ZKUSD
ZK / United States dollar
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zkSync is a trustless Layer 2 protocol for scalable low-cost payments on Ethereum, powered by zkRollup technology. It is a user-centric zk rollup platform from Matter Labs, with security, user experience, and developer experience as the core focus. zkSync Version 1.0 launched on the Ethereum mainnet on June 15th 2020, enabling transaction throughput of ~300 TPS. Matter Labs is currently focused on the development of zkSync 2.0 which has a twofold goal; firstly, arbitrary smart contract capabilities through support of both Solidity (via zkEVM) and Zinc (the rollup's internal programming language); and secondly, an exponential increase in throughput, in the order of 20,000+ TPS, via zkPorter - a protocol combining zkRollups and sharding. In Matter Labs' original announcement for the zkSync protocol's vision four fundamental design choices are presented: Security: zkSync is built upon ZK Rollups - a scaling solution in which funds are held on the main chain, but computation and storage are performed off-chain. ZK Rollups use validity proofs, which are computed on-chain and guarantee that transactions made within the rollup are valid. Usability: In the rollup, transactions are real-time, enabled by subsecond consensus in block production by validators, which must post a significant security bond to the main chain to discourage malicious action. Liveness: specialized roles are required to maintain a scaling solution's liveness. In zkSync these are Validators, which produce blocks and generate corresponding zero knowledge proofs, and Guardians - which will be responsible for making sure the rollup remains censorship resistant. In zkPorter, Guardians will have the role of inviting a protocol's stakeholders to participate as data availability guarantors on the protocol's shard on zkPorter. Guardians-enabled shards will run a form of Proof of Stake consensus. Programmability and privacy: zkSync must have both an appropriate long-term Zero Knowledge proof system and a smart contract programming framework. With regards to the former, Matter Labs is developing RedShift, a transparent SNARK (though the current version is based on the PLONK prover), and for the latter, Zinc was developed as a framework for zero-knowledge based smart contracts. Solidity support will be added as of Version 2.0's release. zkRollup architecture provides the following guarantees: Validators can never corrupt the state or steal funds. Users can always retrieve the funds from the zkRollup smart contract even if validators stop cooperating, because the data is available. Neither users nor a single trusted third party needs to be online to monitor zkRollup blocks in order to prevent fraud. The fundamental premise is that all funds are held by a smart contract on the mainchain, while computation and storage are performed off-chain. Instead of verifying each transaction separately, transactions are "rolled up" to a single item (the rollup block), which is then being verified, approving all of them simultaneously. Zero knowledge proof (SNARK) verification is much cheaper than verifying every transaction individually, and storing the state off-chain is significantly cheaper than storing it on EVM. This enables an improvement in scalability (~100-200x mainnet capacity) and transaction cost savings. Funds placed into zkSync (v1) have the same security guarantees as if they are held in an Ethereum account without any additional requirements on the user's part. zkRollup (the core technology of zkSync) does not require any operational activity to keep user funds safe. Users may go offline for a certain extent of time, then upon resuming activity can be certain of being able to safely withdraw their assets without any external help, even in a scenario zkRollup validators become inactive. Generally speaking, zkSync supports safely sending funds to any Ethereum address, including exchanges and smart contracts;. The list of the Ethereum wallets that can be controlled from the zkSync web wallet can be inspected directly on the web front end. To control addresses programmatically, it is necessary to be able to perform message signing with it — either with native Ethereum signature, or via EIP1271 in case of smart contracts. zkSync can be used to transfer Ether and ERC20 tokens. New token listing is performed on a first-come, first-serve basis if the criteria presented at listing submission time are met. The listing process is set to become permissionless by the next system upgrade.