Recently, zkSync announced the launch of Era Mainet network, marking the beginning of a new Layer 2 ecosystem development with Zero-Knowledge Proof technology. Let’s learn more about the Zksync project and investment opportunities in this ecosystem!
gm zkEVM! 👋🏻
zkSync Era Mainnet Alpha is now open to all users.
Developers, projects, and users can now experience the power of zkEVM.Read more: https://t.co/pL5PuZqanu
1/11 pic.twitter.com/oS6dwmXzeB
— zkSync ∎ (@zksync) March 24, 2023
Nội dung bài viết
What is zkSync?
zkSync is a Layer-2 scaling solution aimed at reducing costs and increasing transaction processing speed while still maintaining the security of Ethereum. zkSync uses ZK Rollups technology to perform transactions without revealing information to Layer 1, thus ensuring user privacy.
Guide to experiencing and receiving Zksync airdrops:
Some advantages of Zk-rollup over Optimistic Rollup include:
- Faster asset withdrawal in fast platforms
- Higher security, avoiding 51% blockchain attacks
- Support for anonymous transactions
- Support for account abstraction
However, transaction costs for Zk-rollup may be higher and transactions may be slower than ecosystems using Optimistic Rollup such as Arbitrum or Optimism. But according to Ethereum Founder Vitalik’s perspective, Zk-rollup is the “game changer” that will soon defeat Optimistic.
Therefore, we may see some outstanding features of Zksync such as:
- Transaction fees 50 times lower than the main Ethereum network.
- Friendly to smart contracts.
- Protection of more than 5 million transactions.
- Number of transactions that can be performed per second: 300 TPS.
- Account Abstraction feature
Development Team
Zksync is built by Matter Labs, founded in late 2019, headquartered in Berlin, and started introducing the zkSync project in 2020.
Matter Labs was founded by 2 members: Alexandr Vlasov and Alex Gluchowski.
Alex Gluchowski is a software engineer with 19 years of experience. He was CTO for several technology companies, including one specializing in Ethereum R&D before focusing on zkSync.
Investment Fund
The latest funding rounds for zkSync include:
Series A (Q3/2021): $6M from Binance, Coinbase Ventures, Balancer, Aave, Curve, etc.
Series B (Q11/2021): $50M from a16z, Blockchain.com, Crypto.com, Bybit, Consensys, OKEx, Covalent, etc.
In January 2022, Matter Labs received a $200M investment from BitDAO to build the zkSync ecosystem.
Series C (Q11/2022): $200M from Blockchain Capital and Dragonfly. LightSpeed Venture Partners, Variant, and a16z.
Thus, Zksync has raised a total capital of $458 million from most of the famous investment funds to build its ecosystem. What is noteworthy here is that there are many large CEX exchanges (Binance, Coinbase, Huobi) and even well-known names in the DeFi community (Curve, Aave, Balancer, etc.). This will help zkSync quickly integrate into both centralized and decentralized exchanges to attract funds quickly.
Zksync Ecosystem and its current pieces
You can explore the ecosystem and use dapps at: https://ecosystem.zksync.io/
Currently, there are more than 60 projects live on the Zksync Era Mainnet, however, most of the projects are still in the testnet, beta, or have not launched their tokens. I assess that the Zksync ecosystem is still in its early stages and needs to actively attract developers to build and attract funds in the future.
Let’s take a look at some outstanding and native projects in each area at the current time (Q3/2023)
DEX
Decentralized exchanges are an extremely important field. Currently, we have some projects such as:
- Zigzag: a non-custodial orderbook exchange on Zksync and Arbitrum. This is an OG project that was built early on Zksync Lite (and has now moved to Zksync Era). Since the mainnet launch, the project has achieved a total trading volume of nearly $1 billion.
- Mute: a non-custodial AMM exchange with full features such as swap, add liquidity, farming, and bond.
- Syncswap: an AMM exchange project similar to Mute with the largest TVL on Zksync Era ($4.7M).
- SpaceFi: a Dex and launchpad on Zksync and Evmos.
- Phezzan: a non-custodial derivatives dex project.
Lending
Lending is also an extremely important DeFi field to increase capital utilization efficiency in the system. Some native lending projects being built are:
Nexon Finance: a low-cost and capital-efficient lending and borrowing platform on Zksync. Currently, the project is only in the testnet phase.
NFT/Game/SocialFi
Zkapes: the first 9,999 NFT Ape collection on the Zksync ecosystem. Not only NFT, the project also promises to bring a metaverse consisting of various products in the system such as NFT Dex, Ape Bank, Ape domains.
Zkcasino: an on-chain casino project built by zigzag Labs.
Bridges
Bridges are an extremely important and indispensable field to attract user funds from many different ecosystems to Zksync. Currently, we have some outstanding projects supporting bridges to Zksync Era such as Orbiter Finance, Multichain, and Hop protocol.
Evaluation
Currently, the Zksync ecosystem has quite complete pieces for users to use, but we still don’t have many prominent native projects on the system (but the project is built from the beginning right on Zksync, not a multichain project). These projects will help Zksync flourish even more. If there are any projects with strong potential to lead in one of the important areas, it will be a good investment opportunity in this nascent ecosystem.
Currently, considering the Dex field – the basic field of DeFi, Zigzag is doing quite well with a total volume of nearly 1 billion dollars. In addition, Dex projects such as Mute or Syncswap are also experiencing strong TVL growth recently. We will soon have a competition to see which project will be the leading Dex on Zksync.
Other areas of DeFi such as lending, derivatives, stablecoins still have few projects and are in the testnet phase => the ecosystem is still not ready to receive stable money flows.
Areas related to entertainment such as games, social networks or art such as NFTs are also being tested in developer mode and will be launched soon.
Conclusion and forecast
Zksync is an Ethereum Layer 2 ecosystem that is highly expected because it uses Zk-rollup technology – a technology strongly supported by Ethereum’s creator. In addition, the project has also received nearly 1 billion dollars in investment capital from many prestigious investment funds in the market.
Regarding Zksync’s next development direction, the development team will need to encourage and strengthen the full development of basic DeFi components such as derivatives, lending, stablecoins to be able to attract money flows from users. In addition, integrating bridges from large CEX exchanges will help Zksync directly attract a large number of users to their ecosystem through deposit/withdrawal gates. Through this, the money flow in the system will develop more sustainably.
We hope that you have a clear overview of the current Zksync ecosystem and can come up with a reasonable investment strategy for yourself.
