🔗 Link to Waitlist Registration

After registering on the Waitlist, you can access Farcaster, open the FarSchool section, complete tasks, claim points, certificates, and more.

There's also the opportunity to mint a Farcaster Pass, which also serves as a .beb domain on the Ethereum network. Registering a domain with 10+ characters is free; you only need to pay for gas on the Ethereum network (approximately $4 at 11 gwei).

Holders of the Farcaster Pass gain access to additional activities, such as quests and claiming the Legendary Lil' FarStray.

Here's what you need to do: ▪️ Mint the Farcaster Pass. ▪️ After minting, immediately click "Share," share the tweet, and copy the link to it. ▪️ Scroll down, paste the copied link, and claim the Legendary Lil' FarStray. ▪️ Open FarQuests and complete them as much as possible.

Additionally, you can mint an official NFT on Zora. The minting process occurs on the Base network, and you need to pay a Zora fee of 0.000777 ETH and a few cents for gas. The minting deadline is September 6th.

Official Announcement

Matter Labs, the team behind zkSync, has raised $458 million in investments from Blockchain Capital, Dragonfly, a16z, Variant, and LightSpeed. The project is quite large and is on par with Arbitrum and Optimism. With the airdrops from Optimism and Aptos, there is a high probability that zkSync will also gratify active users of the network with a drop.

Therefore, in this article, we will try to interact as much as possible with the network and projects on the zkSync ecosystem, so as not to catch FOMO later :D

Transferring ETH to the ZkSync network

We will be using the Metamask wallet (which can be downloaded here).

Go to the website:

https://lite.zksync.io/

Connect your wallet using Metamask

Click on the "Top Up" button

Choose the bridge from zkSync and transfer ETH from the Ethereum network.

To withdraw ETH back to the Ethereum network, you can do so directly in the wallet using the built-in bridge. Click on the "Transfer" button and choose "Transfer to Ethereum".

You can also send funds to the ZkSync network using the Orbiter bridge: Go to the bridge website and connect your wallet Enter the amount of ETH you want to send and confirm the transfer

ZigZag DEX The next project we will interact with is the ZigZag decentralized exchange. Go to the exchange website: https://trade.zigzag.exchange/ Connect your wallet by clicking on the Connect Wallet button Choose the ETH/USDC pair and make a few swaps!

Create NFT CID for the NFT: Register on the website: https://app.pinata.cloud/register Click Upload+ and upload any image

Then copy the CID

Now go back to the zkSync Wallet In the NFTs section, click Mint NFT, paste the CID, click Authorize to Mint NFT, and then Mint NFT Confirm the transaction in your wallet.

Now testing - Argent Wallet

Argent is a mobile wallet on the zkSync network. You can download the app from Google Play or AppStore. After downloading the app, register and deposit some ETH on the zkSync network:

In the mobile app, click Receive, then From Another Wallet, then choose ZkSync web wallet and copy the address.

In the zkSync Wallet, click the Transfer button, paste the address we copied, and send some ETH.

After receiving tokens, make a few trades within the app and deposit some ETH into staking/farming.

The final activity in this guide will be completing quests on Crew3. By completing them, you can earn the zkSync Crew3 role and become a Roadmappor for passing the quiz: Go to the quests: Crew3 , Complete the tasks and get the role in discord.

If you look at the analytics on Dune, it's easy to see that there is significantly less activity on Nova. Recently, we found the $NOVE token (whether it's real or not is unknown), which we also have a high chance of receiving as a drop.

🔎What can we do?

➡️ Bridge ETH through the official bridge (the reverse transaction will take a week, so keep this in mind)

➡️ Do swaps on Arbswap/Sushi/Slingshot

➡️ Add liquidity to Arbswap/Sushi

➡️ Buy/Sell NFTs on the Tofunft platform (there are many no-name collections for $0.10 or less, and the transactions themselves are free)

➡️ Interact with projects on Portal Nova (all relevant projects from the Arbitrum Nova ecosystem are gathered there)

You may ask me > Isn’t it too late to do something right now? …. Just remember how in October-November 2022 they said that the snapshot for ZkSync and Arbitrum had already been taken The main costs are for the bridge, and the reverse bridge can be run through Orbiter to avoid waiting a week.

To test the projects, we will need ETH on the zkSync ERA Goerli network. To obtain it: ▫️Go to the Goerli faucet and claim tokens.

▫️Go to the bridge and send tokens from Goerli to zkSync ERA Goerli.

▫️You can add the testnet to Chainlist.

Spacefi Testnet:

▪️ Go to Spacefi, make several swaps in the Swap tab, and be sure to buy tSPACE tokens.

▪️ Open the Pool tab and add liquidity using different assets, as well as liquidity with tSPACE tokens.

▪️ Withdraw liquidity from the pools.

Mute Testnet:

▪️ Go to the Mute website, swap ETH for MUTE.

