Admit it, how many of you saw this and had flashbacks to โ๐ค Monday ๐คโ
This gimmick carried a bit more heft. In this case, the monoliths announced the public launch of zkSync Era, one of three major ZK launches in the first half of this week alone. ZKs are shipping even faster than regulators can crank out subpoenas.
Now, why might we care about a wave of new L2s? After all, Ethereum is affordable and all other chains are relatively small. Curve activity, for one, is almost entirely on Ethereum mainnet:
Flash back over two (2!) years. Back in this bygone era, the price of one ether is about to run up towards an all-time high of five thousand US dollars, and users biggest complaints are about the expensive cost of using Ethereum mainnet.
Devs promised to do something. The community split into two major camps: โOptimisticโ and โZKโ (zero knowledge) rollups.
Gas prices would ultimately be solved by the prolonged bear market, but work on scaling continued anyway.
The โoptimisticโ solutions would be the first to launch in the form of Arbitrum and Optimism. Even though gas prices had abated as an issue, the two chains nonetheless grew into fan faves โ mostly because the user experience is very good for the swaths of applications deployed by devs, and bolstered by their much-hyped airdrops.
Both Arbitrum and Optimism operate using โoptimisticโ rollups, in which they presume on-chain data is accurate until proven otherwise. This made optimistic rollups much quicker to market than their more challenging โZKโ rollup counterparts. Yet it comes with a major downside: settlement to mainnet is slower. You need to allow for sufficient time for pessimists to dispute the state of the chain before processing withdrawals.
With this weekโs launch of zkSync Era, the โZKโ rollup era has finally come of age.
At this point you may be getting confused by all the โZKโ services launching. Just as Arbitrum and Optimism are two flavors of optimistic rollup, we see several competing โZKโ EVMs, three of which happen to have major launch events this week.
Others, like Scroll, Starknet and surely many more are presumably around the corner. We wonโt go into too many details on all these different flavors, but hereโs a few helpful links for the ones that just launched to help guide your research.
zkSync Era
Over the weekend zkSync Era by Matter Labs dropped, leaving behind a trail of monoliths.
Several major protocols are expected to launch on zkSync Era, and a good variety of new applications are already being built.
Some good threads for further reading:
Polygon zkEVM
All day yesterday Polygon hosted a live event celebrating the launch of their beta mainnet. The ceremonies included a live transaction done by Vitalik.
The code is all open sourced under a hardcore AGPL license.
Much more on their website and blog, as well as this thread:
Consensys Linea
Launching today is Consensysโs zkEVM testnet, rebranded today as Linea.
We havenโt found quite as many threads yet, but weโre bullish on thread000rs emerging throughout the day. For more, check their launch article:
Curve
We expect Curve will have a major presence on the ZK rollups. We see evidence of Curve has already deployed on the Polygon zkEVM.
Curve has also been prominently featured in all the zkSync Era marketing materials.
However, delaying rollout is that zkVyper is not yet ready to rollโฆ would you rather busy Curve devs focus on zkSync Era or work on $crvUSD?
Fun trivia, Curve even launched one of the first zk compatible sites. The domain no longer works, but Curve technically already launched on zkSync back in 2020, as blogged by the same Matter Labs.
Risks
With all of these new rollups, keep in mind that most of these sidechains are relatively centralized at start, with promises to decentralize their operations as they scale.
We generally feel this is the only plausible way for a small project to launch. Full decentralization carries loads of bureaucracy that can make it impossible for early stage projects to maneuver the early pitfalls of going to market. Look at how few protocols manage to get voter participation as high as Curve โ imagine how much tougher it could be for a nascent project to rely on voter participation while getting off the ground. Why waste time on decentralization if you donโt even know you have product market fit?
However, all centralization carriess with major risks. Centralized projects can rug. Teams may never decide to cede power to the community. The technophobic legal system is looking to prey on loosely decentralized teams.
Just because Ethereum is quite well decentralized, this protection may not extend to L2s. See alsoโฆ Curve is too decentralized to claim an $OP grant.
Centralization risk is one of several risks facing new projects โ be sure to exercise extreme caution!
EYWA
Amidst all the big announcements, another big one. Yesterday we saw news of a partnership between EYWA and Curve.
We havenโt seen too many details on this other than the EYWA announcement, but it appears to be authentic. Quoth Mich:
"EYWA builds a very interesting solution: it's not just your typical bridge. They solve the problem of liquidity fragmentation between chains by creatively composing Curve metapools and the actual bridge.โ
Per the announcement, Curve will serve as a validator, multisigner, and DAO participant. EYWA will tap Curve for cross-chain pool liquidity. Sounds interesting!
More from EYWA: