zksync raised more than 700 million US dollars from Germany and surpassed the existence of OP ARB. Is it worth investing? The airdrop amount is more than 1 billion U.S. dollars?

Project Status:
1. zkSync Era network TVL has reached 479 million US dollars, an increase of 23.6% in the past week. In addition, the total number of transactions on the zkSync Era network in the past 30 days was 16.32 million, exceeding Optimism’s 7.9 million transactions and second only to Arbitrum’s 26.26 million transactions.
2. The total number of zkSync addresses exceeds 2.5 million, and the number of users participating in bridge transactions exceeds 900,000.
As the leader in using zk technology in layer2, zkSYNC has become an unparalleled presence in the L2 field. As an important battlefield for ETH expansion, L2 strives to accept more WEB3 users and realize a high-speed, low-gas blockchain network to allow more people to enter. Currently, the L2 field is in turmoil, and the relatively well-known L2 project is currently There are more than 10, and there are many star institutions and teams, such as Coinbase's BASE network currently testing the network, and the ConsenSys team's Linea network. Many people may be unfamiliar with this team, but their products are used every day by people in the currency circle, such as the Little Fox Wallet. Wait, the ZK-EVM network built by the Matic team, etc., now you know how fierce the competition in the L2 field is, and it also shows that L2 technology will become the mainstream form of future networks.
Buterin also recently proposed three changes to Ethereum, clearly stating that L2 is one of the key directions for the future success of Ethereum. Hurry up and get involved!
Learn about the project
In June 2020, the European team Matter Labs launched their first Layer2 expansion solution-zkSync Lite (formerly zkSync 1.0). zkSync Lite uses Rollup technology based on zero-knowledge proof to support simple transfers and collections.
In order to better improve the scalability of the Ethereum network, Matter Labs launched an upgraded version of zkSync Lite - zkSync Era (formerly zkSync 2.0) in October 2022. Its mainnet has been launched in March 2023 and has been launched to the public. Open to all users. zkSync Era is the first zkEVM on the Ethereum blockchain, meaning developers can deploy smart contracts on zkSync Era without making significant changes to their code.
Extended freedom
zkSync Era is a layer 2 protocol that extends Ethereum using cutting-edge ZK technology. Our mission is not only to increase Ethereum’s throughput, but to fully preserve its fundamental values—freedom, autonomy, and decentralization—at scale.
Hyperscalability: Endgame
To meet the exponential demands of web3, blockchain needs to scale like the internet: handle an unlimited number of transactions without marginal impact on security or cost. We call this property hyperscalability, and it is the ultimate goal of Era's design.
safety
ZK-rollups like Era are the only scaling solutions that can inherit 100% security of Ethereum. But theory is not enough. zkSync strives to go above and beyond to make Era the most secure L2 to date in practice.
working principle
zkSync Era is a Layer 2 expansion solution based on zkEVM.
ZK: Abbreviation for Zero Knowledge.
ZK Rollup: A Rollup scheme that uses zero-knowledge proof. The difference from other Rollups is that it uses the zkSNARK algorithm (a zero-knowledge proof algorithm) to compress data. zkSync writes the ZK Rollup it uses as zkRollup. zkRollup transmits the compressed data of each transaction to the Ethereum main network to ensure the validity and availability of the data, making the zkSync network have the same security as the Ethereum main network.
EVM: The abbreviation of Ethereum Virtual Machine, which is used to execute smart contracts on Ethereum. However, ordinary virtual machines cannot support zkRollup technology, so zkSync Era maintains Solidity (smart contract programming language) compatibility by designing a ZK Rollup-friendly new virtual machine and adapting EVM development tools.
Tokenomics
zkSync has not disclosed information about its token economics, which has led to various speculations among users and investors. But the team stated that 70% of the tokens will be used for community and ecosystem development, and 30% will be given to the team and investors, so an airdrop is still very possible.
route map
The zkSYNC2.0 mainnet zkSYNC ERA has been online for two months. We look forward to the official network arriving soon. The overall progress is relatively smooth so far. Some teams have given an estimated launch time of 2024.
zkSYNC ecosystem construction
Currently, more than 200 projects are being developed based on zkSync, covering various vertical fields such as wallets, decentralized finance (DeFi), infrastructure, payment gateways, public products, social, privacy and non-fungible tokens (NFTs). . Given that the zkSync Era is a relatively new network, the number of decentralized applications currently available on its mainnet is relatively limited.
zkSYNC investment institution
zkSYNC has gone through three rounds of financing, and the current total financing amount exceeds US$700 million. This is the financing situation I checked on Golden Finance. The investment institutions can be said to be all-star institutions, and many well-known institutions and project parties in the currency circle have participated in the investment.
The most interesting thing is that I found that two of the investors in his seed round are DEFI project parties in the currency circle, which shows that the market expectations of zkSYNC are still quite high, whether it is well-known investments a16z, 1kx, or exchanges Binance, okx , Huobi, Coinbase, etc., there are very few projects that can gain so much attention in the market at the same time, which fully shows that zkSYNC has technical advantages, otherwise how could it gather so many institutions and financing.
zkSYNC Challenger
The challenger of zkSYNC is the latest zk-evm project developed by the MATIC team. The team calls it MATIC2.0. Needless to say, people in the currency circle basically know the MATIC project. It is the earliest Ethereum expansion solution technical team. Currently, MATIC is already The blockchain network, which has been running for 5 years, has a circulating market value of more than 5.4 billion US dollars and is the 13th largest cryptocurrency in the world.
However, the zk-evm test network has only been running for two months. Although there is previous technical experience, zk technology is a difficult problem for global blockchain developers and has not been well solved. To achieve the same security as the Ethereum network is the biggest Challenges, with zkSUNC who can become the real leader of the zk series, everything is still unknown. Adults do not have to make a choice and want both. At present, zk-evm has officially opened for testing.
Layer2 future outlook
Judging from the current market structure, in the Layer 2 track, in the short term, zkSync’s main competitors are Arbitrum and Optimism. In the long term, zkSync, StarkWare, and zk-evm will compete in the ZK Rollup series Layer 2.
Arbitrum and Optimism use Optimistic Rollup, which is technically better than ZK Rollup. Therefore, their compatibility with Ethereum and the development of the ecosystem itself are faster than zkSync. They have both officially launched on the main network.
This year, it is expected that zkSync 2.0 will be launched on the main network, and zkSync's "composability" goal is also put on the agenda. In the 2.0 test network, the biggest feature of zkSync is that the ecological project is native, unique, innovative and high-quality. These may be scalable advantages.
In the future, "privacy" will also be written into the ecological DNA of zkSync. With the arrival of WEB3, privacy issues will receive more and more attention.
The technical difficulty of ZK Rollup is the biggest variable hindering the development of zkSYNC. Once the technical problems are solved, the advantages of zkSYNC will be far superior to the OP system. The same zk system, zkSYNC, is leading in terms of network operation and development progress.