Original text: "Project Research丨Scroll Research Report on ZK Track Potential Project"
Editor: YuanShan@Web3CN.Pro
Table of contents
1. Project Introduction
2. Project Vision
Start by empowering blockchain developers and users. Build with an open community at the center. Fight for decentralization and censorship resistance.
3. Features and advantages
IV. Development History
5. Team Background
VI. Financing Information
VII. Development Achievements
Pre-Alpha testnet launched Alpha testnet launched on Goerli New three-layer aggregation circuit prototype implemented
8. Economic Model
9. Fundamental Analysis
10. Risks and opportunities
Opportunities Risks
1. Project Introduction
Scroll is a zkEVM-based zkRollup on Ethereum, used as a Layer 2 solution to solve Ethereum's congestion problem. Scroll was founded in 2021 and is committed to creating an EVM (Ethereum Virtual Machine) equivalent zk-Rollup for better compatibility.
2. Project Vision
The Scroll project values making the platform completely decentralized and community-owned. Based on this concept, Scroll’s vision is:
Empowering blockchain developers and users
For most people around the world, the current situation in the Ethereum market is that high-risk applications (such as DeFi and NFT trading) are crowding out non-financial applications, thus making it impossible for ordinary users with less capital to enter. What Scroll is doing is leveraging the potential of ZK technology to increase transaction throughput and significantly reduce fees to unlock the potential for new users and applications. Serving billions of users by scaling blockchain.
For example, Scroll allows existing applications and developers to migrate tools without in-depth modification or rewriting by building an equivalent EVM (Ethereum Virtual Machine); adding experimental features to extend the EVM to make the user experience richer.
Built with an open community in mind
Based on the vision of complete decentralization, Scroll was designed to be community-centric and built entirely in an open-source manner. "We believe that such important technology should be open to everyone for understanding and auditing. When building a platform that can define the ownership of financial assets, the ability to publicly audit and verify code is critical." Such a design will lead to a more secure and better-designed Scroll system.
In addition, open source and openness also bring an inherent level of trust to Scroll. Anyone can check the progress of the project, and the project will always be responsible and transparent to the community.
Fighting for decentralization and censorship resistance
While building for greater blockchain scalability, the Scroll team believes it is critical to preserve the core properties of Ethereum - decentralization and censorship resistance. As Scroll's ultimate goal, they aim to achieve the same level of decentralization and censorship resistance as the base layer Ethereum.
Finally, in an official blog post, the Scroll team stated that their ultimate vision is to push Ethereum to scale to “zk-SNARK everything.”
3. Features and advantages
Since Scroll is committed to creating a zk-Rollup equivalent to EVM (Ethereum Virtual Machine), that is, infinitely close to Ethereum, it is completely consistent with the EVM specification and achieves maximum compatibility with EVM. The biggest feature and advantage of the Scroll project is to achieve zkEVM compatibility at the bytecode level. Its bytecode compatibility means that Solidity, Vyper and Huff can be used out of the box without re-audit, most existing tools are inherited, and the UX and DevX are almost the same as Ethereum.
EVM equivalence is the reason why Scroll is considered "native". The advantages of Scroll can be more clearly seen when compared with other Layer2 ZK projects.
Scroll vs. Zksync and Starkware
Zksync and Starkware only achieve language compatibility, while Scroll is achieving "native" compatibility. Although Zksync and Starkware have begun to support some common functions, they are not yet very compatible with EVM in terms of development language (Starkware uses the Cario language, and although Zksync has achieved solidity compatibility, the underlying layer still uses different virtual machines).
The architectures of both require a specialized compiler to compile the smart contract code into a new zk-friendly IR, which means that this approach only achieves language compatibility rather than native EVM compatibility.
IV. Development History
At the beginning of 2021, the three co-founders of Scroll met in the Ethereum community and founded the Scroll project.
On July 19, 2022, Scroll released a pre-alpha testnet for external testers to quickly obtain community feedback.
On November 24, 2022, Scroll reached a partnership with the zero-knowledge proof privacy DID project zCloak to develop a trusted DID system based on Ethereum L2 and compatible with W3C.
On February 1, 2023, Scroll stated that it had deployed the front end of Uniswap V3 on the test network, and developers and users could participate in the experience.
On February 28, 2023, Scroll released a testnet version of the Ethereum Layer 2 network on the Goerli testnet, moving the zk-EVM from pre-alpha to the alpha testing phase, the final stage before the mainnet.
On March 8, 2023, Scroll received investment from OKX Ventures to support Scroll in improving Ethereum performance issues.
On April 4, 2023, Zada Finance, a cross-Rollup order book DEX built on Scroll, announced the launch of the Scroll testnet, supporting account abstraction wallets. This is the first native open source cross-Rollup DEX on Scroll.
On April 10, 2023, Scroll co-founder Sandy Peng stated at the "FORESIGHT 2023" annual summit that a partner program to incentivize ecological development may be launched in the near future, and the mainnet will be launched in the next three to four months.
5. Team Background
Scroll was founded in early 2021 by Ye Zhang, Sandy Peng and Haichen Shen.
Zhang Ye studied undergraduate at Peking University and has been working on ZK proof since 2018, mainly studying the hardware acceleration of zk proof and the principles of zk cryptographic algorithms. His doctoral studies were also focused on zk. After learning that the inefficiency of ZK-proof can be solved at the cryptography and hardware levels, he met two other co-founders in the Ethereum community in early 2021, and the three decided to use ZK technology to build the future of Ethereum expansion.
