Author: bayemon.eth, ChainCatcher

Recently, zkSync announced that it would "randomly" select 10,000 airdrops of the "LIBERTAS OMNIBUS" series NFTs from 179,365 active community members. It must be said that zkSync's choice to airdrop NFTs to users at this time, when competition in the Rollup space is heating up, indeed gave a boost to many opportunistic users. According to data from DefiLlama, zkSync's trading volume, which was only 10,730 ETH on the 13th, surged to 16,410 ETH on the 14th during the airdrop warm-up and on the day of the airdrop on the 15th, an increase of 52%. At the same time, zkSync Era surpassed Arbitrum in the number of transactions over the past 30 days, becoming the Ethereum Layer 2 with the most transactions in the past month.

However, this boost also came with significant side effects. Soon, users in the community discovered that the winning wallet addresses all started with 0x0. Later, it was revealed that the so-called "random" selection was merely a decorative term used when the official Twitter account announced the airdrop; in reality, nearly 180,000 address strings were sorted, and NFTs were airdropped to the top 10,000 ranked users.

In no time, users who realized they had been caught in an "airdrop scam" were furious, and the entire community's perception of zkSync plummeted. Sensing that something was amiss, zkSync's official team quickly apologized and stated that after the EthCC held recently, other users would still have the opportunity to receive NFT airdrops. However, this did not sway the users who felt "tricked." Just two days after reaching a peak on July 15, zkSync saw its TVL plummet like a bungee jump to 8,063.66 ETH, even slightly lower than before the airdrop.

The zkSync team likely did not anticipate that a mere miscommunication during promotion could lead to such a backlash. However, under the expectations of the airdrop, short-term sentiment-driven changes in trading data cannot serve as a long-term reference. In fact, under the increasing pressure of competition in L2, zkSync has clearly accelerated its development pace.

Recently, zkSync Era launched the proof system upgrade Boojum, which will assist the network in transitioning to a STARK-supported proof system. It is important to emphasize that Boojum is a crucial step for the decentralization of the prover. In addition, zkSync also launched the open-source framework ZK Stack last month, which will grant developers complete autonomy in aspects ranging from choosing data availability models to using their own tokens for decentralized sequencing.

It is worth noting that zkSync Era's path to decentralization is closely related to its token release and airdrop plans.

In March of this year, Alex Gluchowski, CEO of zkSync's development company Matter Labs, stated in an interview with The Block that zkSync Era would not immediately launch a token because the network is still largely centralized, with the company still controlling the operations of the sequencer and prover, the two core components. The token would only come into play when the network is decentralized, so he estimated that it would take at least another year to achieve network decentralization before launching the token.

After that, at the end of March, zkSync promptly released its vision for decentralization, which includes the sequencer, ZK provers, zkPorter, community governance, and other key components of the zkSync Era network, all of which will be decentralized after the core virtual machine and prover are consolidated and stabilized.

As one of the important members of ZK Rollup, what has been the path of centralization from the founding of zkSync to the launch of zkSync Era? What is the current progress? This article will outline the milestone events since the launch of zkSync v1.0 and explore the journey and progress of zkSync's "incremental" decentralization.

zkSync Era Milestone Events Overview

ChainCatcher Illustration

zkSync v1.0: Introduction of ZK Rollup

Let's rewind the timeline to two years ago, when the Ethereum network and the cryptocurrency market seemed to be a paradise for speculators. Due to underlying design limitations, value propositions like DeFi and token economics seemed like a fantasy for the Ethereum network at that time. While most people were still reveling in the joy of "making a little profit today," those who were not content with that—"Ethereum maximalists"—had already begun to ponder why such "superior" technology had not achieved widespread adoption.

Since Rollup solutions are essential for the continued expansion of the Ethereum ecosystem, the question became how to eliminate the issues brought about by the OP mechanism while still retaining Ethereum's most valuable characteristic: decentralization. One of the most serious risks of OP comes from "potentially profit-driven" validators. So, what if interests could not influence the validation mechanism? The community's focus turned once again to the cornerstone of Ethereum—cryptography.

Thus, in early 2020, a group of cryptographers and programmers at Matter Labs released the initial concept of zkSync and officially launched zkSync v1.0 on the Ethereum mainnet in June of the same year. By introducing ZK Rollup, the process of generating proofs was handed over to "emotionless, purely mathematical" zero-knowledge proof circuits. zkSync validators had no authority to operate on user assets, thereby eliminating some risks associated with centralized validators, and combined ZKP with on-chain data availability, aiming to create a faster and cheaper scaling solution for Ethereum.

Although it appeared to be merely a scaling solution for cryptocurrency payments, by the time v1.0 was released, Matter Labs had already laid the technical foundation for the subsequent realization of smart contract functionality and further enhancement of Layer 2 network decentralization.

zkSync 2.0 / Era: Achieving EVM Compatibility

When ZK Rollup firmly established itself in the Ethereum ecosystem, it helped optimize throughput and transaction speed for the entire Ethereum network. What was once defined by many industry insiders as a "technology that would take years to realize" suddenly brought about a seismic change for Ethereum. For all teams in the ZK Rollup space, the exploration was no longer simply about "promoting Ethereum"; they urgently needed to find a long-term path that could attract more attention in the competition.

