bluegreen1352
New member
The zkSync Era mainnet opened to everyone on March 24, and in just over two months, TVL has reached $480 million and is growing at nearly 20% per week. zkSync Era now has 920,000 unique addresses, far surpassing popular Layer2 networks such as Arbitrum, Optimism, and Starknet.
Although these bright data and zkSync Era Token distribution expectations are not unrelated, but in any case, after the BRC-20 led bitcoin ecological heat faded, zkSync Era has become a rare hot spot and topic of the market.
So what is the current ecological development status of zkSync Era? What about the availability of ZK Rollup, which has been criticized for being technically difficult and slow? Can the zkSync Era continue its high heat and high TVL growth beyond the expected end of Token incentives?
01 Layer2 What advantages the zkSync Era has as the war spreads
The high cost, low speed and even congestion of the Ethereum main network have brought about the explosion of the Layer2 plate. Especially in the past six months, Arbitrum, Optimism and other token airdrop have been released, a large number of stories of sudden wealth have attracted the Wool party's attention to the Layer2 project that has not yet released the token, and Layer2 has become the focus of financial resources and topics in the industry. Coupled with Binance, Coinbase, ConsenSys and others have successively entered the Layer2 sector, the blessing of giant funds has made Layer2 a highly anticipated crypto narrative.
So, where does zkSync Era fit in among Layer2 and what are its advantages?
At present, Layer2 is mainly the Rollup solution that the industry focuses on, including Optimistic Rollup and ZK Rollup. The basic principle of both of them is to centrally package some transactions in Layer2 and then submit them to the mainnet of Ethereum. But the difference lies in the form of data validation.
Optimism Rollup assumes that all transaction data is positive, but provides a period of inspection in which a person finds fraudulent transaction data and is rewarded with penalty money pledged by the audit node.
ZK Rollup adopts the method of zero-knowledge proof. After data packaging, the zero-knowledge proof of data generated by a large number of calculations is submitted to the chain together with other related core data to verify whether there is any error, and a definite result is given directly by relying on algorithms and computing power. Compared with the tortuous game process in the middle of Optimism Rollup, That's a lot better.
However, the problem with ZK Rollup is that technical implementation is much more complicated than Optimism Rollup. Therefore, when the main network of Optimistic Rollup project, such as Arbitrum and OP, is launched early to seize the opportunity, other ZK projects can only worry. After all, technical problems require real time and resource investment, and there is no hurry.
However, no matter for the public chain or Layer2 project, the construction of ecology is particularly important. And the construction of many projects is the process of flying aircraft while maintaining, it is difficult to really wait until a project is perfect and then go online, like Bitcoin is an exception, after all, the function and incentive mechanism of Bitcoin are very simple.
For most projects, it is a process of running while iterating after going online, and Ethereum is a typical one. Today's Ethereum, compared with when it was first launched, great changes have taken place in performance, architecture and even consensus mechanism, but the continuous construction of ecology has made Ethereum the giant of the industry.
Therefore, it is not difficult to understand that some public chain or Layer2 projects are rushing to go online when the technical solution is not fully mature.
From the perspective of the current Layer2 ecological pattern, after Arbitrum launched the main network in September 2021, TVL quickly soared to more than $1 billion in just a few days. Although OP went online one month earlier than Arbitrum, the stability and experience of the main network were not as expected when it went online. TVL is not growing as fast as Arbitrum. However, compared with zkSync and Starknet, which launched the main network a year later, ZK projects have indeed taken the lead in ecological construction.
However, as the first ZK Rollup on the mainnet, the data of zkSync Era after its launch is also remarkable.
Unlike Starknet, which uses a separate contract language, zkSync Era uses language tools that are very compatible with the existing Ethereum mainnet, and this high compatibility allows projects on the Ethereum mainnet to migrate to the zkSync Era mainnet rather smoothly, just like the early Arbitrum. The TVL of zkSync Era rose rapidly after the main network was launched, and the TVL of more than 2 billion US dollars in just 20 days was no less than the current champion Arbitrum's initial online status.
So, although zkSync Era TVL currently accounts for less than 5% of the total Layer2, but at the current rate of nearly 20% weekly growth, is it the future?
