The rising hot topic in the world of encryption, why has ZK-Rollup technology become the focus of developers' pursuit? With high privacy and security, and powerful scalability, can ZK-Rollup technology stand out in the market competition? In the future of Web 3.0, developers may need to maintain a dialectical thinking attitude towards ZK-Rollup technology in order to seize the opportunities of the ZK track and explore the potential of on-chain application development. If you are also interested in ZK-Rollup technology, you may want to listen to the experiences shared by the guests in this issue of TinTinWeekly.
Highlights
The reasons for choosing ZK-Rollup technology: Easily achieve the goals of permission fairness and decentralization
The powerful scalability and exit mechanisms of ZK-Rollup technology make it a favorite in the world of encryption
The Starknet Chinese community is attracting more developers to learn about ZK through popularization information and educational activities
How can developers grasp the benefits of ZK technology? Learn technical documentation, try to write code, and make use of the composability feature in on-chain development
Why choose ZK-Rollup? Security, fairness, and decentralization
Developers familiar with zero-knowledge proofs should know that the biggest advantages of ZK technology lie in its security and privacy. In addition, ZK era and Starknet both natively support account abstraction, bringing a brand new experience to Web 3.0 users. "We can expect that native support for account abstraction on ZK era and Starknet is the inevitable path for Web 3.0 users to reach a higher level of user scale," Aaron confidently said. By using account abstraction, we can resolve the dilemma of high fees and long cycles in traditional transaction processes, enhance the privacy and security of accounts with ZK technology, and achieve the goals of permission fairness and decentralization. This is a positive signal for user experience. "Blockchain and smart contracts themselves implement account abstraction at the underlying level based on the principles of fairness and transparency. Whoever can develop excellent wallet applications faster can gain advantages in the user market."
However, ZK-Rollup technology is also full of various challenges while giving developers new opportunities. "Many of the challenges of ZK technology itself come from the immaturity of the technology itself, such as immature code leading to the generation of false evidence," summarized by Teacher Icer. Specifically, the first challenge is contract restrictions, where only a few specific pieces of information in the aggregated transfer records are aggregated; the second challenge is supporting complex logic, where the current attempts and performance improvements in supporting ZK EVM are still unsatisfactory, "faced with the impossible triangle of blockchain - security, scalability, and decentralization, ZK-Rollup inherits the security of the main chain, but does not fully guarantee decentralization"; the third challenge is comprehensive risk, where many platforms supported by ZK-Rollup have exposed technical flaws in contract upgrades, exit mechanisms, and so on, which is worth noting. For the long-term development in the future, the application of ZK-Rollup technology to platform construction and project development still requires developers to possess the consciousness of "seeking advantages and avoiding disadvantages" in order to truly maximize strengths and minimize weaknesses.
Complementary Advantages of ZK-Rollup Technology and Other Scalability Solutions
Technological and Ecological Advantages
Just as ZK-Rollup technology is gradually flourishing, the relationship between ZK-Rollup and Ethereum and other Layer 1 blockchain scalability solutions has become a hot topic among developers. Many developers believe that there is a competitive relationship between them, which is not conducive to future collaborative development. Leo disagrees with this view and believes that this competitive relationship can also be seen as a "complementary" relationship, where they both have their own strengths in terms of technology and ecology, "For example, Starknet helps Ethereum achieve scalability and improve performance through better implementation of ZK technology or solutions.
Encouraging Continuous Exploration by Developers
Furthermore, Ethereum's infrastructure has the potential for more innovative explorations, such as developing Layer 2 applications, which can also drive future market development in parallel." In the face of such a seemingly competitive technological ecosystem, continuous exploration on different Layer 2 or public chains is also a "complement" for developers. We should strive to leverage our technical advantages in order to gain an edge in the market competition.
Building Technical Collaboration Solutions
Although the competition in the technology market can be fierce, developers who choose ZK-Rollup technology have not taken the wrong path. Currently, ZK-Rollup technology has become a "hotcake" in the crypto world for the most important reason that it improves scalability without compromising the security of the main chain and has powerful capacity for expansion. Additionally, ZK-Rollup has sufficient security performance assurance, so as long as it has a sound exit mechanism, users can withdraw their funds even in the event of a failure or shutdown. With its flexible and adaptable technical processing capabilities, ZK-Rollup will also explore a unique collaborative development plan to achieve "complementary" development with more technical systems.
ZK-Rollup Application Pioneer —— Starknet's Innovative Experiment
In order to better step into the crypto world, Starknet has achieved impressive results by adopting ZK technology. Unlike traditional ZK technology, Starknet uses ZK VM, "which sacrifices some operational efficiency but improves ZK performance and reduces usage costs, fully meeting the scalability requirements," said Professor Leo. In addition, Starknet has developed its own custom developer language, Cairo, which supports native account abstraction and strives to create a user-friendly contract wallet.
Starknet can achieve faster and more complex calculations on-chain, which meets the development needs of full-chain games. Many promising full-chain games and derivative games are being developed on Starknet. At the same time, Starknet is also facilitating the entry of dynamic NFTs into full-chain game projects, enabling various game concepts.
The Starknet Chinese community, which is growing, is also attracting more Web 3 developers to join the technical ecosystem. Teacher Leo said, "Currently, the Starknet Chinese community is mainly doing two things: providing technical knowledge, daily updates on the Twitter platform, and translating technical knowledge content; and developer education, helping developers in the crypto field smoothly enter the Starknet ecosystem. In the future, Starknet will also hold education and training sessions and hackathons from time to time." We believe that Starknet, with the gathering of more developer power, will also develop stunning products.
Grasp the investment opportunities of ZK technology, developers still need to improve their technical capabilities
As venture capitalists, Teacher Yuxing and Teacher Jiucai also see the investment opportunities behind ZK-Rollup technology. "I am very interested in the technological innovation of ZK-Rollup itself, such as the gaming industry on the entire chain, which is a worthy investment direction under the ZK-Rollup technology system; in addition, the combination of ZKML and artificial intelligence technology also has potential development opportunities," said Teacher Yuxing. Compared to specific investment tracks, Teacher Jiucai suggests that we take a more macroscopic view of ZK-Rollup technology. He points out that we need to solve the development challenges faced by ZK-Rollup from both technical and ecological perspectives. Only by cultivating more developers, establishing a healthy community ecosystem, and designing excellent performance technical tools can we promote the incubation of more investment-worthy projects by ZK-Rollup. When we find a new technological narrative, we must also see the current development of the ecosystem, which is the most important proposition.
"In the face of investment and development opportunities in the ZK field, we still need to see if there will be leading DApps in the future." Undeniably, as the underlying infrastructure of the chain, ZK-Rollup is still in its early stages of development in areas such as trading, lending, and stablecoins. Teacher Jiucai looks forward to the emergence of innovative projects in the ZKML track in the future.
For developers, in addition to grasping the investment direction of ZK-Rollup technology, it is more important to improve their own development capabilities in order to seize development opportunities. The attending teachers suggest that developers interested in ZK-Rollup should further focus on targeted learning of technical documentation (understand the basic principles and algorithm logic of ZK technology); participants with development experience can try writing ZK-Rollup technical code to improve their technical skills and have a broader perspective. Based on this, developers should fully leverage the technical advantages of originality and composability in blockchain, continuously innovate, and explore the possibilities of technological coupling, so that ZK-Rollup can also shine in the future of Web 3!
