In an interview at ETHSeoul on Friday night, Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin said that ZK (Zero Knowledge of proof) -Rollups are likely to be able to beat Optimistic Rollups on Ethereum’s Layer 2 scaling battles.
The event was attended by Buterin stated that although Optimistic Rollups have more experience but the fundamentals of Zero-knowledge Rollup technique will allow it to take over Optimistic rollups over the future.
ZK-Rollups and Optimistic are the most commonly used Layer 2 solutions created to increase the size of Ethereum by using off-chain computing but still maintaining its security on the principal blockchain. There are some differences, however in the design of these solutions as well as the degree of security they offer.
Zero knowledge of proof protocol gives the better speed and security to the blockchain with less computation power , which leads to high scalability solutions.
Buterin said that ZK-Rollups are more efficient when moving funds onto or from the mainnet which could result in a greater adoption
“My opinion is that in the longer term, ZK-Rollups are eventually going to beat Optimistic Rollups because they have these fundamental advantages like you don’t need to have a seven-day withdrawal period,” Buterin added. “In more than 10 years from now or even more, I expect the Rollups to basically be all ZK.”
Buterin admitted, however, ZK-Rollups aren’t yet be fully developed and are currently difficult to build upon.
“So while it is true that ZK technology is ZK technology is difficult to develop. There are many mental hurdles, particularly in making all of this happen securely and making sure that all circuits are in order. Modern rollup technology is more advanced,”
he said.
While ZK-Rollups speed up however, one thing that ZK-Rollups are lacking is the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) which makes them unsuitable for running decentralized apps like DeFi protocols. EVM is the EVM is the principal processor on the Ethereum blockchain, which is used for applications that are decentralized.
However, this could change very soon because EVM compatibility for ZK Rollups is being developed. Layer 2 projects such as Scroll, zkSync and Polygon have announced plans to launch an environment for computing called ZK-EVM which will enable ZK-Rollups to run independently various types of general purpose smart contracts.
Buterin said, “We’ve actually been starting to see zk-EVM implementations that are almost ready to scale with Ethereum transactions, which is amazing.”
Zk proof protocols are fast and use less computation power to secure itself , some good projects which are working on Zk protocol on blockchain industry are Ethereum , Mina . Polygon recently gives update about its latest Zk Evm support release for Ethereum.
