The gradual decentralization of zkSync is still lacking in the early ecology

Author: bayemon.eth, ChainCatcher

Recently, zkSync announced that 10,000 "LIBERTAS OMNIBUS" series NFTs will be "randomly" selected from 179,365 active community members. It has to be said that zkSync chose to airdrop NFT to users at this time of intense competition on the Rollup track, which really gave a boost to a large number of wool users. According to data from DefiLlama, the trading volume of zkSync, which was only 10,730 ETH on the 13th, increased to 16,410 ETH during the airdrop warm-up on the 14th and the day of the airdrop on the 15th, a full increase of 52%. At the same time, the number of transactions in zkSync Era in the past 30 days surpassed that of Arbitrum, becoming the Ethereum Layer 2 with the largest number of transactions in the past month.

However, the booster needle also has a lot of sequelae. Soon some users in the community discovered that the winning wallet addresses all start with 0x0. Later, someone found out that the so-called "random" is simply a modifier that was randomly typed in when the official push announced the airdrop. In fact, nearly 180,000 address strings were sorted, and then NFT was airdropped to the top 10,000 users.

For a while, the Wool Party who realized that they had been kidnapped into the "airdrop scam" was furious, and at the same time, the entire community's perception of zkSync plummeted. Realizing that something was wrong, the zkSync official immediately apologized, and said that after the recent EthCC, other users still have the opportunity to receive NFT airdrops. However, this does not change the minds of users who have been "put together". zkSync, which just reached its peak on July 15, watched TVL fall to 8063.66 ETH like bungee jumping in just two days, even slightly lower than the level before the airdrop.

The zkSync team probably didn't expect to capsize just because it was mischaracterized when it was advertised. However, under the expectation of airdrops, changes in transaction data dominated by short-term sentiment cannot be used as a long-term reference. In fact, under the pressure of the escalating L2 involution recently, zkSync has also significantly accelerated its development progress.

Recently, zkSync Era launched the proof system upgrade Boojum, which will assist the network in transitioning to the proof system supported by STARK. It should be emphasized that Boojum is an important step for the prover to achieve decentralization. In addition, zkSync also launched the open source framework ZK Stack last month, which will give developers complete autonomy in choosing data availability models to using the project's own token decentralized sequencer.

You should know that zkSync Era's road to decentralization is closely related to the token release and airdrop plan.

In March of this year, Alex Gluchowski, CEO of zkSync development company Matter Labs, said in an interview with The Block that zkSync Era will not launch tokens immediately because the network is still largely centralized and the company still controls the operation of the two core components of the sequencer and prover. And tokens only work when the network is decentralized, so he expects it will be at least a year before the network is decentralized and then the token is launched.

Afterwards, at the end of March, zkSync released a vision for decentralization, which includes sequencers, ZK certifiers, zkPorter, community governance, and other key parts of the zkSync Era network, which will be decentralized after the core virtual machine and certifiers are consolidated and stabilized.

As one of the important members of ZK Rollup, from the beginning of zkSync's establishment to the launch of zkSync Era, what is its centralization path like? What is the current progress? This article will sort out the milestone events since the launch of zkSync v1.0, and discuss the history and progress of zkSync's "progressive" decentralization road.

zkSync Era milestone events

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zkSync v1.0: Introducing ZK Rollup

The timeline goes back to two years ago. The Ethereum network and cryptocurrency market at that time seemed to be a paradise for speculators. Subject to the underlying design, value propositions such as DeFi and token economics seemed like a fantasy to the Ethereum network at that time. While most people are still immersed in the joy of "earning a little more today", the "Ethereum single promoters" who are not here have begun to think about why such a "superior" technology has not achieved large-scale promotion.

Since the Rollup solution is the only way for the Ethereum ecosystem to continue to expand, the question is how to eliminate the problems caused by the OP mechanism, so as to retain the most valuable decentralized feature of Ethereum. One of the OP's most serious risks stems from "possibly profit-driven" validators, so what if the interests don't dictate the validation mechanism? The eyes of the community are once again focusing on the cornerstone of Ethereum - cryptography.

Therefore, Matter Labs, composed of a group of cryptographers and programmers, released the original idea of zkSync in early 2020, and officially released the zkSync v1.0 version on the Ethereum mainnet in June of the same year. By introducing ZK Rollup, the process of generating proofs is handed over to the zero-knowledge proof circuit of "no emotion, all mathematics". The zkSync validator has no right to perform any operations on user assets, thereby eliminating some of the risks brought about by centralized validators. Combining ZKP with the availability of data on the chain is intended to create a faster response and lower cost expansion solution for Ethereum.

Although it seems to be just an expansion solution to solve the cryptocurrency payment problem, when the v1.0 version was released, Matter Labs was already laying the technical foundation for the subsequent implementation of smart contract functions and further enhancement of Layer 2 network decentralization.

zkSync 2.0 / Era: EVM compatible

When ZK Rollup gained a firm foothold in the Ethereum ecosystem, it also helped the entire Ethereum achieve throughput and transaction speed optimization. It was once defined by many industry insiders as a "technology that takes several years to realize" and brought earth-shaking changes to Ethereum overnight. For all teams on the ZK Rollup track, the field of exploration is not just as simple as "promoting Ethereum", they need to urgently find a long-term path that can attract more attention from the competition.

