Blockchain

Blockchain.com set to unlock ZK-rollup scalability for a billion users

As the crypto industry looks forward to 2022, zero-knowledge scalability is high on many corporate hit lists, and the latest move by Blockchain.com Ventures to back ZK-rollup solution provider zkSync has cemented this focus with the ambitious goal of onboarding a billion users.

zkSync protocol is a premier layer-2 scalability offering from Matter Labs, which recently undertook a substantial Series B fundraising round that saw the firm unlock $50m in capital from major players such as Andreessen Horowitz, Consensys, ByBit and OKex.

Samuel Harrison, partner at Blockchain.com Ventures, explained that the ethos behind the decision to directly focus on Matter Lab’s zkSync protocol lay in an obvious demand for scaling solutions that could match the unparalleled explosion of the industry.

“As the crypto sector increasingly goes mainstream and more on-chain use cases emerge, we require scaling solutions that keep pace with demand,” explained Harrison.

“We believe rollups and ZK technology are a powerful pathway to scale blockchains without sacrificing security.

“zkSync makes it easy for developers to adopt this powerful technology, which will help bring crypto to the next wave of users.”

Why do ZK-Rollups have Blockchain.com so excited?

Zero Knowledge a cryptographic technique that is a simple and highly-secure, it enables one party to validate another’s block as true without needing to provide a proof of the blockchain data.

This, in effect, creates a protocol in which digital authentication can take place without anyone seeing anyone else’s sensitive data.

But it also has the knock-on benefit of compressing transactions – drastically reducing the amount of blockchain data that needs to be processed through increasingly strained networks.

This affords incredible scalability, but ZK-rollups take it a step further – bundling hundreds of transfers into one smart contract transaction. The smart contract can be interacted with to automatically deconstruct and verify any given transfers held.

It’s this ZK-rollup technology that has Blockchain.com so excited, but this is a competitive space with evolving mechanisms such as recently deployed ZK-STARKs.