After two years of development, a group of Ethereum idealists are close to launching their zero-knowledge EVM (Ethereum Virtual Machine) — Scroll — developed with Ethereum’s values in mind.
While there are already several zero-knowledge EVMs in existence today, Scroll co-founder Ye Zhang told Cointelegraph at Token2049 that the project was “idealistic” as the team was sticking to the philosophy and the principles that Ethereum already cultivates.
Zhang said that they have been working on this mostly as a “labor of love,” driven by a shared vision to scale Ethereum while staying true to its decentralization principles.
He added that the project was more human interest than simply solving computational problems, “we started in an open source way, in a community-driven way,” he said.
“We can grow this community very organically, and then grow our network effect, not in a very silly way, not in a very marketing-driven aggressive way.”
The new zkEVM is set to launch within weeks, having already undergone extensive testing and carried out audits on the code. Zhang said the Scroll will launch after some final testing and major projects like Uniswap and Aave are ready to deploy on Scroll at launch.
The mathematician believes zk-rollups are the “holy grail” or best-in-class layer-2 scaling solutions, which are also very cheap and secure.
However, Scroll is entering a crowded ecosystem that already has zkEVM solutions from Polygon, Immutable, StarkWare, and ConsenSys’ Linea which launched in August.
Zhang claimed that some of the other systems such as Linea have some “unproven” parts in the circuit but believes Scroll provides a “complete proof” of all Ethereum “opcodes” and components of the transaction.
“So it’s not only compared to compatibility, but also a full proof for proving that everything we already have,” he said.
Related: Buterin weighs in on zk-EVMs’ impact on decentralization and security
Scroll is a layer-2 scaling project that has been in development for two years. It uses zero-knowledge proofs to compress data off-chain, meaning only proofs are submitted on-chain — enabling higher throughput.
As always, we published another ecosystem update, highlighting some of the latest projects to join the Scroll ecosystem
This week, we cover DeFi aggregators and permissionless lending protocols. https://t.co/1G4ErzAB00
— Scroll (@Scroll_ZKP) September 16, 2023
The EVM component enables full native compatibility with any existing Ethereum software and applications.
The initial setup will still involve some centralization such as sequencers, Zhang said, but the roadmap will decentralize this further over time.