As far as ZK Rollup is concerned, both StarkWare and zkSync provide solutions that are currently widely adopted, but the StarkWare team, which was put into development in 2018, clearly has a first-mover advantage - adopting zk-STARKs that require less computing resources and is faster, and using Cairo, a development language that is more efficient in generating proofs. Even though Cairo is flexible and efficient in proof generation, since the origin of ZK Rollup is to "promote the large-scale promotion of Ethereum", this language that requires additional learning and application time will inevitably bring unavoidable additional costs as the application scale gradually expands, and will more or less create resistance to the expansion of the layer-1 network. Therefore, for zkSync, achieving EVM compatibility may become a good opportunity for "overtaking on a curve".

So one year after the release of zkSync 1.0, on June 23, 2022, the zkSync development team released the EVM-compatible zkSync v2.0 with open source code. Its compatibility allows the Solidity and Vyper codes used by most dApps to be directly transplanted to the zkSync Layer 2 network without any modification. The choice of open source code will undoubtedly attract a wave of geek groups interested in ZK technology to participate. In addition, zkSync v2.0 also brings account abstraction (Acount Abstraciton, AA). Simply put, AA allows a wallet to be programmable although it is still controlled by a private key.

On February 16, 2023, the zkSync 2.0 Fair Onboarding Alpha mainnet, which has undergone half a year of precipitation, was launched and renamed zkSync Era, and it will be fully open to the public one month later.

The major version update of zkSync v2.0 realizes EVM compatibility and smart contract deployment optimization, which greatly retains the advantages of Ethereum’s decentralization, thus bringing ecologically rich composability. The team also excitedly declared that they had built "the first open source zkEVM", but this statement attracted a lot of criticism in the encryption community at the time, because this version of zkEVM was still very "centralized".

The zkSync team admits that the company still controls the operation of the two core components of the sequencer and prover. However, compared with OP Rollup, the sequencer of zkSync cannot change the ordering, so even if it cannot achieve the ultimate decentralization, it cannot do evil.

The official vision for decentralization released at the end of March this year also made the determination to gradually realize the core decentralization of the sequencer, ZK certifier, zkPorter, and community governance in the coming year.

It is worth mentioning that zkSync Era recently launched the proof system upgrade Boojum, which is an important step for the prover to achieve decentralization, and will assist the network in transitioning to the proof system supported by STARK.

Previously, zkSync mainly used ZK-SNARK proofs. From the perspective of the amount of proof, SNARK has a small amount of proof and consumes less Gas, and the communication complexity will increase linearly. The official documentation is relatively more complete, so it is more developer-friendly. However, ZK-STARK proves that the time required is shorter, which is more in line with the requirements of ZK Rollup for the expansion speed. Moreover, STARK is resistant to quantum attacks and does not require complex trusted settings, and its trust mechanism is slightly better than SNARK using elliptic curve encryption.

Therefore, the main purpose of zkSync Era to upgrade Boojum is to reduce the hardware requirements for proof generation and increase the generation speed, thereby improving the expansion efficiency.

ZK Stack: An important step for developers to decentralize power and open community governance

Judging from the focus of the team all the time, zkSync has a traditional "student thinking" and plunges into the development of new technologies to achieve technological leadership in the field of ZKP applications. The official publicity has always been technology-based. It wasn’t until the recent launch of the ZK Stack that the zkSync team showed a willingness to participate in community governance.

Take a closer look at the public roadmap given by the official in 2022. In addition to the important updates mentioned above, the main framework transformation, proof merger, and dynamic transaction fees have all been completed. At the same time, the roadmap also revealed the team's brief idea about the concept and application of Layer3. As more and more industry and academic circles focus on ZK technology, ZK Rollup is also regarded as the future of Ethereum expansion, so how to establish the correct architecture from the beginning to realize the amazing potential of ZK technology in the future is very important.

In order to match the future of ZKP technology to match a market with the same expansion level and avoid the problem of "walking off", ZKSYNC advocates "hand over ZKSYNC's ownership to the community" and launch a modular open source framework in June (including Hyperchain, Hyperbridge, and HyperScalabil. ITY and other ideas) allows the community to build a Layer2 or even Layer3 application driven by ZKP on the basis of ZKSYNCRA.

The official gave two important features of ZK Stack: "sovereignty" and "seamless connection", which largely benchmark the future of "scalability" and "interoperability" of the Ethereum ecosystem. The open source code of ZK Stack gives the community the right to independently define the functions and characteristics of the chain, so that more projects with personal touch will emerge in the future ecological construction of Ethereum. At the same time, HyperChain operates independently and completely relies on Ethereum as the underlying trust and security mechanism, while HyperBridge acts as a "Web3.0 Internet" to realize trustless and fast interoperability between chains. Turning a project that originally required extremely strict professional knowledge into a custom chain interface, zkSync seems to want to move the concept of decentralization to Layer2 and become the infrastructure of Rollup to replicate the prosperity of the Ethereum community on the second-layer network. Therefore, the team defines the ZK Stack as "a major paradigm shift."

Summary

zkSync Era is still in its early stages, and relatively top dApps like Aave and Uniswap have not yet been deployed, and its ecological construction also lacks features. At present, its network performance is relatively average compared with other Layer 2, with a daily average TPS of only 9.91. Although the average gas fee hovers around $0.3, there are cases as high as $7.8, and there is still a 24-hour transaction delay in order to prevent validator risks.

Although the recent NFT airdrops have ignited the community's enthusiasm for interaction, zkSync's road to decentralization (the road to coin issuance) still has a long way to go, but it also means that users still have the opportunity to deeply participate in the interaction of its ecology and hope to receive airdrop rewards.