“zkEVM Rollups, a new scaling solution for Ethereum, will allow the smart contract protocol to outpace Visa in terms of transaction throughput, said Polygon co-founder Mihailo Bjelic in a recent interview with Cointelegraph” [Castrovilli, M. Ethereum will outpace Visa with zkEVM Rollups, says Polygon co-founder. (Accessed July 31, 2022)].
Let’s start by identifying what a zkEVM is. According to zkSync, a
zkEVM is a virtual machine that executes smart contracts in a way that is compatible with zero-knowledge-proof computation. It is the key to building an EVM-compatible ZK Rollup while preserving the battle-tested code and knowledge gained after years of working with Solidity. Our zk-EVM keeps EVM semantics, but is also ZK-friendly and takes on traditional CPU architectures. The launch of the zkEVM represents an essential turning point for crypto. Up until recently it was still considered merely a theoretical possibility that will take years to get real. But over the last year, the pace of the entire zero knowledge proof ecosystem has exceeded even experts’ expectations. And because of the many R&D breakthroughs by our team, that made zk-EVM possible, Solidity programmers now have first-class access to the unmatched scaling, security, and UX benefits of zero-knowledge proofs.
[zkSync. zkEVM FAQ. (Accessed July 31, 2022)].
And again, according to zkSync, a zkEVM Rollup is “a layer 2 scaling solution that uses cryptographic validity proofs to scale computation: each batch of transactions comes with a cryptographic proof (SNARK) that is verified by an Ethereum smart contract. This way every single transaction is fully verified by all Ethereum full nodes before a block is finalized” [Id].
It is important to understand the security afforded by zkEVM Rollups as well as their capacity to provide scalability. “Out of all the scaling solutions, ZK Rollups are the most secure. They rely purely on math to fully inherit the security of L1, which is critical to function in a highly adversarial environments. Other scaling solutions, instead, rely on economic guarantees or third parties, and thus offer far weaker security properties […] By relying on pure math, we don’t need to trust them or monitor them for frauds, since they cannot commit any fraud” [Id].
Of greater importance to Ethereum at this juncture is zkEVM Rollups ability to scale. "ZK Rollups can offer up to 2000 TPS at peak load! But it gets better. ZK Rollups are also the only L2 scaling solution that can be extended with a system that can provide an entire order of magnitude more scale: zkPorter can offer up to 20,000 TPS! [Id].
And of course, this now begs the question: what is a zkPorter?
A “zkPorter puts data availability — essential transaction data needed to reconstruct state — offchain rather than on Ethereum. Instead, the data remains available using a proof-of-stake (PoS) mechanism, where stakers are zkSync token holders. This enables much higher scalability (tens of thousands TPS), and as a result, ultra-low transaction fees comparable with sidechains (in the range of a few cents)” [Id].
Polygon recently claimed to be the first to implement a zkEVM scaling solution, which aims at reducing Ethereum’s transaction costs and improving its throughput. This layer-2 protocol can bundle together several transactions and then relay them to the Ethereum network as a single transaction. The solution, according to Bjelic, represents the Holy Grail of Web3 as it offers security, scalability and full compatibility with Ethereum, which means developers won’t have to learn a new programing language to work with it. ‘When you launch a scaling solution, you ideally want to preserve that developer experience. Otherwise, there will be a lot of friction,’ explained Bjelic.
[Castrovilli, supra].
Furthermore, according to Bjelic, if upgraded, the “ZkEVM Rollups could one day handle thousands of transactions per second, thus outpacing mainstream payment systems like Visa” [Id].
You can view Cointelegraph’s full interview with Bjelic by clicking here.
One of Polygon’s other co-founders, Sandeep Nailwal, recently claimed “this solution will slice Ethereum fees by 90% and increase transaction throughput to 40-50 transactions per second” [Walker, E. Ethereum will outpace Visa with zkEVM rollups, says Polygon co-founder. (Accessed July 31, 2022)].
Zero-knowledge rollups combine many layer-2 transactions into one — which settle on Ethereum as a validity proof. While computationally intensive, zero-knowledge rollups are much faster and more scalable. ‘It makes Ethereum almost technically or theoretically infinitely scalable,’ Polygon’s Sandeep Nailwal said during the Twitter space, adding that in contrast to other solutions, only Ethereum itself is needed. ‘It has network effects. It has developers. It has users, so you know we can take Web3 to the next stage of growth,’ he said.
[Peterson, M. Polygon Unveils ZkEVM, ‘The Holy Grail of Scaling’. (Accessed July 31, 2022)].
“Polygon is a multichain ecosystem. We believe there will be probably thousands such chains built on top of Ethereum,’ Nailwal said, stressing the open-source nature of all the company’s development efforts. ‘Cryptography must be open to be safe…Whatever we are building is for the public good and everything will be open source and will be in the public domain." [Id].