▪️ Add liquidity in the Pool tab using ETH and MUTE (leave a little MUTE).

▪️ Open the DAO section, lock MUTE tokens.

▪️ After some time, withdraw liquidity and locked MUTE tokens.

SyncSwap Testnet:

▪️ Make several swaps in the Trade tab.

▪️ Then go to the Pool tab, click New Position, choose ETH and, for example, DAI, click Enter Pool, and make a deposit.

▪️ If you don't see your position after depositing in the Pool tab, click More and Import position. Withdraw liquidity from the pool after some time.

You can repeat the actions in each of the testnets several times to increase your activity on the network.

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• Coinbase has launched a new Layer 2 solution called Base, which is built on the Op Stack version. • Ethereum and Cosmos are on a collision course, trying to solve the same problem from different starting positions. • Optimism has rebranded itself as the Super Chain, which is similar to an app chain or a thesis on the Ethereum application space. • The Super Chain is a horizontally scalable network of chains that share common security, communication, and open source development stack. • Cosmos and Ethereum are building the future of blockchain space focused on specific applications, but Ethereum relies on a single ultimate source of truth, while Cosmos does not. • The Super Chain is a version of what the Cosmos thesis is trying to achieve, but in a secure variant for Ethereum. • Developers get a set of ready-made tools for creating their own blockchains that are secure and compatible with each other. • The goal is to shorten the time from development to launch and allow these chains to interact with each other. • Ethereum and Cosmos are built according to the same shared vision but have different starting positions. • The Op Stack is Ethereum's attempt to create its own Cosmos SDK to allow multiple L1s to use the same stack as L2 or Roll-Ups chains. • Cosmos focuses on compatibility, creating a Cosmos SDK with multiple modules and creating network effects. • Both stacks allow developers to move from zero to one as quickly as possible, but they achieve this in different ways. • The stacks are a generalized Layer 2 blockchain space and are not necessarily Layer 3. • Optimism has chosen a different approach than Sovereign Labs and Celestia, joining Ethereum to make it easier for Ethereum developers to build on top of it. • The compromise is that the fate of Optimism is tied to the success of Ethereum, while Sovereign Labs is not limited by the success of its Layer 1 but lacks the systematics of development and mass user engagement work.

Interchain messaging and shared sequencers

• The Ethereum Foundation has published a document outlining how inter-blockchain communication (IBC) will look in Ethereum, but the likelihood of its implementation is low. • A more likely solution is a shared set of sequencers in the Cosmos ecosystem. • The problem with Roll-Ups is the seven-day waiting period required to transition from one Roll-Up to another, so a shared network of sequencers may be necessary. • One potential solution is to use L3s that connect to the Optimism Mainnet or are sent to Base to avoid the seven-day challenge period. • The biggest missing element in the future multi-chain superchain is whether the benefits of IBC can be replicated between L2 and L2 and L2, or if another level is needed where most OP-chains are actually L3.

Role of General-Purpose Networks

• It is interesting to compare user activity between Mainnet Optimism and Base Coinbase. • The advantage of Base is its 108 million users, but it can be seen as a corporate network. • The role of general-purpose Layer 2 networks such as Optimism and Base will change over time as specific applications move to their own L3. • Optimism and Base will serve as adaptation tools for users and opportunities for easy launching of new projects, but over time they will transition into communication hubs between different L3s.

The Cosmos SDK vs OP Stack

• The OP Stack has different layers, including management, computation, execution, output, sequencing, and data availability, and uses existing tools such as the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM). • The Cosmos Stack is a complete stack that includes consensus, network interaction, application modules, staking, slashing, IBC, and management. • The OP Stack is powerful for scaling, while the Cosmos Stack is powerful for deep innovations that require the chain to understand the application layer. • The OP Stack is good for attracting users and scaling properties, but owning the full stack may be necessary for innovation.

Communication HUBs and Value Accrual

• Praises Coinbase for its participation in Optimism and acknowledges the limitations of the current design in terms of the set of sequencers. • The initial role of the hub was to be the center for message exchange for the Cosmos ecosystem and facilitate user registration. Base performs a similar role for the Optimism ecosystem, while Optimism Mainnet will serve as the communication layer for L3s built on top of the OP Stack. • There may be tension between applications on Optimism Mainnet and those who launch their own L3s for greater control and closer relationships with users, which may impact value accrual. • The potential value accrual for Optimism Mainnet lies in MEV generated by all L3s using it as a common communication layer. • Network effects in the Optimism ecosystem will be strengthened when L3s begin to contribute to the stack and innovate alongside the optimism team.

SDK Network Effects

• The launch of Base by Coinbase is compared to the launch of Binance Smart Chain (BSC). • Binance initially forked the Cosmos stack to create BSC and used a forked IBC to create a bridge between the two chains. • Binance did not coordinate with the Cosmos community and experienced issues with outdated software. • Coinbase is partnering with the Optimism community to create Base and outsource stack maintenance and development. • Base is likely to attract "blue chip" applications rather than create new names. • Binance Smart Chain inherited the brand of its corporate owner, Binance, and has many organic use cases, primarily speculating on meme projects. • It is unclear what brand Base will inherit in the context of web 3.

