Author: Jaleel, Luccy, BlockBeats

Editor: Jack, BlockBeats

Two days ago, Consensys announced the launch of a Web3 Fellowship program, which will select and support 15 startups over a period of 12 weeks, aiming to find the best Web3 builders to unleash the power of collaboration in the community. It is worth noting that the next day, zkSync also announced the launch of a 4-6 month Fellowship program, hoping to promote the development of zkSync, ZK Stack, and ZK Credo through the technical contributions of individuals and teams.

Other than the Fellowship program, it seems that major L2 projects are putting in a lot of effort in terms of project legitimacy, code originality, and RaaS. The competition in the L2 track seems to be turning into a brutal "melee".

Fellowship

In this wave of the Fellowship program, Consensys and zkSync have significant differences in preparation completion and amount settings.

On the Consensys Fellowship program website, it can be seen that the program is a pre-accelerator program aimed at supporting web3 startups and founders using the Consensys software suite. This is also a non-equity program that provides an opportunity to receive potential investments of up to $1.5 million. Through this fellowship, Consensys aims to help participating teams develop new use cases, thereby benefiting the larger Ethereum community.

The first batch of Fellowship program will provide support for 15 startups within 12 weeks, including practical exercises, interactive seminars, and case studies to address the challenges faced by web3 builders. Currently, the project is considering three verticals, namely scalability, optimization, and L2. Scalability refers to the projects that Consensys aims to support in driving scalability within the web3 ecosystem through wallet or application layer using web3 technology.

In addition, optimization refers to projects that provide valuable tools, middleware, and other solutions that simplify the development process. In the L2 field, projects related to L2 solutions and zero-knowledge proofs are provided to help with the scalability and performance of Ethereum and EVM chains.

Consensys Fellowship program team will select the top 15 startups to join its first batch of startups, and another 3 startups will be on the waiting list. The program will officially begin on November 6, 2023, and hold an immersive reality demo day on April 5, 2024. In addition, the program will bring in professional mentors, including Buidl Guidl co-founder Austin Griffith, Hedgey Finance co-founder Lindsey Winder, Algaé Ventures executive partner Vanessa Grellet, and Consensys solution architect Clemens Wan.

On the other hand, compared to the well-prepared Consensys, zkSync's Fellowship program appears to be "rough", with only a theme list and no additional information. Consensys has attached a webpage designed specifically for the Fellowship program and application methods in their official promotion, while zkSync only has one article.

Currently, zkSync's Fellowship program has prepared multiple themes for candidates, including tracking extension-related ZKP memory models, scalable cross-collateral resistance for cross-extension/recursion/folding, and tracking extension technology/continuation. At the summary technology level, it includes how to avoid the fragmentation of consensus equity in a multi-summary ecosystem, MEV summary, summary privacy support and privacy primitives, as well as summary data exploration beyond L2BEAT.

Additionally, in terms of zero-knowledge and verification, this includes zero-knowledge DeFi primitives, including but not limited to transaction matching, risk management, settlement, custody and proof, as well as zero-knowledge proof aggregation and verification schemes, zero-knowledge proof production, zero-knowledge virtual machine models, validator and sequencer market dynamics, and a self-sovereign TX verification assistant that can correctly parse data encoded in ABI and provide visualization of fields and values.

It also includes cross-L2 gas fee mechanism, distributed operation and parallelization of ZK Prover, fuzz testing of zkSync components, and generalization of web3js/ethers.js/ethers.rs, which can separate interaction intent from ABI encoding, tx encoding, signature creation, etc.

If the applicant's proposal is accepted, they will receive a response from Matter Labs before November 1st and will be eligible for a monthly allowance of $3,500 during the Fellowship. Matter Labs states that this is grant-based funding, not a contractual position, and expects applicants' work products to be open-source, well-documented, and accessible to others. The most accomplished participants will have the opportunity to receive long-term scholarships and positions at Matter Labs, or join Matter Labs' incubation program and work closely with the Matter Labs investment team.

Although zkSync has previously received a high financing of 458 million US dollars, it is still small compared to ConsenSys, the parent company behind Linea. After all, ConsenSys has received 726 million US dollars in financing, and the funds are abundant. At the same time, ConsenSys's project MetaMask is the undisputed leader in the wallet track, bringing considerable profits to ConsenSys while providing strong support for Linea.

Not only Fellowship, but also fierce competition in L2

This time, zkSync follows the footsteps of its competitors and launches the Fellowship program, which reminds people of the previously launched ZK Stack by zkSync shortly after OP Stack.

In October 2022, Optimism introduced the OP Stack, a highly scalable and interoperable modular open-source blueprint. As a standardized open-source module, developers can assemble a customized chain through OP Stack to serve any specific blockchain use case.

After nearly half a year of research and development, zkSync immediately announced the launch of the modular open source framework ZK Stack for building custom zkRollups, giving developers complete autonomy, from choosing data availability modes to using their own project tokens for decentralized sequencers.

Related reading: "zkSync's OP Stack competitor, can it win the L2 scaling battle?"

The design of OP Stack allows for easier code forking than current efforts, as developers can easily abstract out the various components of the blockchain and modify it by inserting different modules. ZK Stack provides two key features: sovereignty and seamless connectivity. These zkRollup chains operate independently, relying only on Ethereum L1 for their activity and security, while cross-chain bridges facilitate interconnectivity between each chain, enabling trustless, fast, and inexpensive interoperability.

Due to the numerous star projects, the fierce competition in the L2 track has become a well-known fact in the entire cryptocurrency industry. In addition to the OP Stack and ZK Stack launched by Optimism and zkSync, respectively, the competition between the OP Rollup camp and the ZK Rollup camp in the RaaS field also includes Orbit launched by Arbitrum and Appchain launched by Starknet. In the zkEVM field, the tense relationship between the two "domestic champions" projects, Scroll and Taiko, has also become an open secret in the industry.

In addition, in early last month, Polygon's zero-knowledge proof team, Polygon Zero, publicly criticized zkSync in an article titled "Protecting the Open Source Spirit," accusing it of copying Polygon's open source code without permission and making misleading statements, which caused widespread attention in the industry for a while.

Polygon Zero stated that they heavily utilized the Plonky2 proof system in their recently released Boojum library, which was developed by Polygon Labs. Polygon Zero expressed concern that while Plonky2 is open-source, Matter Labs did not provide proper attribution. Additionally, Polygon Zero accused Matter Labs of misleadingly comparing the performance of Plonky2 and Boojum, with the founder of Matter Labs claiming that Boojum is over 10 times faster than Plonky2.

Matter Labs founder Alex responded promptly, strongly denying Polygon Zero's accusations and stating that clear ownership had already been given in their GitHub code repository when using the Plonky2 code.

Alex also attached relevant links as a response to support his viewpoint. In response to Alex, storm from Paradigm expressed agreement, believing that the ownership of zkSync can be done better, but it is definitely not plagiarism, at most it can be called a bit careless.

Related reading: "Polygon Zero accuses zkSync of plagiarism, founder responds 'open source may not be suitable for you'".

Looking across the entire L2 race track, zkSync stands out in terms of transaction activity. With the launch of zkSync's zkEVM mainnet, ZkSync Era, in March 2023, its TVL once rose to $700 million.

And a large part of the reason for this may be that zkSync's L2 competition strategy is never to lose to competitors and often follows closely behind. However, zkSync may also face a big challenge in terms of innovation if following the footsteps of competitors means it still needs to work hard. What new attempts should be made in attracting users and transactions in the ecosystem may be a big challenge for zkSync as well.

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