Get Ready for the zkSync Airdrop! Understanding the Project’s Benefits and Potential
The L2 field has undergone significant changes in recent years. In the past, you could simply scroll through L2beat without needing to delve into the various L2 systems. It’s not easy to grasp the differences between these systems, even for developers within the Ethereum ecosystem. With the influence of hype and marketing, it becomes even harder to discern valuable information.
Optimistic rollup and ZK rollup are still difficult to fully understand, not to mention other new solutions in the blockchain field like Optimiums, Volitions, and Validiums. I’ll try to simplify the topic because this system is truly exciting, and I hope more people can understand it better.
Our vision is to establish a foundational system beneath the application layer that adds value to the lives of billions of people. Similar to today’s internet, these applications can enhance people’s lives, but with blockchain’s added value and ownership, it greatly enhances the functionality of these applications.
To achieve this vision, it is evident that this system needs scalability, similar to how the internet operates. Engineers refer to this scalability as “horizontal scaling” – essentially, we need to increase hardware and expand the network while maintaining high standards for all key metrics.
You can verify the correctness of a massive system with a small proof that performs a large amount of computational work, and this proof can be done on any smartphone. This is why ZK systems can reasonably achieve horizontal scaling, while Optimistic systems cannot. This is the advantage of the ZK solution.
This horizontal scaling essentially means deploying more rollups on this protocol layer. These rollups can be specific to applications or generic, but they can all be abstracted from end users. Here is a scientific diagram that can hopefully help everyone understand:
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At the protocol layer, these systems require trustless interactions. Without this, the entire user experience becomes fragmented (similar to using different L2 or L1 solutions today).
Optimistic systems cannot achieve this type of interaction properly. The options are basically to wait for a 7-day interaction period, run a full node for each L2 the user wants to interact with, or charge users through intermediaries. None of these options are ideal. However, with ZK technology, these systems can have trustless interactions, where any rollup can communicate with another and verify the correctness of each other’s state. This is mathematically proven. Users don’t even need to know where the game they’re playing is hosted or which rollup their friend is using when they want to transfer $20 for lunch.
Optimistic rollup still needs to publish all transaction inputs to L1 because that’s how they work and the data is necessary to solve potential challenges in state transitions. This is a huge amount of data, whereas ZK systems do not have this issue.
You can prove the correctness of the system without publishing all the states to L1 (you can publish to other places or build a private system). This is a validium. You know it is correct, but you don’t have the state recorded on Ethereum.
I’ve also mentioned that within the entire zkSync ecosystem, proofs can be combined, allowing you to verify the entire network in one proof. This means that as the system scales, the on-chain costs approach zero, and you can verify it on any smartphone.
The zkSync system we are building is highly scalable, performant, and secure, completely different from the other systems unfortunately lumped together as “L2”. These systems are not the same, and many will disappear in a year.
The future ecosystem will consist of many ZK chains, each configured differently based on specific use cases, but all with the same strong security guarantees and the ability to interact trustlessly and quickly. Anyone can deploy new ZK chains in the ecosystem without permission and immediately interact throughout the entire network.
There is much more to discuss about zkSync, but these are the core points I wanted to share today. This is why I am excited about zkSync and why ZK systems will truly change the world and why ZK is the ultimate solution.
This article is a collaborative repost from DeepTech.
