zkSync is taking another step to decentralize.
Named after a mythical creature found in Lewis Carroll’s poem ‘The Hunting of the Snark,’ the team behind zkSync has launched its latest upgrade to its fast layer-2 network .
The launch is in so-called mainnet shadow mode, per team, as part of a phased rollout of the launch. This mode is a testing zone that runs parallel to the mainnet.
zkSync is a novel scaling solution for Ethereum and one of the few that uses zero-knowledge (zk) rollups to do so. There are two types of rollups: zk and optimistic. The two batch transactions come from the mainnet, roll them into smaller bundles, then those bundles are compressed into a proof, and put on Ethereum.
Part of that process involves a prover. This piece of technology is what compresses and wraps all transactions. It’s the cryptographic equivalent of a trash compactor, except it’s not trash but potentially thousands of dollars in crypto activity.
Due to the high computing power required to generate the proofs, however, the barrier for users to participate is relatively high.
The latest upgrade addresses this precisely.
Called Boojum, which, according to Carroll, is the most dangerous type of Snark (itself a fictionalized creature), the technology lowers the hardware barrier to help secure zkSync.
The new prover can be operated with as little as 8 gigabytes of hardware, while the average prover requires about 500 gigabytes on average, said zkSync CEO Alex Gluchowski.
“So far, we’ve seen benchmark competitors showing something like north of 500 gigabytes of RAM for a prover,” he said. Decrypt. “And because you can only run it in the cloud, it’s not ready for it yet [wide adoption]. Our prover only needs eight gigabytes of GPU RAM and it can run on GPUs compatible with gaming computers.
Along with lowering the hardware needs, Boojum has made all of its transaction compression more affordable, too. Cutting costs here is important, even if it’s just pennies.
“Just because a transaction costs $1 to produce, or even 10 cents, or even less than that, going through hundreds of thousands of transactions per second means massive expansion, and you probably don’t have enough of hardware in weak clusters. to create and maintain this load,” said Gluchowski.
Instead of many large data centers supporting a blockchain network, especially one that performs tax calculations such as creating cryptographic proofs, the upgraded prover will make it accessible to anyone.
Like the miners of Bitcoin and validators of Ethereum are paid for securing their networks, so are zkSync provers, he said.
The zkSync CEO even argued that this could be a viable way to reinvent the mining industry.
“I personally don’t think proof of work will be a sustainable source of business,” he said Decrypt. “They have to switch to something that gives the average surplus value, not like junk work. Actually like doing some useful work.”
With this decentralization step by step implemented, Gluchowski said the next step is to decentralize the zkSync sequencer. This piece of a blockchain is responsible for ordering transactions in each block.
The implementation of this step also suggests a token launch in the future, he said Decrypt.
“When you’re decentralizing the sequencer, you need a way to be permissionless to verify transactions,” Gluchowski said.
