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zkEVM: The next-generation technical standard of the Ethereum application layer

Bankless

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EVM + ZK Rollup = ?

Original by William M. Peaster

Original compilation: TechFlow intern

Original title: "Bankless: Why ZkEVM Will Unleash the Great Potential of NFT?" "

Ethereum's future is extended through Rollups, and a special class of Rollups - ZK Rollups compatible with the Ethereum Virtual Machine - is The most promising way to realize this scenario in the future.

Looking to the future, it is no exaggeration to say that the "zkEVM" solution will become a game changer for general Web3 projects (including NFT).

What is zkEVM?

Rollups are L2 scaling solutions because they work on top of Ethereum L1 to make Ethereum transactions cheap and fast. The two most popular types of Rollups on the market today are Optimistic Rollups and ZK Rollups.

Both types execute transactions off-chain, i.e. outside of Ethereum L1, both types also publish their batch transaction data to Ethereum came up to inherit the extensive security guarantees of Ethereum. The difference between Optimistic Rollups and ZK Rollups lies in fraud proofs and zero-knowledge validity proofs, and their advantages.

Optimistic Rollups are a good fit from the start "General EVM computing",meaning that Ethereum projects - such as NFT projects - can easily port L1 smart contracts written in Solidity, or create L1-like smart contracts on these L2.

In contrast, ZK Rollups are very efficient and safe, and this feature will become more obvious as time goes on. However, so far, this kind of Rollup has not provided EVM compatibility due to some technical differences.

So, ZK Rollup with an EVM-compatible execution environment is zkEVM. So far, no such project has landed, so this is why zkEVM advancements represent the "holy grail" of ZK Rollups: because they finally allow these L2s to combine general-purpose EVM computation with the efficiencies afforded by zero-knowledge proofs.

As Vitalik predicted, this level of upgrade will help ZK Rollups win the race for all use cases. And now, "all use cases" includes a large NFT ecosystem. But before we talk about the impact of zkEVM+NFT, let's briefly review this week's developments and see how the future of zkEVM is here and now.

Three new zkEVM announcements

On Monday, July 18, the Scroll team released a Pre-Alpha testnet for their zkEVM-based ZK Rollup, named after Scroll:

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Then in 7 Wednesday 20th , released two other important zkEVM announcements:

· zkSync builder Matter Labs revealed that zkSync 2.0, A ZK Rollup based on zkEVM "will be launched on the mainnet in 100 days".

· Polygon launched the Polygon zkEVM and made it open source, and will launch a public testnet soon. It is worth noting that this ZK Rollup is not only designed for EVM compatibility, but also to be fully equivalent to EVM, which means that writing code and using tools on this ZK Rollup is no different from that on Ethereum, which means Very friendly for Web3 builders.

Why is zkEVM important to NFT?

We are moving towards a future where zk rollups based on zkEVM will be the gold standard for scaling Web3 projects.

Because it is based on encryption rather than economic incentives, ZK Rollup is relatively more secure than Optimistic Rollup. A number of cases have shown that ZK Rollup also significantly reduces the cost required for transactions. In addition,The fastest time to withdraw an NFT from a ZK Rollup is 15 minutes, while an Optimistic Rollup needs to wait for about 1 week.

Therefore, fast and affordable transactions + extremely high security guarantees + EVM compatibility + fast NFT extraction = zkEVM.

In fact, the bottleneck of the early NFT ecosystem has always been the technical limitations of Ethereum L1, and the resulting poor user experience, such as Expensive transaction fees. The arrival and development of zkEVM will help to completely break this bottleneck, allowing NFT projects to provide millions of users with a good Ethereum experience at any time.

It is also worth noting that the future of zkEVM may be even brighter. Because later this year, Ethereum’s highly anticipated Merge will be updated, but this is not the end of the roadmap. After Merge, Ethereum will usher in The Surge, and bring greater improvements to the scalability of Rollup by introducing sharding technology.

This means that L2 with ultra-low transaction costs and ultra-high performance is coming, these upgrades make NFT more ready to go to the world stage. In the long run, Ethereum itself may migrate from the EVM to the zkEVM model, so NFT is also very likely to run through zkEVM in the future. In the cryptocurrency space, sometimes you get a rare opportunity to see the future with great clarity, and this is certainly one of them.