DeFi Giants Launch on Ethereum Layer 2 zkSync Era

After four years in development, the Ethereum layer 2 scaling network, zkSync Era, has opened to users in alpha, enabling faster and cheaper transactions. Between 32 and 50 projects, including some of the biggest names in decentralized finance such as Uniswap, Sushi, Maker and Curve, are set to go live on March 24 or over the weekend.

ZkSync Era is the first Ethereum Virtual Machine compatible zk-Rollup to launch on the mainnet, allowing most Ethereum DApps to be ported easily with very few changes. The network can provide scaling “orders of magnitude” greater than Ethereum’s current 10 to 12 transactions per second (TPS), offering “tens of TPS” initially and scaling up as needed.

The project launched its “fair onboarding alpha” on February 17, allowing projects to be transferred and tested for security and optimizations. Matter Labs, the team behind zkSync Era, said it spent $3.8 million on security testing, seven independent security audits and a bug bounty program to reduce the risk of any incidents.

Zk-Rollups, which include zkSync, Scroll and solutions from Polygon, StarkWare and Consensys, calculate transactions away from the Ethereum blockchain while providing a small cryptographic proof written as a single transaction back on Ethereum showing that a bundle with other transactions are executed correctly. ZkSync also uses recursion, which generates a proof showing that a group of other proofs (each representing many transactions) have been executed.

Zk-Rollups can enable virtually instant withdrawals, giving them an advantage over optimistic rollup tier 2s like Optimism, where withdrawals take a week. However, zkSync Era will impose a 24-hour waiting period initially as a safety measure.

ZkSync Era has also enabled native account abstraction, meaning every account on the network is a “smart account” that can use two-factor authentication (2FA), social recovery, autopay transactions and more via smart contract wallet providers like Argent.

The network will not be fully decentralized at launch, so the team can implement quick fixes for any security or technical issues. However, a time lock will later be implemented so that the Security Council and society can sign resolutions. Like its competitor StarkWare, zkSync relies on a centralized sequencer and sampler, which is faster but provides a centralized point of failure.

Running a trial version requires buying expensive hardware or renting cloud capacity at $10,000 a month, making decentralization of that aspect of the network tricky. A new proof system is already under development that significantly reduces the hardware requirements and should be available on the mainnet this year.

Overall, the zkSync Era represents an important step forward for Ethereum, which has struggled with scaling issues for years. The network’s launch on the mainnet has the potential to significantly reduce gas fees and enable faster and more efficient transactions, benefiting not only DeFi projects but also other Ethereum-based applications.