Solana and the Ethereum community are arguing again, this time over Solana’s newly launched ZK Compression technology.

Yesterday, Mert Mumtaz, CEO of Solana ecosystem development platform Helius, announced on the X platform that ZK Compression is being introduced to Solana. Subsequently, Solana ecosystem privacy project Light Protocol announced the launch of ZK Compression. According to Mert, ZK Compression will be done directly on L1, without the need for L2, which will greatly improve the scalability of the Solana network, "and take a step towards building a financial computer - an unstoppable, global, atomic state machine that synchronizes at the speed of light."

According to the ZK Compressiondocumentation, the technology is a new primitive built on Solana that enables developers to build applications at scale. Developers and users can choose to compress their on-chain state, reducing state costs by orders of magnitude while maintaining the security, performance, and composability of Solana L1.

ZK Compression works through a process called state compression, allowing developers to use Solana's cheaper ledger space instead of more expensive account space to store certain types of data. The "hashes" or "fingerprints" of off-chain data are stored on-chain for verification using "sparse state trees".

Has the Ethereum community "broken defense"?

The purely technical explanation may be too complicated. To put it simply, the technology reduces Solana's state cost.

In Solana, technicians face two costs - computing costs and state costs. Solana currently has cheap computing power, but the state is expensive. Allocating accounts, paying rent, and scaling with users have proven to be huge obstacles for Solana developers, and ZK Compression solves this problem.

Mert took the cost of airdrops as an example. Assuming an airdrop to 1,000,000 users, the state cost spent would be reduced from more than $260,000 to $50, which is 5,200 times cheaper. Justin Bons, founder and CIO of Cyber Capital, also believes that ZK Compression "clearly puts Solana far ahead of ETH in terms of actual L1 scalability, solving one of Solana's biggest survival problems."

The views expressed by Justin Bons have made the Ethereum community, which has been trapped in the expansion problem and has embarked on rollup, unable to sit still. They questioned the "L1 nature" of ZK Compression.

Because Mert said that ZK Compression data is kept off-chain, the Ethereum community regards it as validium. The Solana community responded with a meme, mocking the company for claiming to be an expert without serious research. Mert even named ZK Compression ZK validium out of spite.

In order to convince the Ethereum community, Mert named Ethereum founder Vitalik on Farcaster and asked him to comment on the technical principles of ZK Compression. Vitalik also responded seriously and said that the technology is more like a stateless client architecture.

Vitalik interpreted ZK Compression into 3 main points. First, you have a new class of accounts, for which only the hash of their state is stored on the chain; second, to interact with these accounts, you need to write a TX that specifies the pre-state hash and post-state hash of N accounts and provides a validity proof (assuming that this means ZK-SNARK); third, the new state requires disclosure (which is reasonable, otherwise you can randomly send someone a sum of money and their account will be inaccessible. You can bypass this and make it a Ut xo system, but that would be a significant limitation).

In addition to the interpretation, Vitalik also questioned the document. On the one hand, it is the 128-byte validity proof mentioned in the document, and on the other hand, whether the public content includes the transaction content.

Later, Vitalik expressed his doubts again. He thought that the figures claimed by ZK Compression were like that if each time it was done separately, the cost of verifying SNARK would be higher than the cost of doing some small actions and hash operations (such as token transfers). The benefits of ZK rollup come from "one" SNARK wrapping "many" transactions.

But Vitalik's doubts were not responded to, and his initial call of ZK Compression as a "stateless client architecture" gave supporters including Mert more confidence.

CEHV partner Adam Cochran firmly stated that ZK Compression is Solana's L2 solution, and he believes that "one day, the Solana crowd will realize that what they have built is a good rollup based on L2 functionality/validity, not a whole chain." Adam's resolute attitude also attracted criticism from Mert.

Solana co-founder Anatoly Yakovenko seemed "indifferent" to the L1 or L2 debate, and even said that he was "happy to designate it as L2, storage rollup, or validity-based rollup, etc.", but emphasized that "all executions occur on L1 and are ordered by L1 validators." Although Adam was different from responding to Mert's toughness, he still insisted that ZK Compression could not be L1.

Alex Gluchowski, founder of ZKsync, was also critical of ZK Compression. At the same time, he said that ZKsync has been quietly building an asynchronous and composable ZK future for Ethereum. But interestingly, after the release of ZK Compression, Anatoly also published a long article introducing asynchronous program execution (APE) in Solana.

Will Rollup be the perfect match for Solana?

Solana has always been looking for value for its network. The valuation logic of the various altchains that emerged from the last bull market is not exactly like Bitcoin and Ethereum. Due to the cheap block space, it is difficult for the corresponding coin prices to rise significantly. Solana is still focusing on compression technology and constantly reducing its own costs, which is a huge challenge for SOL's appreciation to a certain extent.

Even considering Moore's Law, even if hardware can continue to improve performance, and Solana is optimized for this hardware progress, it does not mean that Solana can cope with global demand, but Solana will manage better than other chains relying on composability and low latency.

Unlike Ethereum, the Solana mainnet is not intended to be a "B2B chain"; it has always been and will always be a consumer chain. Building distributed systems at scale is extremely challenging, and Solana has the best potential to become a shared ledger for the world’s most valuable transactions.

As for rollups, Solana rollups will mostly be abstracted from end users.

Ideologically, Ethereum’s rollups were top-down, with the Ethereum Foundation and leaders deciding the best way to scale was through rollups, and then starting to support various Layer2s after the CryptoKitties incident. On Solana, demand is bottom-up, coming from application developers with significant user adoption. As a result, most current roll-up plays are marketing plays that are more narrative-driven than user demand-driven. This is a significant difference that could lead to a different rollup future than Ethereum’s.

Related reading: "Does Solana need L2 and application chains? "

But ZK Compression enables state compression for Solana, coupled with Firedancer, multiple concurrent leaders, asynchronous execution, and an ecosystem of thousands of developers, which undoubtedly gives Solana a real chance for encryption.

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