Decentral Block Post

ZK-rollups are the hottest thing in Ethereum right now, having seemingly appeared out of nowhere in late 2018 to fundamentally reshape the “Eth2” plan to scale via sharding alone.

Zero-knowledge, or validity proof rollups, essentially perform the computations for many thousands of transactions away from Ethereum and then write a tiny cryptographic proof back to the blockchain that verifies those transactions were performed correctly. It’s much faster and cheaper than using the base layer and has the potential for virtually unlimited scaling.

To an outsider, it looked like the technology went from 0 to 100 in a couple of years, but from the perspective of Polygon Miden founder Bobbin Threadbare, it doesn’t seem fast enough.

“Your internal perception is that it’s moving slowly,” he says. “People say, ‘We’re going to be doing this in a year,’ and it takes longer because people overestimate [how quickly it can be done].”

“But if you take a step back out of your own bubble, I do think that the tech is moving at an amazing pace. A lot of the things we’re doing now did not exist 10 years ago — or even maybe like eight years ago — they were just theoretical concepts.”

ZK-rollups are the hottest thing in Ethereum right now, having seemingly appeared out of nowhere in late 2018 to fundamentally reshape the “Eth2” plan to scale via sharding alone.

Zero-knowledge, or validity proof rollups, essentially perform the computations for many thousands of transactions away from Ethereum and then write a tiny cryptographic proof back to the blockchain that verifies those transactions were performed correctly. It’s much faster and cheaper than using the base layer and has the potential for virtually unlimited scaling.

To an outsider, it looked like the technology went from 0 to 100 in a couple of years, but from the perspective of Polygon Miden founder Bobbin Threadbare, it doesn’t seem fast enough.

“Your internal perception is that it’s moving slowly,” he says. “People say, ‘We’re going to be doing this in a year,’ and it takes longer because people overestimate [how quickly it can be done].”

“But if you take a step back out of your own bubble, I do think that the tech is moving at an amazing pace. A lot of the things we’re doing now did not exist 10 years ago — or even maybe like eight years ago — they were just theoretical concepts.”

ZK-rollups are the hottest thing in Ethereum right now, having seemingly appeared out of nowhere in late 2018 to fundamentally reshape the “Eth2” plan to scale via sharding alone.

Zero-knowledge, or validity proof rollups, essentially perform the computations for many thousands of transactions away from Ethereum and then write a tiny cryptographic proof back to the blockchain that verifies those transactions were performed correctly. It’s much faster and cheaper than using the base layer and has the potential for virtually unlimited scaling.

To an outsider, it looked like the technology went from 0 to 100 in a couple of years, but from the perspective of Polygon Miden founder Bobbin Threadbare, it doesn’t seem fast enough.

“Your internal perception is that it’s moving slowly,” he says. “People say, ‘We’re going to be doing this in a year,’ and it takes longer because people overestimate [how quickly it can be done].”

“But if you take a step back out of your own bubble, I do think that the tech is moving at an amazing pace. A lot of the things we’re doing now did not exist 10 years ago — or even maybe like eight years ago — they were just theoretical concepts.”