On March 28, ConsenSys, a well-known software company working on the Ethereum blockchain, will be releasing a zero knowledge Ethereum Virtual Machine (zkEVM) public testnet, increasing the competition among leading crypto firms to be the first to implement this quickly developing technology.
In December, Brooklyn-based software firm ConsenSys unveiled its private beta zkEVM testnet. Since then, the testnet has processed over 350,000 transactions. This move shows their commitment to staying up-to-date with the quickly advancing technology.
Zero-knowledge (ZK) technology, which utilizes cryptography to speed up transactions and lessen gas fees on blockchains, is being rapidly adopted by many businesses into the Ethereum system. Professionals in the field consider it likely to be one of the most popular trends in blockchain technology this year.
The contest to launch the first ZK rollup is intensifying lately. At the end of this month, Polygon will be launching its mainnet beta zkEVM. Scroll and Matter Labs have also declared that they are launching ZK rollups, but haven’t specified when yet.
“It’s not crowded enough. We think that it’s important to have multiple zkEVMs, and we want to be one of them.”
– Nicolas Liochon, the head of R&D at ConsenSys and lead for the ZK Business Group
A November 2022 report from Galaxy Digital states that ZkEVMs are ‘virtual machines that can run the same programming languages and bytecode as the Ethereum Virtual Machine, and prove their accuracy using zero-knowledge proofs. These proofs verify data without disclosing any information about the data itself, like characteristics or content.’
ZK rollups, as described in the report, are a variety of layer 2 solutions that emulate the same transaction processing environment seen on Ethereum mainnet.
This type of layer 2 technology is designed to process transactions quicker and then send the results back to layer 1. To ensure that transactions are valid and have not been altered, ZK rollups employ “proofs” which only disclose a small piece of data from the transaction.
Liochon stated that the zkEVM from ConsenSys should be out of the testnet phase by the end of 2023, though no specific timeline has been established.
