The main network launches "countdown", a quick look at the new look of zkSync Era

原文标题：《 主网上线「倒计时」，速览 zkSync Era 带来的 ZK 新面貌 》

原文作者： 月之暗面，PANews

On February 16th, ZK's L2 expansion solution zkSync announced the launch of version 2.0, which will be called Era, and version 1.0, which will be renamed lite. The two will coexist for a long time with different types of tasks. zkSync has entered a new Era of development.

This is the first mainnet launch after its four-month beta phase. Unlike the restricted use of the beta phase, this zkSync Era mainnet will be open to all developers. The Github code base is currently available for review. But eventually more features will be made available to all users.

Era update features at a glance

The life cycle of a standard zkSync block can be divided into four steps. It usually takes 3-5 hours from the start of a transaction to the final confirmation, which is the biggest advantage of ZkSync over Optimistic average confirmation time of a week.

For more practical purposes, Era will continue to support the following features:

Native support for ECDSA signature. No additional operations are required to use the private key. Any account can use the same private key in L2 as in L1.

Support for Solidity 0.8.x. Be consistent with the Ethereum mainnet development environment.

The Web3 API is almost perfectly compatible with Ethereum. Developers can reuse most apis.

Smart contract messaging between L1 and L2. Allows developers to transfer data from Ethereum to zkSync, seamlessly connecting the various data messages that communicate between the two.

Among them, the most important is the compatibility between L1 and L2. zkSync is divided into two parts: L1 to L2 communication and L2 to L1 communication, so as to finally realize the two-way communication between L1 and L2.

In this Era update, the focus will be on communication between L1 and L2. Thanks to the compatibility with the main network, it is not difficult to send messages from the Ethereum main network to the zkSync Era to invoke smart contracts. The Era is mainly focused on the design and optimization of Gas.

The current L1 to L2 transaction priority is sorted and processed in FIFO (first in first out) mode, but in the future, the concept of "priority" will be introduced to support the specific ordering of transactions to determine specific priorities, in order to improve the network customization and high frequency usage requirements.

Second, zkPorter, which is expected to be realized by the main network in the future, is characterized by high security and 20 times lower cost than that of the main network of Ethereum. Finally, the transaction cost as low as a few cents can be realized to support large-scale calls. However, it should be noted that this function has not been launched on the test network this time.

In addition, zkSync Era will work on smart contract composability and account abstraction to support advanced operations such as complex DeFi stacks, and to keep in sync with the direction of Ethereum mainnet iterations.

In Matter Labs' vision, specific application chains such as L3 and L4 can eventually be built based on zkSync, and eventually the scalability of the entire blockchain network can be achieved, and native cross-chain Bridges can be implemented between specific two chains to transfer assets and messages, with the help of third-party tools.

However, L1 is still needed for final settlement, and this is where zkEVM's power comes in.

zkEVM and mainstream developers

zkEVM and Ecology are the two sides of the current ZK L2 expansion scheme struggle, ConsenSys, Polygon and Scroll's zkEVM are the three main competitors, and the fight over the major DeFi projects is reaching a climax.

In September, zkSync developer Matter Labs raised $200 million in Series C funding, much of which will be used for development and ecology, and its first Hackathon, the main grid phase of the zkSync Era, was officially launched on February 20.

In the update of the main network, the deployment list of zkSync Era test network projects was officially opened at the first time. Only the projects that passed the debugging can be the first ones to go online on the zkSync Era Mainnet Alpha main network, so as to avoid the failure of the main network directly online.

At present, Matter Labs can directly start the main network, but in order to ensure the safe start and operation of the main network, the following two security measures will be taken:

zkSync Era still needs to go through a full security audit, and Matter Labs will try to ensure the main network security, which is also the experimental significance of the Open beta network project.

zkSync Era Mainnet Alpha will initially be limited in terms of transaction frequency and lock-in volume (TVL), which will decrease as the mainnet matures.

During the beta network phase, nearly 9 million transactions were completed, 30,000 smart contracts were deployed, and 500,000 active addresses were generated.

To further attract developers, the code of Era main network will be synchronously opened to developers for their use, including intelligent contract, sequencer, prover and GPU accelerator, covering the most important function realization parts.

Developers can deploy and test dApp functions on zkSync Era during the beta phase; Developers can bridge Ethereum standard tokens to the Era network. Currently, tokens other than ERC-20 can be supported, but specific information needs to be submitted to the authorities. Developers can participate in bug discovery, feature debugging and bug bounty programs to help officials improve the security measures of the Era Mainnet;

Under the MIT/Apache 2.0 open source license, there are fewer restrictions on commercialization or forking. zkSync will not take Uniswap from forking code to limit competitors in the future, reflecting its commitment to the open source spirit and promoting ZK technology across the board.

zkSync's EVM compatibility, which makes smart contracts written by Solidity and Vyper available for use on zkSync without refactoring, is still not enough to reach Matter Labs' goal of becoming a truly mainstream developer community.

Also, zkSync Era will use a LLVM-based compiler, which, thanks to LLVM's open source and universality, will eventually allow developers to write smart contracts in languages such as C++ and Rust.

LLVM is Low  Level  Virtual  Machine is an acronym for underlying virtual machine that is not dependent on a specific programming language, instruction set, or operating system; macOS, for example, uses it as part of its development tools.

Era Mainnet will also integrate more with existing development tools to reduce barriers to entry for outside developers:

After this update, the Era mainnet will be compatible with the cloud convergence development environment. For example, the Era mainnet will be able to use Google Cloud services to store data.

Both GPU and non-GPU environments can be used for key generation and setup, and GPU acceleration will still be optimized to facilitate future hardware acceleration devices;

The local development uses the official website development guide, which can basically achieve the integrated development mode that can be run after one instruction, without excessive debugging of the software and hardware environment.

However, developers should be reminded that zkSync is still in the mode of "off-chain computing and storage, on-chain transaction confirmation", and is still run by Matter Labs nodes, so it is not fully decentralized, but will gradually transition to distributed mode.

conclusion

If Polygon zkEVM's release rang the bell for the New Year, zkSync 2.0 is a full blown preview.

zkSync Era achieved a relatively high degree of completion in this competition, its developer-oriented and project-oriented strategy helped it build its ecosystem, and it has a deep reservoir of technology for future hardware acceleration and inter-chain scalability.

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