What remains to be built

• The discussion revolves around what else is needed to formalize the vision of a super chain. • Six things are needed: a trusted set of chain attesters for withdrawal claims, faster interchain transactions, the ability to perform atomic interchain transactions, scalability to accommodate transactions, a foundation for creating scalable dApps, and a simple wallet for managing assets across chains. • These are similar problems that Cosmos has focused on, particularly fast interconnectivity between chains and recreating compatibility between various applications. • The Super Chain is another step towards the same vision as Cosmos and Ethereum. • Solana may have an opportunity to position itself by doing everything at one layer, allowing for more synchronous composition.

How Ethereum has influenced Cosmos

• Ethereum and Cosmos have similar roadmaps, with Ethereum borrowing some of Cosmos's best ideas, such as lazy ledger and communication hubs. • However, ideas do not penetrate the Cosmos ecosystem in reverse, possibly due to competing security models. • Cosmos is starting to implement common security methods across its ecosystem to better align with Ethereum, which could lead to greater interoperability between the two ecosystems.

Investors: the project has raised over $4 million from Big Brain Holdings, Jade Protocol, Magnus Capital, and others.

Twitter score: 669

Networks: Multichain

The project team has shown a roadmap where, starting from March 6th, a confirmed drop for trading volume will be available, which can still be accumulated. At the moment, they already have their own token called $VELA, which is traded and has a capitalization of about $40 million. A good fact is that the team has officially confirmed the distribution of 35% of tokens for the community as an Airdrop, while only 5% is allocated to investors. Also, recently, the team published a tweet saying that they will distribute the drop and the more trading volume, the "wider your smile will be" after the Airdrop distribution.

Connect your wallet on the site, click Deposit in the upper right corner and replenish the account with the desired amount.

Then go to the Trade tab, choose the asset you want to trade with: BTC, ETH, or DOGE and the position you want to enter: Long or Short. After that, you need to select the opening price of your limit order, leverage, and position size. And start trading volume.

It is best to trade with Pound Sterling/Euro/Japanese Yen volume.

Then we need to send $VELA tokens to staking. To do this, buy some $VELA on 1inch in the Arbitrium network (0x088cd8f5ef3652623c22d48b1605dcfe860cd704).

Then go to the Stake tab, go to the Vela & eVela tab. Select the number of coins, click Stake, and confirm the transaction twice in Metamask.

Join the project's Discord and follow its activities.

💼The project has raised $119 million, with investors including Paradigm, ConsenSys, a16z, HashKey, Fenbushi, Variant, and others.

🔎What to do?

➡️Go to the website, click Shield now, and connect your wallet.

➡️Specify any name for your wallet, choose Default (2-4 hours) transaction type, and sign it.

➡️Then click Shield More and deposit funds to your wallet. You need to make 3 transactions to have a total of more than 0.1 ETH.

➡️If you have already made a deposit in ETH, transfer a sufficient sum to DAI.

➡️Click Earn and deposit $1 into 3+ pools: AAVE, LIDO, and Yearn (on the Zk network). This step is not mandatory, but desirable. (You can also deposit in DAI.)

➡️After that, go to Sismo, claim the NFT badge, then click Use badge and enter the verification process. Then go to the verify-badge channel, click Let's go, connect your wallet, and you will receive the Aztec Badge Verified role on Discord.

➡️All badge owners have full access to the zkPay platform.

➡️Test all the functions and leave feedback in Discord.

➡️Check and claim your role in Guild.

➡️Withdraw your funds back to your wallet, click Wallet > Send, choose the L1 network, enter your Metamask address, and confirm.

🟢ZkPay is the Aztec wallet that allows instant withdrawal of funds from the Aztec network. They also added L2 swaps. The project's mission is to expand the use of Aztec and increase its user base. They position themselves as one of the dapps deployed on Aztec, and they closely collaborate with the Aztec team.

UPD. ZkPay is followed on Twitter by Aztec themselves, CEO Zac Williamson, and lead developers. ZkPay is a participant in the top DEV conference ETHDenver2023 and even if they don't get a project drop from Aztec, there is a high probability that they will have their own token.

🤔ZkPay now has quests.

➡️New quests from ZkPay are already available on their platform, not on zk.money (but there are integrations).

➡️A new badge from ZkPay is available on Sismo.

P.S Decide for yourself whether or not to do ZkPay quests.

A couple of days ago, the project raised $11 million from Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), Franklin Templeton Investments, Coinbase Ventures, Village Global, FJ Labs, and Not Boring Capital.

Recently, the project's administration announced

that there will be rewards for early users. Detailed information about the rewards will be promised later this week.

