessed 2 February 2022.
Dapp University. “This is a Game Changer for Ethereum | ZK Sync Explained.” YouTube, 19 October 2021, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gxjKrcJ11TY. Accessed 2 February 2022.
ETHGlobal. “'zkEVM' - Alex Gluchowski.” YouTube, 5 May 2021, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6wLSkpIHXM8. Accessed 2 February 2022.
ETHGlobal. “'zkSync — zkPorter: Why Rollups Are Not Enough' - Alex Gluchowski.” YouTube, 20 April 2021, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MstuXYewtXs. Accessed 2 February 2022.
HOSKsCLIPS. “Charles Hoskinson on What are your thoughts on rollups ZKSync and Starkware like solutions for Carda.” YouTube, 21 November 2021, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GbR8B4OlT0w. Accessed 2 February 2022.
Ivan on Tech. “ZK-SYNC Interview with Alex Gluchowski - Scaling Ethereum with Zero Knowledge Rollups.” YouTube, 21 October 2021, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0xiiY8r8eX4. Accessed 2 February 2022.
Matter Labs. “L2 scalability and zkSync (Edcon talk).” YouTube, 10 August 2020, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=el-9YYGN1nw. Accessed 2 February 2022.
Matter Labs. “Matter Labs · GitHub - zksync.” GitHub, https://github.com/matter-labs. Accessed 2 February 2022.
“Tokens | zkSync Block Explorer.” zkScan, https://zkscan.io/explorer/tokens/. Accessed 2 February 2022.
“zkSync Security Audits.” zkSync, https://zksync.io/updates/security-audits.html. Accessed 2 February 2022.
“zkSync (ZKSYNC) Price, Market Cap, Live Charts, Research.” Messari, https://messari.io/asset/zksync. Accessed 2 February 2022.
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