Advantages that are difficult to replicate in the short term.
Author: Soya
Cover: Scroll
Since 2016, the developer community has come to rely on Ethereum. Ethereum has also deposited the most assets in the decentralized world, and the Multichain ecology centered on it is likely to be the future pattern of the public chain system.
Ethereum 2.0 has not yet appeared, qualified ZK Rollup projects have not yet landed, and the expansion market is in the window period.
The existing ZK Rollup is only for specific applications, and the application of Ethereum is not easy to migrate directly to L2. Then focus on the "orthodoxy" of Ethereum and the fully compatible Scroll,
Development route
Ye Zhang has been in contact with ZK proofs since 2018. He knows that the inefficiency of ZK-proofs can be solved at the cryptography and hardware levels. He met two other joint ventures in the Ethereum community in early 2021. The three decided to use ZK technology Building the future of Ethereum scaling.
Haichen was 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 been engaged in research work in the Hong Kong Securities Regulatory Commission, has experience in game and product project operations, and is familiar with the brand operation of start-up teams.
The team had two goals at the beginning: building a general-purpose ZK Rollup and realizing the decentralization of ZK prover.
Because it has been in close contact with the Ethereum community, the team found that PSE (the research institution of Ethereum, focusing on the cutting-edge research of ZK Proof and its application in Ethereum) is also going to do ZKEVM, and the technical routes of the two match. It is an opportunity for the workshop to develop an EVM compatible ZK Rollup framework.
Scroll places great emphasis on technical fundamentals. In 2022, the team size will be 40+, of which more than 30 are ZK or blockchain researchers and developers.
Even when choosing a partner, they also pay attention to the research ability and technical strength of the other party, because only they can understand the technical difficulty of Scroll, and point out the project or introduce talents. For example, the founder of Geometry was once the CEO of Aztec.
Scroll Technical Highlights
1. Fully EVM Compatible
The developer's code will perform the same on Scroll and Ethereum without deep modification or rewriting. At the same time, it supports all Ethereum native development tools, and developers can quickly migrate contracts without repeated audits.
In contrast, Scroll's competing products Zksync and Starkware require developers to recompile when migrating applications across layers, and users also need to trust new virtual machines and compilers. Polygon Hermez may have certain risks in the execution of transactions.
Scroll inherits the EVM model that has been tested countless times, and at the same time reuses Geth (a necessary development tool for Ethereum smart contracts) to minimize the differences with Ethereum and maximize security.
2. Decentralization
Scroll has developed the fastest GPU prover in the world, allowing anyone to use GPU machines to build a proof node (the cost of building a node was too high before) to achieve decentralization. The more nodes are added, the greater the computing power and the lower the cost, thus encouraging the community to update better and faster hardware, iterate the ASIC dedicated to ZK, and further reduce the final confirmation time and proof cost of L1.
On the ZK Rollup track, Scroll has the highest hardware computing efficiency.
In addition to technical aspects, the Scroll team pursues decentralization on a social and cultural level. In 2022, the Scroll team has added 39 members, spread across more than 20 cities and more than 10 time zones.
Community Building
The Scroll team realized very early on that many public chains do not lack technology, but ecology.
Scroll has sponsored Ethereum core events many times and frequently appeared at Ethereum events (such as ETH Devcon, ETH CC, ETH Vietnam). By 2022, Scroll's Discord users will reach 120,000+.
Similar to Ethereum's strategy, Scroll values the voice of the community.
Public Education:
The essence of decentralization is to empower members to solve problems as well.
Scroll has lectures on proof stacks at 0xPARC, presentations on research results at Stanford and Berkeley, and a weekly series on applied research on Zero-knowledge Proof.
Open platform:
In addition to PSE and the Lianchuang team, Scroll community members can also participate in the development of ZKEVM, such as the optimization of the keccak circuit and the snark verifier is done by community members. Scroll has a community conference call every two weeks to discuss technical optimization.
In addition, Scroll is maintaining a python version of the specification (similar to Ethereum's consensus-spec and execution-spec), which is convenient for people who are not familiar with Rust and Halo2 to understand circuit logic.
Status and Prospects
At the end of 2021, Scroll completed a US$30 million Series A round of financing. Among the angel investors are members of the Ethereum Foundation and core members of the Ethereum community.
In August 2022, Scroll released the testnet (supported by more than 100,000 community users), and upgraded in October. Allows users to try out core applications like Uniswap v2, performing transfers between L1 and L2. Later, the license-free Pre- Alpha test network was launched, and anyone can interact on the test network, and developers can deploy contracts without permission.
In January 2023, Scroll will perform a Pre- Alpha network reset to increase the throughput of the Pre- Alpha testnet and remove restrictions on social accounts. A week after the network reset, the number of unique addresses on the Scroll testnet exceeds 270,000, and 110,000 transactions are processed on L2 every day.
In early March this year, the Alpha testnet was officially released. Users can deploy contracts completely without permission, and anyone can experience Scroll and test its limits.
Currently, Scroll is working on iterating and improving the performance of zkEVM in the coming months, and striving to align with Ethereum on the orderer at the protocol level.
Summarize
In addition to its excellent performance in EVM compatibility, Scroll proves that the decentralization of nodes and open-source community management both reflect the orthodoxy of Ethereum and achieve "compatibility" at the level of values. Top-level hardware speed injects greater potential into Scroll .
Although it started late, other ZK Rollup have yet to land. With these advantages that are difficult to replicate in the short term, it is believed that Scroll will have considerable potential in the ZK Rollup track.
In addition, in addition to the Ethereum ecology, we should also pay attention to another blockchain ecology that is gaining momentum - Cosmos.
Lian Tea House will jointly hold the "Cosmos 2023 Ecological Opportunities" forum in Shanghai at 14:30 on March 18 (this Saturday) in conjunction with Octopus Network, District 51, and Cosmos Chinese Community, inviting a number of industry leaders (from developers to projects) From parties to investors), let’s explore the possibility of Cosmos in 2023.
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