Taiko brands itself as a “Type 1 zkEVM — Fully decentralized, Ethereum-equivalent zk-rollup” on its website. They claim that being a Type 1 zkEVM is one of the major differentiators compared to the other projects on this list. They make almost no changes to the Ethereum architecture, which includes the hash function, state trees or gas costs. By doing this, they can reuse the execution client implementations with as few modifications as possible. One of the main advantages of using a Type 1 zkEVM like Taiko is the ease of migration without many changes to your code. For example, you can deploy on the Ethereum L1 and then migrate to Taiko. On the other hand, you could also first deploy on Taiko and then migrate to any other EVM-compatible chain afterwards.

Daniel Wang is the founder of Taiko, who was previously the founder of Loopring until he stepped down from that position in 2021. This happened just before the Loopring deal with Gamestop. While there was some speculation in the community as to why this happened, there has never been any bad blood between the two.