Ethereum's Rollup Race: What is the "real" zkEVM?

Original source: Sage D. Young

Compilation of the original text: Shui Duoduo | zkSync

Last week, three announcements from Scroll, Matter Labs, and Polygon all had one thing in common: each company hinted that it would be the first to bring zkEVM to market.

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read more:The Sudden Rise of EVM Compatible ZK Rollups

zkEVMs all aspire to the same goal: to create a ZK that feels like a layer 1 blockchain using EthereumRollupsexperience. This means that developers should be able to port their existing smart contracts without changing the code and abandoning the EVM (Ethereum Virtual Machine) tooling they are used to.

EVM, not a specific piece of hardware or software,understand betterA combination of rules, criteria, and packages. When shared between different computers running similar software, this set of shared standards merges into a single network (Ethereum is such a network, although many other blockchain networks have adopted versions of the EVM).

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zkEVMs

We won't explain all the different types of aggregation in this article. For more information on this - including the difference between Optimistic rollups and the more advanced ZK rollups discussed here - you can readvalid pointsand CoinDesk'sLayer 2 explaineddevice.

So far, zero-knowledge aggregation has only been applied to a few use cases — such as sending tokens between addresses or trading non-fungible tokens (NFT). zkEVMs — zero-knowledge rollups designed to power any ethereum smart contract — were expected to be “years away” until recently.

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competition schedule

As for why all three teams seem to think they have the "first" zkEVM, it's probably their mutualdidn't realizeTheir competitors are developing at a similar pace.

When Matter Labs (zkSync) said it would be the first zkEVM to market in Q1 2023, it probably didn't realize that Polygon would launch its own zkEVM last week.

Perhaps Polygon, in announcing that it would be the first zkEVM to market, didn't realize that zkSync was poised to launch on Ethereum's mainnet before the end of the year — ahead of Polyon's planned launch in early 2023.

As we all know, the timetable of cryptoland is only an estimate, and we should take the roadmaps of Scroll, zkSync and Polygon with reservations.

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EVM Equivalent Compatible with EVM

Last week, when Polygon announced that it would bring to the market the first ZK rollup equivalent to the EVMface criticism.According to some bigwigs, Polygon's solution is best described as EVM "compatible", rather than EVM equivalent.

So what is the difference between compatibility and equivalence?

Ethereum's two leading optimistic rollups, Artbitrum and Optimism, boast that they are EVM equivalent. This means that the experience of developing on Arbitrum and Optimism is 100% identical to that of developing on Ethereum; Layer chain, they don't need to worry about layer 1 contracts breaking.

EVM equivalence means a lot to developers because it means much less overhead and effort when migrating from layer 1 to layer 2.

Users also see the benefit of EVM equivalence. Users of EVM-equivalent chains such as Optimism and Arbitrum do not need to abandon familiar applications such as Metamask without simultaneously using rollup-specific wallets or other tools.

EVM compatibility is a looser definition than EVM equivalence. Exactly the same developer and user experience as Ethereum, an EVM-compatible chain may not plug into all the same tools and software frameworks used on Ethereum.

Developers may need to rewrite their smart contracts in order to port them to EVM-compatible blockchains—sometimes using a completely different programming language than Ethereum's native language, Solidity. Even if developers are still able to write their smart contracts using Solidity, some operations may not be fully supported by rollup, which could lead to bugs or other engineering difficulties.

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Is the polygonal EVM equivalent?

Last week, when Polygon announced that it was bringing the first EVM-equivalent zkEVM to market, some bigwigs pointed out that the specification Polygon provided was best described as EVM-compatible rather than EVM-equivalent.

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zkSync2.0

zkSync 2.0 is at the language level. Developers can write smart contracts in Solidity, butzkSync willThat code is translated into another language called Yul, which is then interpreted to do all the fancy cryptography that enables zero-knowledge rollups.

Matter Labs, the team behind zkSync, says its system is designed to offer certain advantages to rollups — particularly in how it generates computationally intensive cryptographic proofs.

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Scroll and Polygon

Both zkEVMs take a bytecode-level approach.

These methods do away with the translator step entirely, meaning they don't convert Solidity code into a separate language before it is compiled and interpreted. This means better compatibility with the EVM. But even with these two, there are a few differences that might make Scroll more of a "real" zkEVM than Polygon, depending on who you ask.

a reporta reportAs explained in , “Part of the [EVM] debate is whether EVM bytecode is executed directly or interpreted and then executed. In other words, if a solution does not reflect the official EVM specification, it cannot be considered a true zkEVM. In this definition, a Scroll might be considered a 'true zkEVM', rather than a Polygon."

According to Messari, "Polygon expresses each opcode using a new set of assembly code, the human-readable bytecode translation, which allows code to behave differently on the EVM."

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Marketing in the Virtual World

Last week’s zkEVM announcement represented impressive technological advancement, but, as cryptocurrencies have proven time and time again, even highly technical concepts are not immune to marketing distortions. (Polygon's technical team has always been very strong, but the marketing team always likes to exaggerate and brag)

At the end of the day, though, subtle technical differences (such as the difference between EVM equivalence and compatibility) exist within ill-defined boundaries.

As Scroll co-founder Sandy Peng puts it: “There is no clear consensus on any definition. [Scroll’s] entire research team tends to have a certain narrative or a certain view of things, but it’s by no means a definitive thing. Our The research team didn't even agree on what everything meant."

Even less clear (and probably less important) is who can rightly claim to be the "first" zkEVM.

"'First' is a very philosophical concept," "Whether you measure the first to announce or the first to launch, or the first to implement mainnet ... it may take months or years to fix all the kinks and debug. years."

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