⚡️What to do?

• Go to the website and complete tasks;

• Go to the guild to get the "Early Adopter" role;

• Buy and hold 0.1 $AMKT = $9;

• Go to the quiz (you can click randomly, and there is more than one attempt);

• Claim the badge.

Whether or not we can catch the rewards remains to be seen, but it's better to have at least one account with higher activity. The main thing is not to go overboard.

Sui crypto overview

Sui is the world's first permissionless Layer 1 blockchain, built entirely from scratch. They are a proof-of-stake decentralized blockchain with horizontally scalable throughput and storage.

Mysten Labs, the startup behind Sui, was founded by former Meta team members. They're also working on Move, an open-source smart contract programming language.

Sui, on the other hand, is not a derivation or an add-on to the Diem network. Instead, it is a step-function breakthrough in blockchain technology that allows producers and developers to create experiences for web3 consumers.

In order to expand its capabilities as well as provide a comprehensive platform, Sui team has built an ecosystem which includes a lot of main elements such as DEX, Wallet, NFT, Lending, Infrastructure, Bridge, GameFi, SocialFi, Launchpad, Security and Names Services. 

Sui crypto highlights Safe smart contract language — Move

The first outstanding feature about Sui is that it runs smart contracts written in Move, a programming language based on Rust that was created by Meta to support their Libra cryptocurrency (which was later rebranded Diem and ultimately abandoned in January 2022). 

Move was created to represent digital assets and perform secure actions on them. It has been co-developed with the Move Prover verification tool to give extra security. This enables Move developers to set formal specifications for their application's core correctness properties, then utilize the prover to ensure that these requirements hold true for all conceivable transactions and inputs. Move lives on and is accessible on GitHub as a programmable blockchain platform.

Super scalability

Sui's distinct characteristics imply unmatched scalability and rapid transaction settlement. To accommodate the growing demands of applications, the platform can scale horizontally. Sui's authorities can hire more people to boost processing power and meet expanding network capacity. As a result, even when network traffic is heavy, gas expenses would be decreased, resulting in improved user experiences for Web3 apps.

Fast transaction and low latency

Sui's high-performance platform, which can conduct more than 120,000 token transactions per second, is one of its benefits over other blockchain networks. Because of a feature known as "transaction parallelization," which is an innovative approach of organizing blocks, throughput has increased. It should be noted that most Layer 1 blockchains currently do not employ this approach.

Another benefit of this feature is its low latency, which decreases the amount of communication required between validators while processing transactions. As a result, basic transfers may be validated nearly instantaneously, and sophisticated ones in only two to three seconds. Despite being evaluated in a restricted setting, these skills have the potential to provide amazing outcomes when deployed on the mainnet.

Sui crypto tokenomics Sui token key metrics Token Name: Sui

Ticker: SUI

Blockchain: Sui

Token type: Utility and governance

Total supply: 10,000,000,000 SUI

Circulating supply: TBU

Sui token allocation Sui community members will be able to buy the SUI token in the early phases of Sui Mainnet in addition to the Sui Foundation's efforts. Sui enthusiasts won't have to take part in the Foundation's programs in order to purchase SUI thanks to the Community Access Program. The community members who tested and interacted with Sui Apps during the devnet and testnet phases will also receive support from these tokens, which will help Sui's ecosystem grow.

The initial total supply of 10 billion SUI will be distributed as follows:

50% for community reserve

20% for early contributors to the project

10% for Mysten Labs Treasury

14% for investors

6% for airdrop (community access program and app testers)

Sui crypto roadmap

Sui's road map has been bold from the beginning. In order to create a long-term ecosystem that would be more potent and sustainable, its technical design was created from the ground up. Sui's cutting-edge consensus mechanism and multi-lane transaction processing strategy, in particular, represent a step-function improvement in blockchain infrastructure. Sui's tokenomics ensure that these advantages are passed on to the developers and users of Sui's applications. Sui crypto founder and investor.

In addition to providing the interoperability, programmability, and composability that only web3 can provide, Sui's research and production teams are steadily developing the infrastructure needed to run high throughput applications at true global scale. These initiatives have so far proven successful and surpassed all of our wildest hopes. The initial token distribution of SUI will honor the contributors and investors who have up to this point made this adventure possible.

Investor Sui has raised a total of US$36 million in Series A investment. Andreessen Horowitz's a16z led Sui's Series A fundraising round. Redpoint, Lightspeed, Coinbase Ventures, Electric Capital, Samsung Next, Standard Crypto, Slow Ventures, NFX, and Scribble Ventures are among the other investors in Sui.

Sui is valued at more than $2 billion, and Mysten Labs' Series B investment round is well underway. Mysten just completed a $300 million funding round headed by FTX Ventures. Coinbase Ventures, Jump Crypto, Circle Ventures, a16z (again), Binance Labs, and O'Leary Ventures are among the other Series B investors.

