Dialogue Scroll Co-founder: Scroll Mainnet Launch, Committed to Long-term Development of zk-EVM

Organized & Compiled by: Deep Tide TechFlow

Scroll has just launched zkEVM on the Ethereum mainnet!

In the latest episode of the Bankless podcast, hosts David and Ryan discussed the recent launch of Scroll's ZK EVM with Scroll co-founder Sandy Peng and senior researcher Toghrul Toghrul Maharramov.

Hosts: Sandy Peng, Co-founder of Scroll; Toghrul Toghrul Maharramov, Senior Researcher at Scroll

Speakers: David & Ryan, Bankless

Show: Bankless Podcast

Original Title: "Scroll zkEVM LIVE on Ethereum"

Episode: Link

Release Date: October 18, 2023

From Concept to Mainnet: Scroll's Long-Term Development

• A notable feature of Scroll's mainnet is its high compatibility with Ethereum. Scroll enhances Ethereum's capabilities through ZK technology, providing greater security and privacy protection.

• Toghrul emphasized that Scroll's ZK-EVM evolved from a bold idea to the current mainnet solution, a long and arduous process that was considered a crazy idea about three years ago. At that time, building a ZK-EVM equivalent to EVM was seen as an unattainable goal, but that goal has now been achieved.

• The launch of Scroll's ZK-EVM is an important milestone in the Ethereum ecosystem, providing a highly compatible, efficient, and long-term second-layer scaling solution. EVM equivalence ensures seamless integration into the existing Ethereum ecosystem, facilitating ease of development and adoption.

• The Scroll team views ZK-EVM as a long-term solution, whereas Optimistic Rollup is seen more as a temporary or short-term technical solution. Toghrul anticipates that over time, people will gradually shift from Optimistic Rollup to ZK Rollup, which may offer more advantages in certain aspects such as security and efficiency.

• Another unique aspect of Scroll is its developer and user friendliness. EVM equivalence allows Scroll to leverage Ethereum's existing rich resources, including documentation, tutorials, and open-source code, promoting faster and more efficient development and innovation without having to build everything from scratch or retrain people on new programming languages or paradigms.

• Scroll's ZK-EVM provides developers with an easy-to-migrate and develop platform by maintaining high compatibility with Ethereum. They reused a significant amount of Ethereum's code and tools, ensuring compatibility of applications and infrastructure, making the transition from Ethereum to Scroll a seamless, simple, and secure process.

• The launch of Scroll's mainnet marks a new beginning, bringing more substantial feedback and improvement opportunities. Sandy stated that the team has put in tremendous effort for this significant milestone. Meanwhile, the Scroll team looks forward to receiving feedback from the community and developers to iterate and improve ZK-EVM.

Revisiting ZK vs Optimistic

Advantages of ZK Rollup

• Faster transaction confirmation times: ZK Rollup uses zero-knowledge proofs to validate transactions, and once the proof is computed and verified, the transaction is immediately confirmed, eliminating the need to wait for potential fraud proofs, thus greatly speeding up transaction processing.

• Faster finality: ZK Rollup can achieve finality within minutes, as it does not rely on a challenge window to verify the validity of transactions, which is very beneficial for applications and users that require quick transaction confirmations.

• Lower fees: Due to the efficiency of ZK Rollup, transaction fees may be lower, benefiting both market makers and end users.

• Faster cross-chain interactions: ZK Rollup allows for quicker cross-chain messaging and interactions, especially from L2 to L1.

Limitations of Optimistic Rollup

• Challenge window: Optimistic Rollup requires a challenge window that allows others to prove that a transaction is invalid, which typically takes several days.

• Exit delays: ZK Rollup allows for faster exits, usually completed within 30 minutes, while Optimistic Rollup may take a week.

User Experience

• ZK Rollup: For most users, unless they attempt to exit from L2 to L1, they may not notice the difference between ZK Rollup and Optimistic Rollup. However, as the scale and throughput of the second layer increase, the advantages of ZK Rollup will become more apparent.

• Optimistic Rollup: Although Optimistic Rollup also provides L2 scaling, its challenge window and slower exit times may affect the user experience.

The Potential and Applications of ZK

• Efficiency and Performance: ZK proofs allow for faster and more efficient transaction validation and processing. With ZK, the correctness of transactions can be verified without revealing any sensitive information, significantly improving the overall efficiency and performance of the network.

• Privacy: ZK proofs provide enhanced privacy protection. Users can prove they possess certain information or meet certain conditions without actually disclosing that information, which is crucial for protecting user privacy and data security.

• Scalability: ZK proofs are one of the key technologies for achieving blockchain scalability. Technologies like ZK Rollups can significantly increase the throughput and scale of blockchains while maintaining security and decentralization.

• Interoperability: ZK proofs also help achieve interoperability between different blockchains and layers. With ZK, data can be transferred and verified securely and efficiently across different chains and layers, promoting connectivity within the entire crypto ecosystem.

• Security: ZK proofs provide a mechanism to verify the correctness of data without disclosing details. This not only helps protect privacy but also enhances the overall security of the system, reducing the risk of fraud and attacks.

Scroll's Next Steps and Token Plans

• Scroll's mainnet has launched, and developers can now start deploying their dApps. Users can bridge their funds from the Ethereum mainnet to the Scroll platform through a public bridging UI.

• Scroll is committed to simplifying the deployment process of dApps. They have launched a "Copy, Paste, and Deploy" initiative aimed at reducing the friction and barriers developers face when deploying applications.

• Scroll maintains high compatibility with Ethereum, allowing developers to easily migrate existing dApps from Ethereum to the Scroll platform. Due to some unique features and advantages offered by Scroll, some applications may choose to operate exclusively on Scroll.

• It is expected that over time, more applications will be deployed on Scroll. The advantages of ZK Rollup, such as faster transaction confirmations and lower fees, may attract developers and users.

• Scroll plans to continue innovating and improving their platform to meet the needs of developers and users, focusing on enhancing performance, security, and usability.

• Scroll is currently focused on stabilizing and optimizing the mainnet, improving performance, reducing user transaction costs, and assessing the needs of developers and ecosystem projects.

• Security is another focus area; Scroll is exploring multi-signature and other security measures to enhance platform security, including introducing mandatory transactions and multiple provers. They are also researching how to ensure smart contracts are free of vulnerabilities, including using multiple validators to enhance the security of bridging.

• When asked about token-related matters, Toghrul responded, "Tokens and their issuance and management are subject to strict regulations in many countries and regions." In this context, Toghrul and the Scroll team have chosen to be cautious and avoid publicly discussing specific details about tokens until all legal and compliance issues are resolved.