Explain the development status of zkSync in detail: the surge of data on the chain depends on the wool party or the fundamentals?

Original Author: Joyce

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The TVL ranking of Layer 2 projects, currently zkSync Era ranks third, second only to Optimism, data source: L2beat

Although these dazzling data are not unrelated to the expected Token distribution of zkSync Era, in any case, after the popularity of the Bitcoin ecosystem led by BRC-20 fades, zkSync Era has become a rare hot spot and topic successor in the market.

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1. Layer 2 war is spreading, what are the advantages of zkSync Era

The high fee, low speed and even congestion of the Ethereum mainnet have brought about the explosion of the Layer 2 sector. Especially in the past six months, Arbitrum, Optimism, etc. have successively released token airdrops, and a large number of stories about getting rich have attracted the wool party to turn their attention to Layer 2 projects that have not yet released tokens. Layer 2 has become the focus of financial resources and topics in the industry. Coinbase, ConsenSys, etc. have successively entered the Layer 2 sector, and the blessing of giant funds has made Layer 2 a highly anticipated encryption narrative.

So, among the crowd of Layer 2, what is the position of zkSync Era and what are its advantages?

At present, the Layer 2 that the industry focuses on is mainly Rollup solutions, including Optimistic Rollup and ZK Rollup. Data validation form.

Optimism Rollup first assumes that all transaction data is ok, but provides a period of inspection gap. Once someone finds transaction data involving fraud, they will be rewarded with penalty funds pledged by audit nodes.

ZK Rollup adopts the method of zero-knowledge proof. After the data is packaged, the zero-knowledge proof of the data generated by a large number of calculations is submitted to the chain together with other relevant core data to verify whether there is an error. Compared with the tortuous game process in the middle of Optimism Rollup, the result of sex is indeed much better.

However, the problem with ZK Rollup is that the technical implementation is much more complicated than that of Optimism Rollup. Therefore, when the main network of Optimistic Rollup projects such as Arbitrum and OP goes online early to seize the opportunity, other ZK projects can only do it in a hurry. After all, technical problems It requires real investment of time and resources, and there is no rush.

However, whether it is a public chain or a Layer 2 project, ecological construction is particularly important. Moreover, the construction of many projects is the process of maintenance while flying the plane. It is difficult to wait for a project to be perfect before going online. Bitcoin is an exception. After all, the functions and incentive mechanisms of Bitcoin are very simple.

For most projects, it is a process of running and iterating after going online, and Ethereum is a typical example. Today's Ethereum, compared with when it was first launched, has undergone great changes in terms of performance, architecture, and even the consensus mechanism. However, the continuous construction of the ecology has made Ethereum a giant in the industry.

Therefore, it is not difficult to understand that some public chain or Layer 2 projects are eager to go online before the technical solution is fully mature.

Judging from the current overall ecological structure of Layer 2, since Arbitrum's mainnet launch in September 2021, TVL has rapidly soared to more than one billion US dollars in just a few days. Although OP went online a month earlier than Arbitrum, but At this time, the stability and experience of the main network are not as good as expected, and the growth of TVL is not as fast as that of Arbitrum. But in any case, compared with ZK projects such as zkSync and Starknet, which launched the main network a year later, they have indeed seized the opportunity in ecological construction.

However, as the first ZK Rollup to be launched on the mainnet, the data after zkSync Era is also remarkable.

Unlike Starknet, which uses an independent contract language, the language tools used by zkSync Era are very compatible with the existing Ethereum mainnet. Such high compatibility allows projects on the Ethereum mainnet to migrate to the zkSync Era mainnet quite smoothly, and Like Arbitrum in the early days, the TVL of zkSync Era rose rapidly after the mainnet was launched. In just 20 days, the TVL exceeded 2 billion US dollars, which is not inferior to the current state of Arbitrum's initial launch.

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2. Overview of the zkSync ecosystem

Arbitrum currently has a TVL of 5.6 billion US dollars, accounting for about 65% of the TVL of all Layer 2 projects. After a year and a half of ecological construction, there are currently more than 500 DApps on Arbitrum, especially GMX (2021 Launched on Arbitrum in September 2009), it is also the flagship project of Arbitrum's ecological native.

It can be said that the rise of Arbitrum is inseparable from these original high-quality projects. Even after the Token distribution incentives have been completed, Arbitrum TVL still ranks first. Although at the beginning, due to its high compatibility with the EVM of the Ethereum mainnet, a large number of DApps on Ethereum can migrate smoothly and complete the accumulation of initial TVL, but the real continuous competitive advantage depends on its native high-quality DApps on the chain.

So, how is the current zkSync ecology? Are there signs of strong projects like GMX appearing?

According to the current zkSync official website statistics, nearly 300 Dapps have been connected to the zkSync Era ecosystem. Although there are many star projects such as Uniswap, 1inch, and LayerZero among them, only the projects marked "Live on Era" are actually launched. There are only 58 of them. Moreover, from the list of projects that have been launched, it is basically difficult to see well-known DApps.

Source: zkSync official website

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Data source: defillama

Moreover, although the number of independent addresses of zkSync Era has grown very rapidly at present, reaching 920,700 in just two months, the number of ETH on the cross-chain bridge has also broken through a new high, exceeding 280,000, but from the ETH balance of each address Look, more than 61.4% of the address balance is less than 0.1 ETH, 30.6% of the address balance is between 0.1 and 1 ETH, 7.7% of the address balance is between 1 and 10 ETH, and the remaining 0.3% of the address balance is between 10 ETH above.

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Schematic diagram of zkSync Era address balance distribution, source: Dune

Deyi is a member of the zkSync Era wool army. When talking about zkSync, he said:

At present, due to the lack of star projects such as Uniswap and AAVE on zkSync Era, it is difficult to undertake the lock-up of large amounts of funds (participating in DEX liquidity mining or lending agreements), and most of them are wool users. In particular, zkSync made it clear that it will release tokens. Under Arbitrum’s innovative token incentive model, the anticipation of zkSync airdrop has brought a large number of studios to flood in, bringing about an explosive growth in the number of independent addresses.

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3. Current problems of zkSync Era

As the first ZKEVM project to be launched on the mainnet, although zkSync Era has more than 920,000 independent addresses in just two months, surpassing all other mainstream Layer 2 projects, and TVL has also achieved explosive growth, but it is incompatible with Compared with star Layer 2 projects such as Arbitrum, its problems are also very obvious:

1. It is still in the early stage. Although the official website announces many cooperation projects, the star projects have not really launched. The number of native projects that have been launched is not large, and the quality is also uneven. It is difficult to rely on star projects that are endorsed by institutions and have a large community base to quickly accumulate TVL.

2. Dex and borrowing are the top-ranked native projects that have been launched. There are no projects with unique competitive advantages like GMX to break through. For users, apart from the attractiveness of Token distribution, there is not much For other reasons that must be used, after the Token distribution is expected to disappear, how to compete with the Layer 2 giants Arbitrum and Optimism that occupy the first-mover advantage to obtain high-quality TVL is a problem that has to be considered.

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Four. Summary

In addition to the traditional star Layer 2 projects, Binance, Coinbase, ConsenSys and other giants have laid out the Layer 2 sector, which is likely to be the light of the next round of bull market. Can zkSync Era come out? There are still too many variables.