Spend more than a day on Ethereum’s Mainnet and you’ll realize gas fees are a bottleneck. These fees go to the miners –– those providing computation power to execute transactions. Each transaction performed by a smart contract –– sending money, performing a numerical operation, or writing a message onchain –– costs gas to execute. Major protocols –– from Uniswap to OpenSea –– drove an explosion of chain usage over the past year rendering regular activities prohibitively expensive for everyday users. I’m still lending $300 to Aave-v1 for Rabbithole, which cost $500 to migrate at some point.

Matter Labs, building zkSync, propose an equally secure and significantly cheaper alternative

zkSync’s v2 –– zkSync 2.0 –– has launched on Ethereum’s Goerli Testnet, for users to explore and stress-test their implementation. Their v1 has been live on Eth’s Mainnet since mid 2020, securely and (almost) trustlessly processing millions of transactions for a fraction of their original cost. The cryptographic method behind this exciting tool is known as a Zero Knowledge Proof, and will be explored in Part 2 of this series. Hence, these scaling solutions are known as Zero Knowledge Rollups (zkRs). For now, let’s take a journey through the possibilities these zkRs open up for you, me, and any other person unwilling to spend $50 to send $20 worth of ETH.