After 3 months of building, we are excited to release an upgraded version of the Scroll Pre-Alpha Testnet. Our previous version onboarded over 10k users to test our bridge and demo forks of dapps like Uniswap. We'd like to thank the community for their helpful feedback on our UI/UX, and we are working hard to scale up our proving infrastructure to support the 100K+ users on our waitlist.

Our new testnet upgrade enables smart contract deployment on Scroll. This allows developers to write and deploy their own contracts on Scroll using the same Ethereum developer tools we all know and love!

The new version supports the following features:

• Developers will be able to deploy smart contract applications using tooling like Hardhat and Foundry. Because our zkEVM is bytecode compatible with base layer Ethereum, Ethereum smart contracts will work natively on Scroll. We look forward to seeing what applications you are able to build and try out!

• Users can bridge NFTs and user-defined ERC-20s between our Layer 1 and Layer 2 testnets on our upgraded bridge contract. We now support the ERC-20, ERC-721, and ERC-1155 standards.

The upgraded Pre-Alpha Testnet will be the first chance for early developers to experience contract deployment on Scroll and to interact with our infrastructure. As we scale our proving nodes, we will relax the performance-motivated restrictions currently in place and onboard more testers.

While testnet registration is open to anyone, we are permissioning access at this stage as we improve our proving algorithm and scale our proving cluster. Sign up at signup.scroll.io for testnet access as we actively work to scale this up and support more users. Meanwhile, we are excited to open the sign up for developers to get early support at scroll.io/early-dev! Tell us a bit more about yourself and your projects to get prioritized.

• If you already have access, check out our new contract deployment doc and sample deploy repo. We have one line deploy scripts using Hardhat and Foundry ready for you to try!

• For those at DevCon Bogota, we are running a workshop at the ZK Community Hub from 1:30p to 3:00p on Oct 12. Come by in-person to deploy a contract on Scroll with us! We will present more details about the upgrade and performance at 11:00a Oct 13, see event link for more details.

• To learn more about Scroll, check out our website, Twitter, or Discord.

Soon after this upgrade, we will release our Alpha Testnet. Our community can expect the following features:

• A fully permissionless testnet open to all users without whitelisting.

• Proving throughput improvement with increased compute and batch block verification.

• Generating and aggregating more pieces of the zkEVM proof to be verified on-chain.

As we move step by step towards an eventual mainnet release, we will enable successively more pieces of our final architecture, including a decentralized Roller network and integrations with EVM-native developer tools. Stay tuned to learn more about our progress!

To become an early tester or contributor, sign up to try out our Pre-Alpha Testnet at signup.scroll.io. In the meantime, if our vision of scaling Ethereum in an open and community-driven way resonates with you, we are looking for values-aligned individuals to help Scroll become the most developer- and user-friendly scaling solution for Ethereum.

• If you are a ZK researcher, ZKP, Go or Solidity developer, or GPU engineer, we are working on many interesting technical challenges at the edge of what’s possible. Come build cutting-edge solutions to these problems with us in the open!

• If you love nurturing and growing ecosystems or communities, we are looking for developer advocates and community organizers to build with us in a community-aligned and user-friendly way.

To learn more about these roles, check out our jobs page. If you want to get straight to the code and build with us, you can find our repos at github.com/scroll-tech and github.com/privacy-scaling-explorations/zkevm-circuits.