Sliding (we mean — rolling!) into Layer 2 with zkSync🌀: scalability on Golem + Ethereum

Golem takes a step forward towards the adoption of Layer 2 scalability solutions on Ethereum, with the UX-first approach by Matter Labs’ zkSync: a scaling technique powered by zkRollups. Learn here why we chose this, what is it about, and why it is essential for the Ethereum ecosystem to keep pushing for these solutions.

We’ve been on Ethereum for quite some time now — since 2014, as the legend tells. We’ve seen it all, and we’ve seen it bloat (the state!). We experienced the Great CryptoKitties Congestion of 2018. With the proliferation of gas-price insensitive DeFi applications and overall network maturation, network congestion has become increasingly pronounced.

Any application developer you ask is concerned about Ethereum’s congestion and is looking for alternatives and solutions. We are all a part of this, and we all need, first and foremost, to allow for more users to come in and be onboarded to decentralized applications. Enter Layer 2 solutions, which allow us to scale while remaining on Ethereum (and waiting for ETH2).

Our Golem users are not paying these high gas prices and never had to. In order to protect our users from unpredictable gas prices and network congestion, the Golem team opted at launch for a batched transaction approach.

New Golem will be a completely different story, as we won’t be requiring batched transactions, avoiding the current payout delays that come with the old approach. As we’ve mentioned before, we’re migrating our token to the ERC-20 standard to leverage the Layer 2 solutions. The one we found that most aligned with our requirements was zkSync by Matter Labs. We’re already at work on integrating zkSync for New Golem.

“zkSync is a trustless protocol for scalable low-cost payments on Ethereum, powered by zkRollup technology. It uses zero-knowledge proofs and on-chain data availability to keep user’s funds as safe as though they never left the mainnet. While security is our paramount priority, user and developer experience are central to zkSync design. zkSync features:

zkSync is on mainnet already. It’s crucial for users and application developers to try it out, give feedback, and start leveraging it. This allows not only for faster, more efficient, and cheaper experience for devs and users alike, but also — helps improve the state of the main Ethereum chain and alleviate the issues with scalability. Since Golem is adopting the zkSync technology for the payment API of New Golem, we’ll be working closely with the Matter Labs team, providing feedback, and bringing our users the best user experience possible.

This announcement is also meant as a call to action: we hope other projects down this path or thinking about adopting Layer 2 solutions can spread the word and help these teams test their work.

We’ll be following up on this post as we’re already working on implementing the testnet version of zkSync.

Test zkSync🌀 here: https://wallet.zksync.io

Special thanks to the Matter Labs team for the help in writing this!

Originally published at https://blog.golemproject.net on August 12, 2020.