zk-Rollup News

Zk-Rollups, or zero-knowledge Rollups, are layer-2 scaling solutions that boost throughput on the Ethereum mainnet by off-chaining computation and state storage. When a GitHub repository with the name “roll_up” was uploaded in 2018 under the alias Barry Whitehat, the idea of rollups was first introduced. Shortly after, Vitalik Buterin, the creator of Ethereum, published an enhanced version of this original idea under the name zk-Rollups.

In essence, zk-Rollups technology groups transactions into batches that are then processed off-chain. The amount of data that needs to be posted to the blockchain is decreased by performing off-chain computing. Instead of sending each transaction separately, zk-Rollup operators send a summary of the changes required to represent all the transactions in a batch. The state of the zk-Rollup is preserved via a smart contract running on the Ethereum network. Zk-Rollup nodes must submit validity proof for approval before updating this state. Validity proof provides a cryptographic assurance that the state-change proposed by the rollup actually occurred as a result of executing the specified batch of transactions. This means that unlike Optimistic Rollups, which must post full transaction information on-chain, zk-Rollups just need to give validity proofs to complete transactions on the Ethereum blockchain.