Sui crypto social channels Website: https://sui.io/

Twitter: https://twitter.com/mysten_labs

Discord: https://discord.com/invite/mysten

Medium: https://medium.com/mysten-labs

2022 Q2 — Launch of a test network with awards — A larger and more mainnet-like test playground for strategic partners and web3 developers to create applications — Work with the community of node operators to attract and accumulate experience in the joint operation of a decentralized network — Launch bug bounty (rewards for finding bugs) to improve the experience of developers, the work of nodes and solve infrastructure problems. — Provide rewards for all participants who help make the network secure. 2022 Q3 — Launch of the main network 2022 Q4–2023 Q1 — Deployment of the next major release on the Aptos network with the following set of significant features

The main points that I would like to highlight, briefly and point by point: The team received $200 mln from top funds (a16z, Multicoin, 3 arrows capital). The main purpose of raising funds is to build a secure L1 blockchain with open source in the Move programming language, on the basis of which many projects will be attracted. In general, a large ecosystem is being prepared.

Also on March 28, it was announced about the close collaboration of Binance and Aptos.

Binance Labs invested in Aptos (the amount is not specified), and also announced the development of joint products. More information will be available in the coming months.

It is worth noting that the project did not start from scratch, it is a former Diem blockchain, a Meta (Facebook) side project that has been under construction for the last 3 years. However, for a number of objective reasons, it was decided to detach and build a separate product.

Aptos has colossal connections in the crypto and global communities, as evidenced by the list of funds — there are practically no funds below Tier 2, and mostly they are Tier 1+, just the gods of venture investment in the crypto industry.

The team consists of 25+ experts with a high level of expertise in their fields. As I said earlier, this is a Meta side project, that is, people with the highest experience, and most importantly — connections. They will be able to afford to launch a powerful promo program without any problems.

Already, the best crypto influencers are doing PR for them for free. I’m afraid to imagine what a massacre will be when the ambassador is announced (there was no announcement, but I think it is inevitable).

What about the deadlines: they are quite tight. But the project is not new, the technology is taken from Diem. Now there is an unrewarded devnet. in devnet, which already involves the teams of Binance, Coinbase, Streaming Fast, and so on.

I think that if you are a cool developer, then they are unlikely to ignore the contribution, if it is significant.

Incentivized testnet for Q2 2022 has also been announced, where it will be seen if there are serious bugs. However, I believe that this will not happen here, given the level of personnel. They promise to release a top blockchain in the mainnet within a year, which will give millions of users an open core on which everyone can file a project.

That is, Aptos is a new ecosystem, like Polkadot/Cosmos.

Most of the funds (tokenomics has not yet been announced) will be spent on the development of the ecosystem — that is, on supporting projects that can be found in devnet right now. You don’t have to be a popular team to get into Aptos. You can start coding already.

The main priorities of Aptos are safety and completeness for the end user. That is, the project carries usability — so that a person comes and already starts using something (which cannot be said about the same Polkadot, where many parachains are not finished things).

We are facing an independent project that wants to bring absolute security and scalability to the end user. At the moment, this is a sandbox for developers, but the goals are so ambitious and direct that I want to believe in them. I really hope that the guys will succeed, and we will be able to give him a cool and professional PR to attract those users!

How to track on Aptos?

https://twitter.com/aptoslabs

https://t.me/AptosLabs

https://discord.gg/arBYeXhz8Q

https://aptoslabs.com/

https://medium.com/aptoslabs

In the absence of a technological breakthrough, existing scaling solutions have had to make heavy compromises on one or more of these requirements. Luckily, recent advances in zero-knowledge proofs open up radical new possibilities to address this problem.

Today, we at Matter Labs are excited to reveal our vision for zkSync: a trustless scaling and privacy solution for Ethereum based on ZK Rollup, with an emphasis on superb user and developer experiences. We’re also proud to announce the launch of the testnet for zkSync.

ZK Sync is designed to bring a VISA-scale throughput of thousands of transactions per second (TPS) to Ethereum while keeping the funds as secure as in the underlying L1 accounts and maintaining a high degree of censorship-resistance. Another important aspect of the protocol is its ultra-low latency: transactions in ZK Sync will provide instant economic finality.

We subscribe to a lean design philosophy and favor a gradual protocol evolution that introduces features one-by-one in a sequence that brings the most tangible value to users at each step. This is why we are starting with the fundamentals (security), focusing initially on basic scalability (token transfers), then on programmability (smart contracts), and, finally, on privacy.

The hardest problems in blockchain scaling Today, in practice, crypto is still used mostly for speculation. Without real mass adoption, the value proposition of magic internet money, DeFi, Web 3.0 and all other promising blockchain ideas will remain largely unfulfilled.

Scalability is not merely transaction throughput, but the overall readiness of blockchain systems to meet the demands of millions of users.

