Scalability on the Ethereum network has remained a main talking point within the crypto community for years now, as a result of increased fees and network congestion when demand is high.
An idea that is getting buzz as a solution for the scalability problem is the Zero-knowledge rollups (ZK rollups).
This year, protocols like Arbitrum or Optimism, that decided to rely on optimistic rollups received plenty of attention and were seen as being the best solution for scaling on Ethereum. Sadly, aside from Arbitrum, the razzmatazz for these protocols died down as traders highlighted the fact that even optimistic rollups still have above average fees when the demand on the network is high.
During the period when optimistic rollup solutions came to the spotlight, protocols that used the ZK rollups model managed to show their capabilities.
A decentralized perpetual and futures exchange known as dYdX became one of the first adopters of ZK-rollup tech via its partnership with StarkWare as StarkNet network is a permissionless decentralized ZK-Rollup.
The platform still has a certain degree of success today and has even processed a higher 24-hour trading volume than Coinbase sometimes.
Another protocol that used ZK-rollups in order to decrease transaction costs and speed the throughput capabilities is Loopring. This pushed the price of its token to a new ATH of $3.83 in early November.
After the sharp market-wide sell-off of the previous week, ZK-rollups have come back to the spotlight.
Polygon got plenty of attention when it confirmed it bought Mir, a project developing two subcategories of zero-knowledge proofs known as Halo and PLONK.
The investment was made in an effort “to explore and encourage all meaningful scaling approaches and technologies at this stage,” declared Sandeep Nailwal.
Another protocol that received a lot of attention recently is zkSync.
zkSync total deposits vs. total unique users
Source: CoinTelegraph.com