In terms of ZK Rollup, both StarkWare and zkSync provide widely adopted solutions, but the StarkWare team, which began development in 2018, clearly has a first-mover advantage—utilizing zk-STARKs, which require lower computational resources and are faster, and employing the more efficient proof-generating programming language Cairo. Even though Cairo offers flexibility and high efficiency in proof generation, since the origin of ZK Rollup is to "promote the large-scale adoption of Ethereum," the additional learning and application time required for this language inevitably brings unavoidable extra costs as the application scale gradually expands, which may somewhat hinder the expansion of Layer 1 networks. Therefore, for zkSync, achieving EVM compatibility could become a good opportunity for a "curve overtaking."

Thus, one year after the release of zkSync 1.0, on June 23, 2022, the zkSync development team released the EVM-compatible zkSync v2.0 and made the code open-source. Its compatibility allows the vast majority of dApps using Solidity and Vyper code to be directly ported to the zkSync Layer 2 network without any modifications, and the choice to open-source the code undoubtedly attracted a wave of geek communities interested in ZK technology. In addition, zkSync v2.0 also introduced Account Abstraction (AA). In simple terms, AA allows a wallet to still be controlled by a private key while having programmability.

On February 16, 2023, after six months of refinement, the zkSync 2.0 Fair Onboarding Alpha mainnet was launched and renamed zkSync Era, opening to the public a month later.

The major version update of zkSync v2.0 achieved EVM compatibility and optimized smart contract deployment, greatly preserving Ethereum's advantages of decentralization, thus bringing rich composability to the ecosystem. The team excitedly claimed they had built the "first open-source zkEVM," but this statement drew much criticism in the crypto community at the time, as this version of zkEVM was still very "centralized."

The zkSync team itself acknowledged that the company still controlled the operations of the sequencer and prover, but compared to OP Rollup, zkSync's sequencer could not change the order, so even if it did not achieve ultimate decentralization, it could not act maliciously.

The official decentralization vision released at the end of March this year also expressed a determination to gradually achieve decentralization of the sequencer, ZK provers, zkPorter, community governance, and other core components 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 decentralization of the prover and will assist the network in transitioning to a STARK-supported proof system.

Previously, zkSync mainly used ZK-SNARK proofs. From the perspective of proof volume, SNARKs have a smaller proof volume and consume less Gas, with communication complexity growing linearly, and the official documentation is relatively comprehensive, making it more developer-friendly. However, ZK-STARK proofs require less time and better meet the scaling speed requirements of ZK Rollup. Moreover, STARKs can resist quantum attacks and do not require complex trusted setups, which gives them a slight advantage over SNARKs that use elliptic curve cryptography in terms of trust mechanisms.

Therefore, the main purpose of the zkSync Era upgrade Boojum is to reduce the hardware requirements for proof generation and improve generation speed, thereby enhancing scaling efficiency.

ZK Stack: An Important Step Towards Empowering Developers and Initiating Community Governance

From the team's longstanding focus, zkSync has a traditional "top student mentality," diving deep into the development of new technologies to achieve technical leadership in the field of ZKP applications, with official promotion always centered on technology. It was not until the recent launch of ZK Stack that the zkSync team showed a willingness to participate in community governance.

A closer look at the public roadmap provided by the official team in 2022 reveals that, in addition to the important updates mentioned above, major framework renovations, proof mergers, and dynamic transaction fees have all been completed. The roadmap also unveiled the team's brief ideas about the concept and applications of Layer 3. As more and more attention from both industry and academia focuses on ZK technology, ZK Rollup is also seen as the future of Ethereum scaling. Therefore, establishing the correct architecture from the outset to unleash the incredible potential of ZK technology is crucial.

To match the future ZKP technology with a similarly expansive market while avoiding the issue of "going off track," zkSync advocates "handing over the ownership of zkSync to the community" and launched the modular open-source framework ZK Stack in June (which includes concepts like HyperChain, HyperBridge, and HyperScalability), allowing the community to build ZKP-driven Layer 2 and even Layer 3 applications on the foundation of zkSync Era.

The official team highlighted two important features of ZK Stack: "sovereignty" and "seamless integration," which largely correspond to the future of "scalability" and "interoperability" in the Ethereum ecosystem. The open-source code of ZK Stack grants the community the right to autonomously define chain functions and characteristics, allowing for the emergence of more personalized projects in the future ecological construction of Ethereum. Meanwhile, HyperChain operates independently, fully relying on Ethereum as the underlying trust and security mechanism, while HyperBridge serves as a means to achieve trustless and rapid interoperability between chains in the "Web 3.0 Internet." By transforming a project that originally required extensive expertise into an interface for custom chains, zkSync seems to aim to bring the concept of decentralization to Layer 2 and become the infrastructure for Rollup, replicating the prosperity of the Ethereum community in the Layer 2 network. Thus, the team defines ZK Stack as "a significant paradigm shift."

Summary

zkSync Era is still in its early stages and has yet to deploy major dApps like Aave and Uniswap. Its ecological construction also lacks distinct features. Currently, its network performance is relatively average compared to other Layer 2 solutions, with an average daily TPS of only 9.91. Although the average gas fee hovers around $0.3, there have been instances as high as $7.8, and to mitigate validator risks, a 24-hour trading delay is still in place.

Despite the recent NFT airdrop igniting community interaction enthusiasm, zkSync's path to decentralization (and token issuance) remains a long way off. However, this also means that users still have the opportunity to deeply engage in its ecological interactions and hope to receive airdrop rewards.