Can zkSync's competing OP Stack product win the battle for L2 expansion?

On the evening of June 26, zkSync announced the launch of ZK Stack, a modular open source framework for building custom zkRollups, designed to give developers complete autonomy, from choosing data availability models to using the project's own Token decentralized sorter. ZK Stack provides two key functions: sovereignty and seamless connection. These zkRollup chains operate independently and only rely on Ethereum L1 for their activity and security. At the same time, there are cross-chain bridges to facilitate the interconnection of each chain, achieving trustless, fast and cheap interoperability.

The launch of ZK Stack is reminiscent of the scalability solution OP Stack launched by the Optimism team. As a set of standardized open source modules, developers can assemble a customized chain through OP Stack to serve any specific blockchain use case. The design of the OP Stack allows code forking in a way that is easier than current efforts, as developers can easily abstract away the various components of the blockchain and modify it by plugging in different modules.

Announcing products similar to Optimism and Arbitrum ecology before the mainnet Token is launched, ZK Stack is considered by many to be the trump card used by the zkSync team to compete with OP Stack and Arbitrum Orbit. So what are the characteristics of ZK Stack? What are the advantages and disadvantages compared with OP Stack?

ZK Stack

The zkSync team shared a first draft of the ZK Credo last week, illuminating key attributes of a decentralized blockchain network and the need for ZK as the foundation for the emerging Internet of Value. The launch of ZK Stack is based on the team's vision of scalability.

According to the official documentation, ZK Stack is a free and modular open-source framework designed to build custom ZK-driven L2 and L3 based on the code of zkSync Era. The core of ZK Stack provides the two key functions of sovereignty and seamless connection, and creators enjoy unrestricted autonomy to customize and shape all aspects of the chain. In general, ZK Stack has three characteristics: open source, composability, and modularity.

ZK Stack is developed under the fully permissive MIT/Apache open source license, ensuring that it is freely available and developers can contribute and use it according to their needs. Second, the super chain built using ZK Stack can be seamlessly connected in a trustless network, with low latency and shared liquidity. In addition, ZK Stack can help developers customize and shape their own Hyperchain from the selection of sequencers and data availability modes to defining their own token economy.

Paradigm shift

The ZK Stack is also an important paradigm shift for the zkSync core team. Prior to this, the team focused on building mature ZK technology, and launched an EVM-compatible ZK Rollup — zkSync Era earlier this year. The launch of ZK Stack marks to a certain extent that the focus of the team's work has shifted from focusing on technology to focusing on the community. The team hopes that with the launch of more Hyperchains, the number of core contributors to the zkSync ecosystem will grow significantly, and the community will become the true owner of the zkSync ecosystem network.

Similar to OP Stack, it will be a simpler process for developers to deploy a Hyperchain for their own applications, and it will be able to achieve asynchronous connections with other protocols in the ecosystem for various interoperability functions. In the ZK Stack document, the team listed several potential application scenarios of Hyperchain:

1. When building a game or social network and need a lightweight sequencer that is not burdened by other dApps and use cases;

2. When building a DeFi application chain that emphasizes low-latency sequencing;

3. When an enterprise builds an internal private chain and wishes to maintain interconnection with the Ethereum ecosystem;

Ultra Scalability

In addition to the scalability features, the most striking thing about ZK Stack is its strong interoperability. ZK Stack allows developers to build their own sovereign chains without sacrificing interoperability and composability. Each Hyperchain can be seamlessly integrated into zkSync's ecosystem, supported by shared provers and fractal extensions, thus Form a complete liquidity network.

Through the architecture of ZK Stack, smart contracts on each Hyperchain will be able to call each other asynchronously across chains, and users can quickly transfer their assets in a trustless manner within minutes without incurring any additional costs. At the same time, the super chain itself will have complete autonomy, be able to join other ecology, and take away its own chain assets.

The ZK Stack team stated that changes to the code base will be made in the next few weeks to make it easier to check out, configure, and deploy instances of ZK Stack, with the ultimate goal of achieving one-click deployment just like OP Stack.

ON STACK

Next we review the OP Stack which has been released and adopted by many teams. In October 2022, Optimism, the second-layer expansion solution of Ethereum, launched OP Stack, a modular open source blueprint. blockchain. Betting on the ingenuity of the entire Ethereum community, the OP Stack is a set of standardized open-source modules through which developers can assemble a blockchain that serves a specific use case. The design of OP Stack allows developers to fork the Optimism code more easily, and modify the Optimism code by abstracting the various components of the blockchain and inserting different modules. For example, when an Optimistic Rollup wants to transform itself into a ZK Rollup, it only needs to replace its fraud proof module with the validity proof module of the settlement layer.

Open Garden

OP Stack first proposed the concept of "open garden", as long as the OP chain voluntarily chooses to enter the same shared sequencer set, it can enjoy atomic cross-chain combination. If the OP chain does not want to run their own sequencer, they can pay a certain fee to use their trusted Optimism shared sequencer, which also opens up a profit model for Optimism.