02 zkSync Ecosystem Overview
At present, Arbitrum's TVL is 5.6 billion US dollars, accounting for about 65% of the TVL of all Layer2 projects. After a year and a half of ecological construction, Arbitrum has more than 500 DApps at present. In particular, GMX, which once continued to occupy the hot list in the bear market (launched on Arbitrum in September 2021), is the ace project of Arbitrum's ecological native.
It can be said that Arbitrum's rise all the way and these native quality projects are inseparable, even if the Token distribution incentive has been completed, Arbitrum TVL still ranks first. Although at the beginning, Arbitrum allowed a large number of Ethereum Dapps to be silky migrated and completed the initial TVL accumulation due to its high compatibility with the Ethereum main network EVM, it really continued to maintain its competitive advantage by relying on its native high-quality DApps on the chain.
So, what about the zkSync ecosystem? Is there a strength project like GMX on the horizon?
According to the statistics of the zkSync official website, nearly 300 Dapps have been connected to the zkSync Era ecosystem, although some of them are Uniswap, 1inch, LayerZero and other star projects. The only projects that are actually online are those labeled "Live on Era," and there are only 58 in total. Moreover, from the list of projects that have been launched, it is basically difficult to see the figure of well-known Dapps.
It can be said that the current zkSync ecosystem is still in a relatively poor state, although TVL growth is fast, but the total amount is not high. The number one SyncSwap accounts for more than 41% of DeFi TVL on the entire chain, and the top ten DApp TVL accounts for nearly 96%. Moreover, these Dapps are dominated by Dex, coupled with several loan agreements, and at present, there is no project with some unique innovative advantages like GMX in the top ten projects.
In addition, although the number of independent addresses in the current zkSync Era has grown very rapidly, reaching 920,700 in just two months, and the number of ETH on the cross-chain bridge has also broken through a new high of more than 280,000, but from the perspective of the ETH balance of each address, more than 61.4% of the address balance is lower than 0.1ETH. 30.6% of addresses have a balance between 0.1 and 1ETH, 7.7% of addresses have a balance between 1 and 10 Eth, and the remaining 0.3% of addresses have a balance above 10ETH.
At present, due to the lack of Uniswap, AAVE and other star projects on zkSync Era, it is difficult to undertake the locking warehouse of large funds (participate in DEX liquidity mining or loan agreements), and the vast majority of the wool users. In particular, zkSync clearly stated that it would release tokens. Under Arbitrum's innovative token incentive model, the expectation of zkSync airdrop led to the influx of a large number of cashmere studios, bringing an explosive growth in the number of independent addresses.
However, the projects really worth participating in the interaction are limited, nothing more than the DEX, borrow, and several commonly used cross-chain Bridges that TVL ranks relatively high. As for the official cross-chain bridge of zkSync, because currently it can only be cross-chain to zkSync from the Ethereum main network, the cost is 5-6U, and even more than 10U when the chain is congested, so for the Woollen Party, unless it is for the expected interaction of airdrop, other cross-chain Bridges are generally chosen when they really need to use funds. After all, the cost savings are more than 70%.
03 zkSync Era Current issues
As the first ZKEVM project to go online on the main network, although the number of independent addresses in zkSync Era reached more than 920,000 in just two months, surpassing all other mainstream Layer2 projects, and TVL also achieved explosive growth, compared with Arbitrum and other star Layer2 projects, The problem is also very obvious:
1. It is still in the early stage, although there are many cooperation projects announced on the official website, the star projects have not really been launched. The number of native projects that have been launched is small, and the quality is uneven, and it is difficult to rely on star projects with institutional endorsement and a huge community base to accumulate TVL quickly.
2. The top listed native projects are mainly Dex and borrowing, and there are no projects with unique competitive advantages like GMX to break through. For users, besides the attraction of Token distribution, there are not many other reasons to use it. How to compete with Arbitrum and Optimism of Layer2, which occupy the first-mover advantage, to obtain high-quality TVL is a problem that has to be considered.
3. The complexity of zkSync Era technology leads to the instability of its blocks. Compared with Optimistic Rollup projects such as Arbitrum and Optimism, ZK Rollup project is much more difficult in technical development. zkSync is relatively compatible with the Ethereum mainnet, but Dapps on the zkSync Era still have some compatibility challenges. However, in the future, with the further maturity of ZKEVM technology and the arrival of the decentralization stage, these problems will be effectively improved.
