ON #172: ZK-EVMs 🪐

Jun 16, 2023

About the editor: Spencer Noon is an independent crypto investor.

ZK-EVMs 🪐

WTF is a ZK-EVM 🤔? Check out this great Forbes article from Polygon’s Mihailo Bjelic for a proper intro.

zkSync Era is a Layer 2 zkEVM created by Matter Labs to scale Ethereum. It retains EVM compatibility while introducing additional features such as native account abstraction to greatly enhance user experience. Since its mainnet launch in March 2023, zkSync Era has experienced tremendous growth, reaching one million transactions in just four days, a rate quicker than any other Layer 2 according to L2Beat. It has averaged over 400k transactions per day post-launch and reached a peak load of ~36 transactions per second (TPS) on May 17th.

Daily active addresses on zkSync Era have steadily risen since early May, with an average of ~175k for the last 30 days. This is not far behind Arbitrum's ~185k. The activity spike across several L2s can largely be attributed to knock-on effects of PEPE coin mania reigniting on-chain activity.

Verified contracts, rather than all contracts deployed, best reflect developer activity. There has been an average of ~115 contracts verified daily for the last 30 days on zkSync Era. The alpha version of Foundry for zkSync Era recently went live which gives a significant boost to developer tooling.

Scroll is an EVM-equivalent ZK-Rollup built upon Ethereum and alongside the Ethereum Foundation, designed for scaling without sacrificing security or devX/UX. Scroll launched its Alpha Testnet on Goerli in Feb 2023, is moving to Sepolia in the next month, and is aiming for mainnet in Q3. The Alpha Testnet has had significant traction—amongst the most of any ZK-rollup and without any incentivization—reaching 34 million total transactions, with steady growth even after the initial wave of usage.

Scroll has also had substantial user adoption on testnet, with 3M+ unique wallet addresses. Comparing wallets to txs also reveals an interesting insight: as wallet growth decelerated, weekly txs initially decreased, but sharply increased again—suggesting that existing users are transacting more than initially.

Tying together this entire analysis, we see that smart contract growth on Alpha Testnet has largely been consistent, but spiked to 300K per week this month. This is likely due to the rapidly increasing number of projects deploying on Scroll, which in turn may explain the increased transactions relative to users.

Polygon zkEVM is a Layer 2 zk Rollup created by Polygon Labs to scale Ethereum. It strives for EVM Equivalence, meaning that most apps and tools built on Ethereum can immediately port over to Polygon zkEVM with almost no changes needed to their code. Since its Mainnet Beta launch a few months ago, many of its key performance indicators, including TVL and transaction volumes, have seen continued growth. The rollup has processed over 1M transactions to date and over $35M in value has been bridged over.

Major DeFi primitives such as perpetual derivatives have demonstrated notable early traction on Polygon zkEVM, with QuickSwap perps taking center-stage. Since launching on May 11, QS Perps have processed over $31M of volume from over 3300+ unique users. Pool TVL now stands at more than $7M collateral as well (source).

Finally, a new market for oracles has sprung up on Polygon zkEVM due to the rollup’s low gas fees and high TPS. According to DeFiLlama, API3 now secures over $9M, with all of that TVL being native to the Polygon DeFi ecosystem.