Based on this vision, Optimism calls its own OP chain Superchain. OP Chains will be fully interoperable on Optimism and connected by the same technical structure. With increased configuration flexibility enabled by OP Stack shared modules, developers are recycling reusable code that previous developers have used, making the code stronger and more resistant to hacks and bugs.

Support from "Web3 Big Factory"

Shortly after the launch of OP Stack, it received support from the "Web3 giants". In February of this year, Coinbase announced the launch of a multi-chain L2 platform based on OP Stack. This cooperation is committed to upgrading the Optimism main network, Base and other L2 to the initial super chain structure, and sharing bridges and sorting. As an OP platform blockchain, Base will return a portion of the transaction fee revenue to the Optimism Collective treasury.

Based on OP Stack, Base has the security and scalability required to support decentralized applications, and utilizes the underlying security of Ethereum to allow users to enter Base from Coinbase, Ethereum L1 and other interoperable chains. At the same time, Base provides full EVM equivalence at a very low cost and is committed to advancing the development of developer platforms. In addition, developers on Base can easily build decentralized applications by accessing Coinbase's products, users, and tools, seamlessly integrate with Coinbase products, and access $80 billion worth of assets to provide services to platform users.

On Stack, which one is better, OP or Sync?

In addition to coinbase, OP Stack, which has a first-mover advantage, has also been favored by the "leading public chain" such as BNB Chain. On June 19th, BNB Chain announced the launch of a new expansion solution, opBNB, and launched the opBNB test network. With the surge in transaction volume such as GameFi, BSC also often faces the problems of network congestion and high Gas fees, and the original design and architecture have been difficult to meet the scalability requirements. In this case, opBNB came into being, which provides a new possibility to solve the scalability problem of BSC.

opBNB is a layer-2 expansion solution built on top of BSC. It is also compatible with EVM and implemented based on the Bedrock version of OP Stack. Similar to the working principle of Bedrock, opBNB processes transactions off-chain and then publishes transaction data on-chain. In this way, on-chain data is compressed, thereby improving scalability.

Users interact with the opBNB network through applications or directly through contracts on opBNB; Sequencers aggregate transactions, calculate state transitions and submit them to the rollup contract on BSC; Provers generate encrypted proofs to prove these states The validity of the transition; Verifiers check the proof to verify the correctness of the opBNB state.

Unlike Optimism and Coinbase's two-layer solution Base, opBNB is built on BSC instead of Ethereum. The performance of BSC itself is better than Ethereum. Therefore, the performance of opBNB is not only better than BSC, but also better than expansion solutions such as Optimism. According to the official description, the block time of opBNB is 1 second, the gas fee for transfer is as low as $0.005, and the number of transactions per second (TPS) that can be processed exceeds 4000, which is better than the existing expansion scheme.

In addition to public chains like BNB Chain, many application development teams also choose to develop their own application chains based on OP Stack:

On March 1, the game digital economy platform Cocos-BCX and NodeReal announced a global strategic cooperation based on the Optimistic (OP) Stack to jointly develop the first Web3 game-centric Rollup Layer 2 on the BNB Chain. This cooperation will combine Cocos-BCX's leading Web3 game extension solution and NodeReal's comprehensive blockchain infrastructure to support more than 1.6 million game developers in 2D/3D games, metaverse, artificial intelligence (AI) and extended reality ( XR) field development.

On April 20, a16z Crypto announced the launch of Magi, a new Optimism Stack rollup client. Magi is an OP Stack rollup client developed in Rust, Magi performs the same core functionality as the reference implementation (OP-node), and works with execution nodes (such as OP-geth) to sync to any OP Stack chain, including Optimism and Base.

On June 22, Zora, an NFT trading market, announced the launch of ZORA NETWORK, a Layer 2 network based on OP Stack. The network provides faster and more efficient Ethereum scaling for artists, creators, and the community, and will integrate directly with all existing zora tools. Zora Network released a two-layer NFT minting platform based on OP Stack, which provides a series of NFT creator tools for NFT creators, brands and collectors, and can reduce the minting cost by less than 3 US dollars.

**So has the OP Stack with the first-mover advantage already defeated the ZK Stack in the L2 scalability battle? **

After the news of ZK Stack was announced, the community also compared the two in detail from the technical fundamentals. Blockchain researcher Haotian (@tmel0211) pointed out in a follow-up tweet that HyperChain does not need to maintain state and consensus, and can directly rely on the security of Ethereum. Moreover, compared with OP Rollup's interactive fraud proof, HyperChains can use ZK proofs to directly verify state changes without waiting for the state change at the bottom of Ethereum, so the efficiency of inter-chain interaction has also improved a lot. In contrast, OP Stack still has limitations in asynchronous cross-chain calls. Its state change needs to wait for the underlying verification of Ethereum.

It can be seen that, on one side is the OP Stack with first-mover advantage, and on the other is the ZK Stack with technical advantages. The battle for L2 expansion has just begun. There is no doubt that no matter who wins in the end, the multi-chain expansion narrative surrounding Ethereum is gradually becoming an important driving force for detonating a new round of encryption cycle.