An article discussing the modular ambition of ZK Stack

Author: Haotian

Just when OP Stack won the BNBChain public chain and Arbitum launched the Orbit L3 magic weapon, Matter Labs also announced the launch of the ZK Stack open source framework, which will build a HyperChain vision defined by ZK technology.

Is ZK Stack launched just to compete with OP Stack for developer resources? In-depth analysis found that ZK Stack may "accidentally" roll out a multi-chain concurrency era? (Will the coins be issued in advance?)

To put it simply, ZK Stack will provide underlying architecture support for highly customized and privatized application ecosystems such as games, exchange side chains, and enterprise chains.

Moreover, based on ZK Stack's technical advantages in Account Abstraction, asynchronous cross-chain calls, and infinite scalability, it provides the possibility to construct a complex multi-chain network era.

This is no different from the card application chain ecological niche of OP Stack and Arbitrum Orbit.

If OP Stack is trying to grab the market from L1 to L2, Arbitrum Orbit has locked in the L3 private chain market, and ZK Stack has a higher momentum. It does not make a choice, and both L2 and L3 markets are needed.

Why is ZK Stack so confident that 2 and 3 layers can take all? L2 layer zkSync itself has a successful model, and L3 lies in the technical advantages of asynchronous cross-chain calls, which is somewhat unexpected. It seems that the unfinished road of @cosmos has the possibility of continuation in the ZK ecology;

HyperChain does not need to maintain state and consensus, and can directly rely on Ethereum, so it has high security; and HyperChain can use ZK proof to directly verify state changes without waiting for Ethereum, and the interaction efficiency is also high.

In contrast, the state synchronization and consensus of different Zones in Cosmos must be completed through the relay chain Hub. The Hub needs to maintain the consensus and state of the chain itself, which is costly, and needs to receive each new block and perform inter-chain verification, resulting in a high delay;

Who ever thought that ZK Stack would open up the situation at the level of multi-chain interaction!

This method of reusing Ethereum security and consensus to the greatest extent simplifies the design and avoids repeated investment. The key is that it revolves around the two-stage verification of ZK Proof proof, which can greatly shorten the interaction time between DApps and between chains. Improve interaction efficiency. (Refer to the previous Workflow detailed description for zkSync)

Compared with the same period, OP Stack still has a lot of restrictions on asynchronous cross-chain calls:

1. State changes still require L1 verification, which limits asynchrony;

2. Fraud Proof generation needs to wait for Ethereum confirmation;

3. Real Sovereign sovereign control cannot be achieved.

Arbitrum Orbit has made some improvements but the essence of the framework constraints has not changed.

It can be said that in the same framework infra war, the competition plane of ZK Stack is far above that of OP Stack.

To sum up, on the surface, both OP Stack and ZK Stack are robbing developer resources. Under the premise that their own ecology is not abundant, it always seems a bit hasty and easy to be criticized.

However, although the launch of ZK Stack is aimed at rolling out competing products, it directly increases the level of competition. In the long run, it is quite different from what OP Stack has to do.

It seems that we can really look forward to the next era of application-driven multi-chain concurrency.

Finally, it is a bold guess that the launch of Zk Stack is not only meaningful, but also directly beneficial to speed up the process of issuing zkSync coins. Because of a Credo decentralization declaration, behind the design of a Soverign sovereign chain framework, there is a signal: Matter Labs will shift from focusing on research and development of ZK technology to building a ZK ecological community. To drive the ecological growth of the community, it is possible that Token economics is missing as a key starting point.

However, although ZK Stack has a lot of room for imagination in the future multi-chain network, the challenges are equally daunting.

Because Ethereum is the bottom layer, its contract calls have a Gas Limit limit, so ZK Rollup needs to be further expanded, and Ethereum needs to be further strengthened after the Cancun upgrade. To increase the complexity of the system, the core ZK algorithm of HyperChain has to rely on zkSync for a long time.