Haichen studied in Tsinghua University Yao Class for undergraduate and received his Ph.D. from the University of Washington. His research direction is in the field of underlying systems. After graduation, he worked in Amazon to build machine learning systems. He has strong engineering skills and is good at putting theory into practice.
Sandy graduated from Cambridge University and worked in research at the Hong Kong Securities Regulatory Commission. In 2017, he began to invest in Web3 projects and previously worked on games and product projects. Currently, he is responsible for non-technical work in the team and is familiar with the brand operations of start-up teams.
Scroll attaches great importance to technical foundation. In 2022, the team size is more than 40 people, of which more than 30 are ZK or blockchain researchers and developers. It can be said that the entire team is still relatively technical, and there are relatively few non-technical members responsible for ecological operations.
In addition, the team is relatively "decentralized", with members scattered around the world including China, the United States, Singapore, Europe, etc.
VI. Financing Information
On April 21, 2022, Scroll completed a US$30 million Series A financing round, led by Polychain Capital, with participation from angel investors such as Bain Capital Crypto, Robot Ventures, Geometry DAO, Ethereum Foundation Ying Tong and Carlos Aria, and Ethereum community members Anthony Sassal, Ryan Adams and Santiago Santos.
In March 2023, Scroll announced that it had raised $50 million from investors including Polychain Capital, Sequoia China, Bain Capital Crypto, Moore Capital Management, OKX Ventures, Variant Fund, Newman Capital, IOSG Ventures, and Qiming Venture Partners. This round of financing will be used for product development, launching the mainnet, and expanding the ecosystem, and plans to increase the team size from 60 to nearly 100 people.
This round of financing brings the valuation of the Scroll project to $1.8 billion, and together with approximately $3 million in financing from angel investors, its total financing has reached $83 million.
VII. Development Achievements Launch of Pre-Alpha Test Network
In August 2022, Scroll launched the Pre-Alpha testnet, supported by a community of over 100,000 users. To date, over 15,400,000 transactions have been processed and 1,800,000 blocks have been proven. Over 641,000 batches have been submitted as proof of validity and finalized by Scroll's Rollup contract on L1.
Alpha testnet launched on Goerli
On February 27, 2023, the Scroll team announced that the Alpha testnet has been launched on Goerli, marking an important moment in the development of Scroll. It means that developers do not need any permission to deploy applications on the Scroll network. Anyone can try to use Scroll technology and push it to its limits.
Implementing a new three-layer aggregation circuit prototype
In the ZK space, Scroll implemented a new three-layer aggregation circuit prototype that reduces the gas cost of Solidity validator contracts.
8. Economic Model
Scroll has not yet released its Token economic model.
9. Fundamental Analysis
Currently, the Scroll project is in the Alpha Testnet stage and is expected to enter the mainnet stage in three to four months.
To analyze the fundamentals of the Scroll project, we need to understand the two clear goals of the Scroll project. One is EVM equivalence, and the other is comprehensive decentralization.
As mentioned above, EVM equivalence achieves Byte-level compatibility with the Ethereum L1 network, and Scroll's EVM operations are close to the Ethereum L1 base layer. This means that the execution effect of the developer's code on Scroll and on Ethereum is the same.
Comprehensive decentralization means that not only the prover needs to be decentralized (Prover), but also the node operators, developers and user communities need to be decentralized. This is to allow more people to participate in the Scroll ecosystem. Any ordinary user can become a believer of Scroll, which is in line with the value of Ethereum's "decentralization".
In this regard, the comparison between Scroll and Zksync and StarkNet can more clearly show this advantage.
The Sequencer and Prover of Zksync and StarkNet are operated by the official team. The project party is responsible for block generation, verification, and packaging. The code is not open source, and decentralized mining nodes have not been built, so the community cannot participate. One problem caused by the centralized model of the two is that all computing power is controlled by the team itself, which means that the team has to rent machines to continue to bear this part of the cost.
From the perspective of project operation, the more decentralized the project is, the better it is. The more nodes added, the greater the computing power, the lower the cost, and the more efficient the operation. This will achieve lower economic costs and higher work efficiency.
EVM equivalence and full decentralization is what Scroll is doing.
10. Risks and Opportunities Opportunities
When ZK Rollups (ZKRs) technology is running on a large scale, the crypto ecosystem and even the entire world will gain substantial progress based on this technology. Rollup is currently the Ethereum expansion technology that is widely adopted. The huge ecological value based on Ethereum will inevitably extend to Layer2 projects. Scroll's EVM equivalence and comprehensive decentralization advantages and characteristics will inevitably make it a priority choice for value.
Taking the cooperation project Intmax's choice of Scroll as an example, Intmax believes that its own stateless (validators do not retain any data to achieve decentralized sorting) zkRollup, which combines high scalability and customizable privacy, can be integrated with Scroll's zkEVM rollup into an ecosystem without its own VM (virtual machine) to provide it with advantages.
Risks
The application value of the Layer2 project has yet to be verified by the market, and the large-scale application of ZK technology also requires practical testing. This is an unclear situation faced by Scroll and other Layer2 projects.
Compared with zkSync and StarWare, the ecological deployment of the Scroll project is still relatively scarce, which also means that in terms of ecological project cooperation, more third-party projects choose the former, recognizing that the former has more advantages in infrastructure construction, capital volume and a relatively complete ecological chain. This is the shortcoming of Scroll and one of the reasons why everyone needs to be cautious in choosing this project.
reference:
https://www.chaincatcher.com/article/2078499
https://scroll.io/blog
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