Editor’s notes:
On December 13, 2022, we publicly updated our roadmap to make room for our ongoing security audits. We now expect to reach our Fair Onboarding Alpha milestone in Q1 2023 and Fair Launch Alpha milestone in Q2 2023.
zkSync 2.0 was renamed to zkSync Era in February 2023.
Today we hit our Baby Alpha Milestone and have now begun the march to Fair Onboarding Alpha and Full Launch Alpha. This is a major accomplishment that wouldn’t have been possible without the dedication and support of our team, our ecosystem projects, and our community. Now that we’ve achieved the Baby Alpha Milestone, we want to take a moment to review what we’ve accomplished and what’s ahead.
The previous roadmap we shared earlier this year outlined key milestones on the road to mainnet. Below is a look at each of the promised and delivered milestones.
After releasing our first version of testnet in February 2022 — and running it for several months — we learned many new things that led us to make significant improvements to the zkEVM which set us up for better scalability, performance, and security, and laid the foundation for future features. This included a major architecture overhaul, with a significant enhancement to the default EVM behavior and the implementation of Account Abstraction, which enables the decoupling of the object holding tokens (the account) from the object authorized to move tokens (the signer) so that development teams can turn accounts into smart contracts with their own logic.
The Dynamic Fees Milestone included a new fee model, an update to add paymaster support to Account Abstraction, and EIP-1559 support. Running an L2 protocol is expensive, and transaction fees must cover these costs. While fees must be collected, our goal is to keep them as low as possible. Dynamic fees allow users to pay only for their actual use of the zkEVM. We’re continuing work to get these fees lower and lower. Read more here.
We opened registration for projects before October, and have seen incredibly interesting projects that are already in line and eager to deploy on zkSync. We can’t wait to see the innovation of teams that take advantage of the features of a zkRollup. Haven’t registered your project yet? Register here now.
We have our prover running on Ethereum testnet (Goerli) and are ensuring state-of-the-art cryptography security. Forget about game theory and relying on fraud proofs. With this milestone complete, we will continue working to improve performance. As users transact with zkSync 2.0, these proofs provide a guarantee of the correctness of program execution (and therefore the transition of the blockchain from state to state). The system publishes these proofs to our smart contract on Ethereum, which is able to verify the correctness of the proof. Read more here.
Our work on zkSync 2.0 is just beginning. Below are details on what’s ahead.
This milestone includes deployment of the end-to-end system to mainnet. During this stage, there won’t be external projects or users so that we can put the system through a series of real-money stress tests to help us verify it is working correctly and performing as expected. Security is a top priority for us, and we want to reduce risks for the whole ecosystem.
During this stage we will:
Stress-test the system with multiple use cases.
Run security audits with top-tier auditors.
Run contests and bug bounty programs. The first one is live now on Code4rena.
Ensure our block explorer provides top-notch information about transactions, blocks, etc.
Improve the technical documentation for zkSync 2.0.
Improve our tutorials and examples, making developer onboarding as easy as possible.
Release SDKs in multiple languages, allowing more diverse applications to be created.
At this stage, we’ve prioritized having the end-to-end system complete, but haven’t yet attempted to optimize for performance —for the system or the prover specifically — or cost reduction. For this reason, there is no expectation to provide a high-performant (high TPS) system during Baby Alpha, but a feature-complete one.
After we have completed the work planned for Baby Alpha, we will carefully execute a Fair Onboarding process. Fair Onboarding means we welcome all of our ecosystem projects and will not participate in picking winners or favorites. The system will be closed to users during this phase.
To ensure the security of zkSync and its users, Fair Onboarding Alpha will provide projects the opportunity to test the system and for more audits to be conducted. At this stage we will:
Enable registered projects to deploy their contracts.
Conduct more security audits, contests, and bug bounty programs.
Expand developer tools, including improvements to our Hardhat plugins.
Expand the set of programming languages for our SDKs.
Enable token bridging, with limited use for testing and deployment purposes.
Expand our documentation and tutorials, including more information for end-users, and release an FAQ built based on community feedback.
Work on improving prover performance to increase TPS. We’ll communicate every time an improvement is achieved and will share our work and findings publicly.
Once we finish the previous set of security audits, contests, and bug bounties, and our ecosystem has fully tested their projects on the system, zkSync 2.0 will be open for all users. Over 150 projects from across the ecosystem have already committed to launching on zkSync 2.0.
Although we aim to hit Full Launch Alpha before the end of the year, we will put security first and consider extending the Fair Onboarding stage into 2023, ensuring we open the system to the community in the safest environment possible. At this stage we will:
Make zkSync 2.0 available for all projects and users.
Expand bridging capabilities and announce bridging projects.
Run additional security audits.
Work to reduce the overall cost of contract deployment and transactions.
Implement the infrastructure for external read nodes to be run by third parties.
Improve TPS performance to at least an order of magnitude more than Ethereum.
Getting zkSync 2.0 live is a key milestone, but there is much more we will do in 2023.
As a result of the feedback we received from our closed and open stages of zkSync 2.0, we will be working on delivering an improved experience for builders and end-users. At this stage we will:
Substantially optimize the protocol for performance and cost reduction.
Support more common development tools like Truffle, Waffle, Foundry, Tenderly, etc.
Create plugins for IDE like Remix and VSCode.
Open our Block Explorer API for external use.
Release our transaction debugger to the public. With it, developers can re-run transactions and follow — instruction by instruction — what happened on the zkEVM level.
Improve the Faucet experience.
Create zkCheckout for zkSync 2.0.
Launch zkSync v1 → v2 bridge.
And much more to be defined based on feedback from the community.
Layer 2 is the first step toward scalability, developer experience, and user experience. zkSync’s EVM-compatible Layer 3 proof of concept ‘Opportunity’ will come to life in the first quarter of 2023, bringing a starfield of 10X moments to Ethereum. We will deliver:
The prototype of a Layer 3 HyperChain built on top of Layer 2, allowing the ecosystem to research and experiment with it.
Kickstart development of developer tools, including a CLI and SDKs to spin off your Layer 3 and interact with it.
In support of Ethereum’s mission, we will decentralize the zkSync 2.0 protocol, including proof generation, block production and transaction validation. We are already thinking about how to decentralize parts of the system, and will provide clear instructions on how to run nodes.
We are grateful to the researchers, developers, and community members who help accelerate the mass adoption of crypto for personal sovereignty. We look forward to seeing what our decentralized future has in store!
For more updates, follow us on Twitter and join the conversation on Discord.
If you’re interested in joining Matter Labs to help scale Ethereum, we encourage you to view our job openings.