04 Summary
In addition to the traditional star Layer2 project, the Layer2 plate that Binance, Coinbase, ConsenSys and other giants have laid out is likely to be the light of the next round of bull market, zkSync Era can run out? There are still too many variables.
Although these bright data and zkSync Era Token distribution expectations are not unrelated, but in any case, after the BRC-20 led bitcoin ecological heat faded, zkSync Era has become a rare hot spot and topic of the market.
So what is the current ecological development status of zkSync Era? What about the availability of ZK Rollup, which has been criticized for being technically difficult and slow? Can the zkSync Era continue its high heat and high TVL growth beyond the expected end of Token incentives?
01 Layer2 What advantages the zkSync Era has as the war spreads
The high cost, low speed and even congestion of the Ethereum main network have brought about the explosion of the Layer2 plate. Especially in the past six months, Arbitrum, Optimism and other token airdrop have been released, a large number of stories of sudden wealth have attracted the Wool party's attention to the Layer2 project that has not yet released the token, and Layer2 has become the focus of financial resources and topics in the industry. Coupled with Binance, Coinbase, ConsenSys and others have successively entered the Layer2 sector, the blessing of giant funds has made Layer2 a highly anticipated crypto narrative.
So, where does zkSync Era fit in among Layer2 and what are its advantages?
At present, Layer2 is mainly the Rollup solution that the industry focuses on, including Optimistic Rollup and ZK Rollup. The basic principle of both of them is to centrally package some transactions in Layer2 and then submit them to the mainnet of Ethereum. But the difference lies in the form of data validation.
Optimism Rollup assumes that all transaction data is positive, but provides a period of inspection in which a person finds fraudulent transaction data and is rewarded with penalty money pledged by the audit node.
ZK Rollup adopts the method of zero-knowledge proof. After data packaging, the zero-knowledge proof of data generated by a large number of calculations is submitted to the chain together with other related core data to verify whether there is any error, and a definite result is given directly by relying on algorithms and computing power. Compared with the tortuous game process in the middle of Optimism Rollup, That's a lot better.
However, the problem with ZK Rollup is that technical implementation is much more complicated than Optimism Rollup. Therefore, when the main network of Optimistic Rollup project, such as Arbitrum and OP, is launched early to seize the opportunity, other ZK projects can only worry. After all, technical problems require real time and resource investment, and there is no hurry.
However, no matter for the public chain or Layer2 project, the construction of ecology is particularly important. And the construction of many projects is the process of flying aircraft while maintaining, it is difficult to really wait until a project is perfect and then go online, like Bitcoin is an exception, after all, the function and incentive mechanism of Bitcoin are very simple.
For most projects, it is a process of running while iterating after going online, and Ethereum is a typical one. Today's Ethereum, compared with when it was first launched, great changes have taken place in performance, architecture and even consensus mechanism, but the continuous construction of ecology has made Ethereum the giant of the industry.
Therefore, it is not difficult to understand that some public chain or Layer2 projects are rushing to go online when the technical solution is not fully mature.
From the perspective of the current Layer2 ecological pattern, after Arbitrum launched the main network in September 2021, TVL quickly soared to more than $1 billion in just a few days. Although OP went online one month earlier than Arbitrum, the stability and experience of the main network were not as expected when it went online. TVL is not growing as fast as Arbitrum. However, compared with zkSync and Starknet, which launched the main network a year later, ZK projects have indeed taken the lead in ecological construction.
However, as the first ZK Rollup on the mainnet, the data of zkSync Era after its launch is also remarkable.
Unlike Starknet, which uses a separate contract language, zkSync Era uses language tools that are very compatible with the existing Ethereum mainnet, and this high compatibility allows projects on the Ethereum mainnet to migrate to the zkSync Era mainnet rather smoothly, just like the early Arbitrum. The TVL of zkSync Era rose rapidly after the main network was launched, and the TVL of more than 2 billion US dollars in just 20 days was no less than the current champion Arbitrum's initial online status.
So, although zkSync Era TVL currently accounts for less than 5% of the total Layer2, but at the current rate of nearly 20% weekly growth, is it the future?
02 zkSync Ecosystem Overview
At present, Arbitrum's TVL is 5.6 billion US dollars, accounting for about 65% of the TVL of all Layer2 projects. After a year and a half of ecological construction, Arbitrum has more than 500 DApps at present. In particular, GMX, which once continued to occupy the hot list in the bear market (launched on Arbitrum in September 2021), is the ace project of Arbitrum's ecological native.