Let’s consider three of the hardest problems in expanding the blockchain revolution to the masses.

Challenge #1: Staying decentralized Real-world adoption requires transaction throughput that is an order of magnitude higher than what today’s most decentralized blockchains can handle. Bitcoin is capable of 7 TPS, Ethereum manages 15 — while VISA alone is processing a daunting 2000 TPS on average.

But the slowness of Bitcoin and Ethereum is a feature, not a bug! It is trivially possible to increase the speed by reducing the number of validators. The huge number of full nodes that both leading blockchain networks can boast of is their most critical asset. This provides resilience, and is what actually makes these blockchains fundamentally different from existing financial institutions.

An alternative popular scalability approach is to require each validator to check only part of the relevant blockchain traffic, rather than all of it. But this inevitably introduces additional trust assumptions and puts such systems on very shaky game-theoretical grounds.

Challenge #2: Enabling privacy Most people won’t feel comfortable moving large parts of their fortune into a publicly exposed glass box. Inhabitants of dangerous places — Venezuela, for instance — are unlikely to pay a local merchant in crypto if the recipient can immediately learn how much money they have. People creating or consuming obscene content, such as pornography, will be unlikely to use crypto as an alternative to Paypal if these payments can potentially be linked to their real-world identities.

Moreover, in the absence of on-chain confidentiality, privacy regulations like GDPR and CCPA will drive ordinary businesses away from public blockchains towards more centralized payment and financial hubs, turning our increasingly cashless society into a surveillance nightmare.

Achieving privacy in public blockchains is especially difficult due to several factors:

Privacy must be on by default as an integral protocol feature. To quote Vitalik Buterin: “If your privacy model has a medium anonymity set, it really has a small anonymity set. If your privacy model has a small anonymity set, it has an anonymity set of 1. Only global anonymity sets are truly robustly secure.” To enable privacy by default, private transaction costs must be very low, despite significant added computational overhead. Privacy models must support programmability, because real-world use cases need more than just transfers: they require account recovery, multi-sigs, spending limits, etc. Challenge #3: Meeting UX expectations The reality is harsh: product managers know well that users routinely prefer easier, more lightweight experiences with instant gratification over alternatives, often ignoring the long-tail risks. It takes an extraordinary force to coax users into switching from what is familiar to something new. For some people, the value proposition of crypto (radical self-ownership, censorship-resistance, sound money) is enough. But those folks are probably already on board. We need millions, if not billions, to reach the requisite scale for crypto to deliver on its promise.

To attract millions of mainstream users, we need to offer them a user experience that doesn’t just match these expectations, but exceeds them. We must do this providing entirely new possibilities while keeping all the convenient properties of traditional Web products that people have become accustomed to. Everything must be fast, simple, intuitive and error-tolerant.

The promise of zkSync: trustless, confidential, and blazing fast. In this technical write-up, we will explore the high-level architecture, design choices, and properties of the proposed protocol.

1. Security: Rooted in ZK Rollup ZK Sync is built on the concept of ZK Rollup.

In a nutshell, ZK Rollup is an L2 scaling solution in which all funds are held by a smart contract on the mainchain, while computation and storage are performed off-chain. For every Rollup block, a state transition zero-knowledge proof (SNARK) is generated and verified by the mainchain contract. This SNARK includes the proof of the validity of every single transaction in the Rollup block. Additionally, the public data update for every block is published over the mainchain network as cheap calldata.

This architecture provides the following guarantees:

The Rollup validator(s) can never corrupt the state or steal funds (unlike Sidechains). Users can always retrieve the funds from the Rollup even if validator(s) stop cooperating because the data is available (unlike Plasma). Thanks to validity proofs, neither users nor a single trusted third party needs to be online to monitor Rollup blocks in order to prevent fraud (unlike fraud-proof systems, such as payment channels or optimistic rollups).

In other words, ZK Rollup strictly inherits the security guarantees of the underlying L1. This, together with the richness of the Ethereum community and existing infrastructure, was a decisive factor in our decision to focus on an L2 solution instead of trying to build our own L1.

To better understand the concept, please refer to our video explainers from talks at ZCon1 and Dappcon, a podcast featuring Matter Labs at zeroknowledge.fm, or our earlier technical explainer post. Curious readers can also explore the differences between ZK Rollup and Optimistic Rollup in this post.

Following a grant from the Ethereum Foundation, Matter Labs has spent the past year working on ZK Rollup technology. We have completely rewritten the architecture and ZK circuit since the launch of the first prototype. The newest version incorporates feedback we received from the community and implements various usability and performance improvements.

1. Usability: real-time transactions We expect current developments in ZK prover technology to reach proving times that will enable ZK Rollup blocks to be produced in under a minute. Once a block proof is submitted to the mainchain and verified by the Rollup smart contract, all transactions in this block are finalized and are now subject to L1 reorg-resistance guarantees.

