What Makes Scroll, Which Raised $30 Million in Funding, So Attractive: An Analysis of Its Technical Approach
On the afternoon of October 10th, Scroll’s official social media posted a message: the Scroll mainnet has generated the genesis block, and the Scroll mainnet is now officially live. This news has garnered widespread attention and has excited the cryptocurrency community.
Scroll is a zkRollup solution built on Ethereum, based on zkEVM (Zero-Knowledge Ethereum Virtual Machine). It serves as a Layer2 solution to address the congestion issues on the Ethereum network. Scroll, being a zkRollup project with bytecode-level zkEVM compatibility, holds significant potential. If Scroll can successfully achieve its technical goals, it will bring increased scalability and compatibility to the Ethereum ecosystem.
1. Introduction to the Scroll Team, Financing Status, and Community, Demonstrating the Project’s Overall Strength
First of all, the founding team of Scroll is quite young overall. There are three co-founders: Ye Zhang, Sandy Peng, and Haichen Shen. Let me introduce each of them separately.
Ye Zhang attended Peking University and is currently a Ph.D. candidate at New York University, with 99 years of experience. Ye Zhang mentioned that four years ago, they began research in the field of Zero-Knowledge Proofs (ZKP). Their first project involved accelerating ZKP using FPGA and ASIC technology. Subsequently, Ye Zhang delved into the mathematics and cryptography behind ZKP, with a particular focus on its applications in the blockchain domain. Ye Zhang stated that the development of the Scroll network began when they identified certain issues with ZK Rollup in early last year. Their research interests aligned perfectly with resolving these issues.
Sandy Peng completed their undergraduate studies at the University of Cambridge and obtained a master’s degree from the London School of Economics. They previously worked in research at the Hong Kong Securities and Futures Commission before transitioning to Web3 project investments in 2017. Currently, Sandy Peng is responsible for Business Development (BD), financing, and ecosystem matters at Scroll.
Haichen Shen pursued their undergraduate studies at Tsinghua University’s Yao Class and earned a Ph.D. from the University of Washington. Their doctoral research primarily focused on the field of low-level systems, including GPU, PL (Programming Languages), compilers, and related interdisciplinary areas. After graduating, they worked at Amazon on projects involving building machine learning systems and more.
Furthermore, the Scroll project has demonstrated impressive performance in terms of financing.
The Scroll project was founded in 2011, and in 2022, it successfully deployed its mainnet testnet. After going live, the testnet quickly garnered attention from the crypto community. In April 2022, Scroll completed a $30 million Series A financing round led by Polychain Capital and received personal financing from Ethereum community members such as Ying Tong and Carlos Aria, who are associated with the Ethereum Foundation.
Interestingly, even now, Optimism, which dominates the Layer 2 arena, has only secured a funding of $25 million in its Series A round, highlighting its significance.
This year, Scroll completed a $50 million financing round with participation from investors such as Polychain Capital, Sequoia China, IOSG Ventures, Qiming Venture Partners, and OKX Ventures.
Apart from gaining favor from investors, the Scroll community is highly active, with over 500,000 Twitter users and a thriving Discord community where developers and community members engage in discussions and exchanges on a daily basis.
Since launching its testnet last year, Scroll has accumulated 100,000 community users in just two months. Two months later, Scroll conducted extensive transfer tests with the Uniswap exchange.
As of this year, the unique addresses on the Scroll testnet have exceeded 270,000, with transaction volumes reaching as high as 110,000 per day. Currently, its infrastructure is deeply integrated, and it is expected that the number of validator nodes will continue to increase over time.
2. Introduction to Scroll Technology Advantages and Technical Philosophy: Integrating Security, Interoperability, and Practicality Well
The uniqueness of the Scroll project lies in its achievement of bytecode-level zkEVM compatibility, allowing applications on Ethereum to seamlessly migrate to Scroll’s Layer 2 network without any modifications. This feature is crucial for a smooth transition of the Ethereum ecosystem to Layer 2 networks.
What’s more, Scroll also plans to enhance verification efficiency through hardware acceleration. Their vision is to establish a decentralized verification network that distributes ZKP proofs to participants for computation and aggregates the results into the final proof. This will contribute to improving the efficiency and scalability of the entire network.
Currently, in the zkEVM field, there are many projects such as zkSync, Hermez (deployed by Polygon), Infura, but only Scroll can achieve the highest degree of EVM compatibility. Current zkEVM projects can be roughly categorized into two types:
1. zkEVM that supports native EVM opcodes, like Scroll, achieves this by building circuits for each opcode.
2. zkEVM using custom opcodes, such as zkSync, generates custom bytecode by compiling Solidity source code.
Both approaches have their advantages. Projects directly supporting EVM bytecode can seamlessly use Ethereum tools but are more challenging to implement. Projects using custom opcodes are easier to implement but require modifications to the development process. Scroll, with its complete equivalency feature, ensures that zkEVM is identical to the EVM operation specifications defined in the Ethereum Yellow Paper. This means that users and developers can easily access Ethereum without modifying code, changing smart contracts, saving time and effort.
