Uniswap, Sushi & other DeFi giants launch in Ethereum layer 2 zkSync Era

The Ethereum layer 2 scaling network, zkSync Era, has enabled quicker and less expensive transfers after four years of development. On March 24, between 32 to 50 initiatives, including some of the biggest names in decentralised finance like Uniswap, Sushi, Maker, and Curve, are scheduled to launch.

The majority of Ethereum DApps can easily port over with very little modification thanks to ZkSync Era, the first zk-Rollup compatible with the Ethereum Virtual Machine to debut on mainnet. The network can scale "orders of magnitude" more than Ethereum's present 10–12 transactions per second (TPS), starting with "tens of TPS" and increasing as needed.

Increase in transaction speed

The "fair onboarding alpha" of the project, which debuted on February 17, enables projects to port over and try out security and optimisations. The creators of zkSync Era, Matter Labs, claimed that to lower the possibility of any incidents, they had spent $3.8 million on security testing, seven independent security assessments, and a bug bounty programme.

Zk-Rollups, such as zkSync, Scroll, and products from Polygon, StarkWare, and Consensys, compute transactions away from the Ethereum blockchain while offering a small cryptographic proof that is written as a single transaction back on Ethereum showing that a collection of other transactions has been completed correctly. ZkSync also uses recursion, which produces a proof demonstrating the execution of a number of other proofs (each depicting numerous transactions).

Faster Withdrawals for users

Compared to optimistic-rollup layer 2s like Optimism, where withdrawals take a week, Zk-Rollups can allow almost instant withdrawals. However, as a security measure, zkSync Era will originally impose a 24-hour waiting period.

Every account in the network is now a "smart account" thanks to ZkSync Era's native account abstraction feature, which also enables two-factor authentication (2FA), social recovery, autopay transactions, and other features through purveyors of smart contract wallets like Argent.

The network won't be entirely decentralised at launch, allowing the team to quickly resolve any security or technical problems. A time lock, however, will subsequently be put in place so that the Security Council and the general populace can approve of choices. Similar to its rival StarkWare, zkSync depends on a central prover and scheduler, which are quicker but offer a single point of failure.

Decentralising that portion of the network is more challenging because running a prover requires paying $10,000 per month for cloud capability or purchasing expensive hardware. This year, a new proof system that significantly lowers hardware requirements should be made accessible on the mainnet.

Overall, the zkSync Era is a significant advancement for Ethereum, which has been battling scalability problems for years. The mainnet launch of the network has the potential to significantly lower gas costs and allow quicker, more effective transactions, which would be advantageous for both DeFi projects and other Ethereum-based programmes.