Celebration and explanation of the zkSync Era — the first zkSync EVM live on mainnet and available for everyone

Host bxpana — community manager of zkSync

Speakers Alex Gluchowski — zkSync Co-founder

Anthony Rose — Head of Engineering

Ramon Canales — Head of Product

Marco Corav — Head of Business Development

AMA Share more details about today’s milestone. Alex: We’ve come a long way, from the first zkSync Lite network for payments to the developed smart-contract, which includes many applications and in which we can make any computations. We are keeping the continuity with the Ethereum while building the future. Today we are opening the system to everyone. Our mission is to make sure that everyone can share our vision — zk rollups, zkEVM are the key components of the scalability.

How to start use zkSync Era mainnet? Ramon: If you want to bridge funds to zkSync, go to bridge.zksync.io. Want to receive updates on the system? Go to zksync.io/#get_involved and fill in a form to subscribe our newsletter. Also, you can explore on what is going on in zkSync Era right now from our block explorer — explorer.zksync.io. By the way, we have all the links on zksync.io. Documentation is on era.zksync.io/docs. To reach us out, you can go to our Discord.

Walk us through the design of the system. Anthony: We are aiming to bring security to our crypto-environment and engineer a complex system that will be highly secure. We have made about 7 independent security audits and still thinking about how to get more independent reviews of our work. We also run bug bounty program and open contests for the community (with public security exercises) where we are opening the smart contract to the community.

The system is in Alpha. Please explain what does it mean. Anthony: Alpha is our attempt to make the system unambiguous, secure, and optimised. We want to eliminate risks.

What does mean to L2 to be future-proof and what does is look like exactly? Ramon: It bringing security. Also if we won’t make sure we’re secure, we may hurt not only ourselves, but the whole ecosystem. One specific bridging may make the whole ecosystem to lose its credibility. We are focusing building the future, not in proving the past, and we are building something that we are sure can grow and fit the need of mass adoption of crypto usage. We evolve and improving things that could be better in Ethereum. We have an approach in the compiler that can compile different languages to our zkEVM bytecode (which is going to unable interesting use cases and more devs to be onboarded). We have data compression, we are making things faster and cheaper and are planning to have zkSync Porter and hyperchains. We are focusing on the future where everyone have blockchain tailored to their needs and is connected to many other blockchains. This is our vision.

Share more about zkSync Era’s native implementation of account abstraction and how it differs from Ethereum’s. Alex: We want to bring the blockchain to the masses so we need to scale the Etehreum not only in throughput, but also in security preservation (and we’re making sure that user experience is matching expectations of all the users). The account abstraction is one of the main features that are separating Ethereum from giving developers the ability to implement beautiful UX. Our system gives it, because it is neutral, self-custodial, and gives peer-to-peer decentralised experience.

Ramon: By being implemented natively we do not require additional infrastructure to be run and any 3rd part providers. We also support pay masters that may be used to pay for things like food.

What do you think of the account abstraction feature from the zkSync Ecosystem side? Marco: All the projects are excited of new guys in protocol and enterprises. We believe this scaling open-source system will change the world.

What is the difference between zkSync zkEVM and Polygon zkEVM? What makes you stand out from other zkrollup? Alex: Our EVM is more developed. They’re focusing on backward compatibility and we’re optimising for the future. We use the EVM compiler stack which allows you to compile contracts to native zk language that guarantees your contracts will follow the highest possible performance of the future versions of zkEVMs. In case of Polygon, they’re interpreting the EVM bytecodes. They use date availability in a similar manner as Optimistic rollups so we expect costs to be raffling on the same range as the costs of transactions of Optimistic rollups. We are publishing only final updates of the storage state after each block batch and by this we can compress data. Data availability is the scarcest resource in the world of rollups — the most expensive resource — because all the rollups compete for the same single-limited block of date availability from Ethereum.

Ramon: Also we are LIVE and that is the main difference between us.

Do you have a testnet running? bxpana: Yes, we have a testnet. It’s been running since February of the last year.

Do you have any programs for builder? And what are the criteria to participate? Marco: At the moment we do not have programs to support builder directly with capital. But we are creating programs in this direction. And we do have direct support to the developers, so if you need to deploy and learn how to do it, you may reach us out and we connect you to the broader ecosystem and make sure that your tools and projects are well integrated in the ecosystem. Moreover, we are organising talks and educational sessions for all the members of the ecosystem.

Will zkSync be decentralized? Alex: This is a part of our core ethos and we do not want to built systems that will be centralised. Everything is completely decentralised and trustless.

What are you most interested in seeing people interact with? Alex: I would love to see more usage of native account abstraction and more wallets supporting them as much as experimenting with smart accounts and adding more layers of protection to the end users. On the other hand I would love to see protocols experimenting with the account abstraction and adding unique features that are not possible on Ethereum.

Ramon: Physical use cases.

Marco: I’m excited about what people build with state differences.

Is there a limit transaction throughput? Anthony: Partly yes.

Can you explain zkSnark in zkSync? Alex: We use plonk — non-transparent SNARK generic setup. Yo may find information in out GitHub repository.

How are you planning to improve the UX? Ramon: Account abstraction is the main step.

Marco: Such things like signing transaction with Face ID or finger prints. Also zkPorter brings the fragmentation of liquidity.

Are you planning to make any improvements in security of the system? Alex: Every system should have at least 2 safe mechanisms. ZkProofs are one of these mechanisms but we want to expand with few more. We also monitor the network ourselves from our servers.