An advantage that is difficult to replicate in the short term.
Written by: Soya
Since 2016, the developer community has become dependent on Ethereum. Ethereum has also accumulated the most assets in the decentralized world, and the multi-chain ecosystem with it as the core is likely to be the future pattern of the public chain system.
Before Ethereum 2.0 appears and qualified ZK Rollup projects are implemented, the capacity expansion market is in a window period.
The existing ZK Rollup is only for specific applications, and Ethereum applications are not easy to migrate directly to L2. Then Scroll, which focuses on Ethereum's "orthodoxy" and full compatibility,
Development route
Ye Zhang has been exposed to ZK proof since 2018. He knows that the inefficiency of ZK-proof can be solved at the cryptography and hardware levels. In early 2021, he met two other co-founders in the Ethereum community, and the three decided to use ZK technology to build the future of Ethereum expansion.
Haichen was previously in charge of machine learning systems at Amazon. He has strong engineering capabilities and is good at putting theory into practice.
Industry OG Sandy has worked as a researcher at the Hong Kong Securities Regulatory Commission. He has experience in operating game and product projects and is familiar with brand operations for start-up teams.
The team initially had two goals: building a universal ZK Rollup and achieving decentralization of ZK prover.
Because the team has always maintained close contact with the Ethereum community, they discovered that PSE (Ethereum's research institute, focusing on cutting-edge research on ZK Proof and its application in Ethereum) was also going to work on ZKEVM. The two technical routes matched, and Scroll immediately got the opportunity to work with Ethereum to develop an EVM-compatible ZK Rollup framework.
Scroll attaches great importance to technical foundation. In mid-2022, the team size is 40+, of which more than 30 are ZK or blockchain researchers and developers.
Even when selecting partners, we pay attention to the other party's research capabilities and technical strength, because only they can understand the technical difficulty of Scroll, and provide guidance on projects or recommend talents . For example, the founder of Geometry was once the CEO of Aztec.
Scroll Technology Highlights
1. Full EVM compatibility
Developers’ code will execute the same on Scroll and Ethereum, without the need for deep modification or rewriting. All Ethereum native development tools are supported, so developers can quickly migrate contracts without repeated audits.
In contrast, Scroll's competitors Zksync and Starkware require developers to recompile applications when migrating across layers, and users also need to trust the new virtual machine and compiler. Polygon Hermez may have certain risks in the process of executing transactions.
Scroll inherits the EVM model that has been tested countless times, while reusing Geth (an essential development tool for Ethereum smart contracts) to minimize the differences with Ethereum and maximize security.
2. Decentralization
Scroll has developed the world's fastest GPU prover, allowing anyone to use GPU machines to build proof nodes (previously, the cost of building nodes was too high) to achieve decentralization. The more nodes added, the greater the computing power and the lower the cost, thus motivating the community to update better and faster hardware, iterate ASICs dedicated to ZK, and further reduce the final confirmation time and proof cost of L1.
In the ZK Rollup track, Scroll has the highest hardware computing efficiency.
In addition to the technical level, the Scroll team pursues decentralization at the social and cultural levels. In 2022, the Scroll team added 39 members, distributed in more than 20 cities and more than 10 time zones.
Community Building
The Scroll team realized early on that many public chains do not lack technology, but rather an ecosystem.
Scroll has sponsored many Ethereum core events and frequently appeared at Ethereum events (such as ETH Devcon, ETH CC, ETH Vietnam). As of 2022, Scroll's Discord users have reached 120,000+.
Similar to Ethereum’s strategy, Scroll values the voice of the community.
Public Education:
The essence of decentralization is to enable members to solve problems.
Scroll has given talks on the proof stack at 0xPARC, presentations on research results at Stanford and Berkeley, and a weekly series on applied research on zero-knowledge proofs.
Open Platform:
In addition to PSE and the joint creation team, Scroll community members can also participate in ZKEVM development. For example, the optimization of keccak circuits and snark verifiers is completed by community members. Scroll has a community conference call every two weeks to discuss technical optimization.
In addition, Scroll is also maintaining a python version of the specification (similar to Ethereum's consensus-spec and execution-spec) to make it easier for people who are not familiar with Rust and Halo2 to understand the circuit logic.
Current situation and prospects
At the end of 2021, Scroll completed a US$30 million Series A financing round, with angel investors including members of the Ethereum Foundation and core members of the Ethereum community.
In August 2022, Scroll released a testnet (supported by more than 100,000 community users) and upgraded it in October. It allows users to try out core applications such as Uniswap v2 and perform transfers between L1 and L2. Later, it launched a permissionless Pre-Alpha testnet, where anyone can interact on the testnet and developers can deploy contracts without permission.
In January 2023, Scroll performed a Pre-Alpha network reset to increase the throughput of the Pre-Alpha test network and remove restrictions on social accounts. A week after the network reset, the number of unique addresses on the Scroll test network exceeded 270,000, and 110,000 transactions were processed on L2 every day.
In early March this year, the alpha testnet was officially released. Users can deploy contracts without permission, and anyone can experience Scroll and test its limits.
Currently, Scroll is working to iterate and improve the performance of zkEVM in the coming months and strive to align with Ethereum on the sorter at the protocol level.
Summarize
In addition to its outstanding performance in EVM compatibility, Scroll's decentralized proof-of-node and open-source community management reflect the legitimacy of Ethereum, achieving "compatibility" at the value level. The top-level hardware speed has injected greater potential into Scroll.
Although it started late, other ZK Rollups have not yet been launched. With these advantages that are difficult to replicate in the short term, I believe Scroll will have considerable potential in the ZK Rollup track.