But in retail and online payments, even Ethereum’s 15-second block latency can be too long. How can we do better?

Here’s how: in ZK Sync we’re introducing instant tx receipts.

Validators elected to participate in ZK Sync block production will have to post a significant security bond to the ZK Sync smartcontract 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 ZK Sync block, signed by a supermajority of ⅔ of the consensus participants (weighted by stake).

If a new ZK Sync block is produced and submitted to the mainchain, it cannot be reverted. However, if it doesn’t contain the promised transaction, the security bond of the intersection of the signers of the original receipt and the signers of the new blocks 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 is slashable, and that only malicious users will be punished.

A portion of the slashed funds will be used to compensate the tx recipient. The rest will be burned.

The slashing can be triggered either by users themselves or by any of the honest participants in the consensus who have signed the original tx receipt. The latter will have a natural incentive to call the fraud: if they participate in the subsequent block production, they can be slashed too. Thus at least one honest participant in the consensus is sufficient for fraud detection.

Let’s examine the properties of this protocol. We will call a zero-confirmation tx a transaction with an instant receipt for a ZK Sync block which has not yet been published to Ethereum.

A double spend of zero-confirmation transactions on ZK Sync is only potentially exploitable in a very short time window of a few minutes until the block proof is published on the mainchain. Further, malicious validators would have to trick users into accepting zero-confirmation transactions worth over ⅙ of the security bond.

From the point of view of both buyers and merchants, zero-confirmation transactions are:

Instant Potentially reversible, but only within a few minutes Only reversible in a simultaneous attack against thousands of merchants, not one-by-one. This is a huge UX and security improvement over credit card payments! Let’s look at it from the perspective of different actors:

Online stores with physical goods may instantly confirm a purchase to a user, but are immune against attack because they will wait for the full confirmation before shipping. Physical stores are practically unsusceptible to attack when dealing with smaller amounts. Even if you’re selling a Macbook against an instant tx receipt, it would take thousands of coordinated physical attackers in different locations AND a collusion of the majority of validators to cause you to lose money. But let’s dig deeper. To quantify the risks, the economic guarantee provided by the bond can be compared to the settlement assurance provided by proof-of-work blockchains (see this great write up by Nic Carter). For example, Coinbase requires 35 tx confirmations before considering a deposit final on Ethereum. The cost of reverting this transaction by running a 51% attack for 10 minutes on GPUs rented from AWS is roughly $60,000. Assuming millions of USD in the security bond, it would be much more expensive to revert an instant ZK Sync receipt. Thus, instant receipts are generally likely to have ETH-like or even better economic finality properties.

It’s important to note that instant tx receipts also protect against ETH block reorgs, because their validity is independent of Ethereum. Additionally, Ethereum’s settlement assurance compounds with the settlement assurance of ZK Sync.

1. Liveness: censorship- and DoS-resistance An inevitable property of any scaling solution is that most users cannot participate in verifying all of the transaction volumes. This leads to the need for specialized roles in all L2 scalability solutions (validators in Plasma or Rollups, Lightning hubs, and so on). The increased security and performance requirements imposed by these roles pose a risk of centralization and censorship.

The ZK Sync design tackles this issue by introducing two different roles in the long run: Validators and Guardians.

Validators Validators are responsible for packing transactions into blocks and generating zero-knowledge proofs for them. They participate in the consensus and must, therefore, contribute a share of the security bond for instant tx receipts. Their nodes must run in a secure environment with good internet bandwidth. Alternatively, they may choose to generate ZK proofs in the unsecured on-demand cloud.

Validators are rewarded with transaction fees, which can be paid in any token being transacted (for the maximum convenience of end-users).

In order to keep the ZK Sync consensus fast, only a limited number of validators are allowed at any moment (between 30 and 100, subject to profiling). Recall, however, that ZK Rollup validators are completely trustless. In ZK Sync, malicious validators can neither jeopardize the security of the system nor trick honest validators into slashing conditions. Therefore, unlike in optimistic rollups, a small set of validators can be frequently rotated by the Guardians. At the same time, the liveness of the consensus is guaranteed as long as more than ⅔ of the nominated validators are honest and operational.

Guardians Guardians comprise the majority of ZK Sync token holders who stake their token share to nominate validators. The purpose of Guardians is to monitor peer-to-peer transaction traffic, detect censorship behavior, and ensure validators caught censoring are not nominated. The motivation of Guardians is to protect the value of their stake by making sure that ZK Sync remains DoS- and censorship-resistant.

Despite keeping the voting keys online, Guardians in ZK Sync are never exposed to risk of slashing or theft (the ownership keys can be kept in cold storage). They may also choose to monitor only a fraction of the traffic. Thus, their nodes can be run on ordinary laptops or cloud servers, i.e. there is no need for specialized validator services.

Guardians are rewarded with fees from the Validators denominated in the ZK Sync native token. Their earnings and stakes are locked for a prolonged period of time.