Scroll’s uniqueness also lies in its extensive use of zero-knowledge proof technology to ensure the security of user funds. Decentralization is a core part of the Scroll project’s values. Scroll is committed to creating a more versatile zero-knowledge proof scaling solution and boldly announces its intention to decentralize power to the community, allowing nodes, validators, developers, and users to collectively build the Scroll community. By open development with the community and creating reliable paths for on-chain proofs and ordering, Scroll strives to ensure decentralization at all levels, which is crucial for the long-term sustainability of the project.
When developing blockchain scaling solutions, the security of user funds and data integrity are of paramount importance. For Scroll, the primary task is to ensure that users can always access their funds without relying on the reliability of Layer 2 nodes for security. This means that even when conducting transactions on Layer 2, security must be maintained based on Ethereum’s underlying secure and decentralized consensus mechanism.
Scroll believes that a successful Ethereum scaling solution should provide a seamless migration path for users and developers, allowing them to smoothly transition existing DApps and development tools to a new environment. To achieve this goal, Scroll adheres to the principle of maintaining EVM equivalency, ensuring that its behavior is fully consistent with the EVM specification in the Ethereum Yellow Paper. This means that users and developers can achieve a smooth migration without modifying code, undergoing expensive audits, or changing workflows.
To ensure that Layer 2 users have an excellent experience, Scroll believes that transaction fees should be very low, much lower than the fees on the base layer. Users should receive instant pre-confirmations on Layer 2, while reasonable final confirmations should be obtained on the base layer (in Scroll’s case, Ethereum). Scroll is committed to maintaining user security and decentralization between Layer 2 and the base layer while improving efficiency.
Decentralization is a core attribute of blockchain but is often underestimated or improperly treated. Scroll believes that decentralization is one of the most valuable features of blockchain, and therefore, it is committed to ensuring that the protocol and community achieve decentralization at all levels. This includes the community of node operators, validators, developers, and users. By building together with the community, creating reliable paths for proofs and ordering, Scroll strives to achieve decentralization in all aspects.
In Scroll’s design, security is a top priority. Scroll employs the zkRollup approach, verifying the integrity of second-layer transactions in Ethereum’s underlying smart contracts using concise zero-knowledge proofs. This ensures that transactions on Scroll are as secure as those on the Ethereum base layer. Users do not need to trust third parties, as security is guaranteed by the security of Ethereum’s base layer and mathematical proofs. This trust model minimizes trust assumptions to provide the best user security.
In Scroll’s zkEVM design, it was quickly realized that putting the EVM into ZK proofs could lead to significant proof computation costs due to incompatible fields. To reduce the cost of this proof computation, Scroll has established its own Roller network, a permissionless and decentralized validator network used to generate proofs for Scroll’s Layer 2 blocks. This network is designed to be highly parallelizable and capable of scaling proof computation massively. Scroll also encourages the community to develop better hardware solutions and run validators independently to ensure decentralization. Scroll plans to gradually decentralize the validator network to improve the protocol’s resilience and stability.
To achieve practicality while maintaining security and decentralization, Scroll actively engages in open research and collaborates with partners to explore the latest technological solutions. Scroll’s zkEVM design incorporates cutting-edge proof systems, proof aggregation, and ZK hardware acceleration technology to provide exceptional performance and security. Scroll believes that through an open-source research approach, the best and most effective solutions can be found to meet the needs of users and developers. Scroll will continue to focus on optimizing and integrating the latest technologies to deliver outstanding performance and security.
3.Conclusion: The launch of Scroll’s mainnet brings new hope to the Ethereum community.
In this article, we delve deep into the highly anticipated project known as Scroll. Scroll, as an Ethereum Layer 2 solution, employs zkEVM technology, achieving bytecode-level compatibility and offering an innovative solution to address congestion issues on the Ethereum network. Let’s review the key highlights of Scroll and our expectations for its future.
Firstly, we introduced the founding team behind Scroll, whose youth and passion inject fresh energy into the project. Members of this team possess extensive research backgrounds in cryptography, blockchain, and machine learning, laying a solid foundation for Scroll’s success.
Furthermore, Scroll has performed impressively in terms of fundraising, attracting investments from various renowned institutions, reflecting a high level of market recognition for its prospects. The injection of these funds provides robust support for Scroll’s development, enabling continuous innovation and technological advancement.
Even more excitingly, Scroll has successfully launched its mainnet. This significant milestone signifies that Scroll can now provide its innovative Layer 2 solution to a broader user base. We look forward to how Scroll will continue to drive the development of the Ethereum ecosystem in the future, offering enhanced scalability and compatibility.
The mainnet launch of Scroll brings new hope to the Ethereum community, offering a potential solution to issues such as network congestion and high transaction fees. Over time, we have reason to expect that Scroll will continue to realize its potential and make more contributions to the sustainable development of the blockchain sector. Whether in terms of technical innovation or community growth, Scroll deserves our close attention and anticipation as it continues to progress along its future path.