It can be said that Arbitrum's rise all the way and these native quality projects are inseparable, even if the Token distribution incentive has been completed, Arbitrum TVL still ranks first. Although at the beginning, Arbitrum allowed a large number of Ethereum Dapps to be silky migrated and completed the initial TVL accumulation due to its high compatibility with the Ethereum main network EVM, it really continued to maintain its competitive advantage by relying on its native high-quality DApps on the chain.
So, what about the zkSync ecosystem? Is there a strength project like GMX on the horizon?
According to the statistics of the zkSync official website, nearly 300 Dapps have been connected to the zkSync Era ecosystem, although some of them are Uniswap, 1inch, LayerZero and other star projects. The only projects that are actually online are those labeled "Live on Era," and there are only 58 in total. Moreover, from the list of projects that have been launched, it is basically difficult to see the figure of well-known Dapps.
It can be said that the current zkSync ecosystem is still in a relatively poor state, although TVL growth is fast, but the total amount is not high. The number one SyncSwap accounts for more than 41% of DeFi TVL on the entire chain, and the top ten DApp TVL accounts for nearly 96%. Moreover, these Dapps are dominated by Dex, coupled with several loan agreements, and at present, there is no project with some unique innovative advantages like GMX in the top ten projects.
In addition, although the number of independent addresses in the current zkSync Era has grown very rapidly, reaching 920,700 in just two months, and the number of ETH on the cross-chain bridge has also broken through a new high of more than 280,000, but from the perspective of the ETH balance of each address, more than 61.4% of the address balance is lower than 0.1ETH. 30.6% of addresses have a balance between 0.1 and 1ETH, 7.7% of addresses have a balance between 1 and 10 Eth, and the remaining 0.3% of addresses have a balance above 10ETH.
At present, due to the lack of Uniswap, AAVE and other star projects on zkSync Era, it is difficult to undertake the locking warehouse of large funds (participate in DEX liquidity mining or loan agreements), and the vast majority of the wool users. In particular, zkSync clearly stated that it would release tokens. Under Arbitrum's innovative token incentive model, the expectation of zkSync airdrop led to the influx of a large number of cashmere studios, bringing an explosive growth in the number of independent addresses.
However, the projects really worth participating in the interaction are limited, nothing more than the DEX, borrow, and several commonly used cross-chain Bridges that TVL ranks relatively high. As for the official cross-chain bridge of zkSync, because currently it can only be cross-chain to zkSync from the Ethereum main network, the cost is 5-6U, and even more than 10U when the chain is congested, so for the Woollen Party, unless it is for the expected interaction of airdrop, other cross-chain Bridges are generally chosen when they really need to use funds. After all, the cost savings are more than 70%.
03 zkSync Era Current issues
As the first ZKEVM project to go online on the main network, although the number of independent addresses in zkSync Era reached more than 920,000 in just two months, surpassing all other mainstream Layer2 projects, and TVL also achieved explosive growth, compared with Arbitrum and other star Layer2 projects, The problem is also very obvious:
1. It is still in the early stage, although there are many cooperation projects announced on the official website, the star projects have not really been launched. The number of native projects that have been launched is small, and the quality is uneven, and it is difficult to rely on star projects with institutional endorsement and a huge community base to accumulate TVL quickly.
2. The top listed native projects are mainly Dex and borrowing, and there are no projects with unique competitive advantages like GMX to break through. For users, besides the attraction of Token distribution, there are not many other reasons to use it. How to compete with Arbitrum and Optimism of Layer2, which occupy the first-mover advantage, to obtain high-quality TVL is a problem that has to be considered.
3. The complexity of zkSync Era technology leads to the instability of its blocks. Compared with Optimistic Rollup projects such as Arbitrum and Optimism, ZK Rollup project is much more difficult in technical development. zkSync is relatively compatible with the Ethereum mainnet, but Dapps on the zkSync Era still have some compatibility challenges. However, in the future, with the further maturity of ZKEVM technology and the arrival of the decentralization stage, these problems will be effectively improved.
04 Summary
In addition to the traditional star Layer2 project, the Layer2 plate that Binance, Coinbase, ConsenSys and other giants have laid out is likely to be the light of the next round of bull market, zkSync Era can run out? There are still too many variables.