1. Programmability and privacy: the building blocks Achieving efficient programmability and privacy is the most difficult part of the ZK Sync vision. It requires solid design and implementation for both an appropriate zero-knowledge proof system and a smart contract programming framework.

4.1. RedShift: transparent universal SNARK The biggest blocker for implementing ZK-based smart contracts (whether transparent or privacy-preserving) has been the lack of efficient generic ZK proof systems with recursive composition. Groth16, the most efficient ZK SNARK at the time, required an application-specific trusted setup, and would lose a lot of efficiencies when recursion applied. FRI-based STARKs, on the other hand, require highly specialized skills to construct and lack efficient recursive composition of arbitrary generic circuits.

This was one of the main motivations for our work on RedShift: a new transparent, efficient and fully succinct SNARK derived from our FRI-based polynomial commitment scheme. We’re currently in the process of incorporating peer-review and community feedback, and will then deploy RedShift as a core part of ZK Sync.

Redshift is a universal SNARK, which allows us to use it to conveniently convert arbitrary programs into provable ZK circuits. Heterogenous circuits (e.g. different smart contracts) can be recursively composed in one SNARK. RedShift is plausibly post-quantum secure since it relies exclusively on collision-resistant hash functions.

4.2. Zinc: framework for zero-knowledge smart contracts In the design of ZK Sync’s programmability model, we have committed to an ambitious combination of several orthogonal goals:

High scalability Support for both public and private smart contracts Most importantly: a flat learning curve and easy development A number of outstanding projects share some of these goals, but none commits to all of them at once. For example, ZkVM offers a virtual machine for generic confidential smart contracts, but is based on bulletproofs and doesn’t support succinct proof aggregation. ZEXE has an excellent privacy-preserving design, but requires an in-depth understanding of the zero-knowledge circuit specifics and trade-offs, raising the barrier of entry very high for the broader circle of programmers. Other, simpler ZK programming frameworks lack the expressiveness or features necessary for safe smart contract development.

This led to our decision to create Zinc: a safe, simple and efficient programming framework and VM-based runtime-environment, designed specifically for ZKP-based smart contracts.

The key design priorities of SyncVM are safety and developer-friendliness. The programming language for defining contracts, closely follows a simplified Rust syntax, with smart-contract programming elements borrowed from Solidity and Libra’s Move. It does not require developers to deeply understand the specifics of the ZKP domain to write efficient and secure programs. In fact, Zinc can be learned in one day by developers with a background in Rust, Solidity, C++ or similar programming languages.

Consider a part of program written in Rust for the Bellman framework (ZEXE has a similar API) and the same piece in Zinc:

Zinc v0.1 will be released in January 2020.

ZK Sync v0.1 testtnet is live! The testnet for ZK Sync v0.1 is live. The scope of this version is limited to ETH and ERC20 token transfers in a single-operator setting.

The launch of the v0.1 devnet is the first step on the long journey of bringing the ZK Sync vision to life. It will take a lot of research, experimentation and development effort. Some design aspects may change as we learn and incorporate feedback. But we promise that the aspiration will remain unchanged: ZK Sync is going to be a bridge for bringing millions of users into crypto. We are setting a high bar for user experience and will demonstrate that zk-technology is capable of providing a Web-like experience without sacrificing the values of the blockchain revolution.

https://twitter.com/Surge_Fi

Surge пытается решить эту проблему и собирается стать юнисвапом мира borrow/lending протоколов. Они разработали собственные алгоритмы для контролирования коэффициентов займа без оракулов и возможность создания пула любых токенов. В общем штука крутая.

Несколько тезисов после которых вы побежите в их твиттер:

1️⃣На их Твитер подписаны челы из фондов таких как Paradigm, Spartan, Animoca. Я нашел подтверждение только Paradigm однако в альфах пишут и про другие фонды.

2️⃣Один из разрабов - nour участвовал в создании Inverse Finance которые раздали жирный дроп

3️⃣Тест будет приватный а значит людей относительно немного

Что делать?

⚪️Подписка на их Twitter + уведы. Нам нужно поймать инвайт в закрытый Discord. Твиттер очень свежий(9 января) как и Discord. Твиттерскор хороший, накрутки нет.

⚪️В дискорде нужно получить роль tester. Для этого нужно пройти квиз. Квиз также анонсируют в твиттере и в канале announcements в дискорде. Теперь подробнее по квизу и как его пройти:

Жульничать не получится - вопросы относительно разные каждый раз. 

10 вопросов. На каждый вопрос 45 секунд и пауза 5 секунд между вопросами. Вопросы на английском языке по статье написанной на английском языке.

За каждый правильный ответ от 500 до 1000 очков. Чем быстрее ответите - тем больше получите. Топ 50 получают tester а топ 10 sergeant. Изучите статью, там несложно.

Также если вы попали в дискорд, то написав твиттер тред можете получить роль threaderr.

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