Last week, Solana launched a new technology called "ZK Compression", which is said to reduce Solana's state cost and allow Solana to improve network scalability without going through L2. This is simply a slap on Ethereum's face with the three words "I win".

Solana co-founder Anatoly Yakovenko also came out to emphasize that the technology "all execution occurs on L1 and is ordered by L1 validators." Justin Bons, founder and CIO of Cyber Capital, believes that "this obviously puts Solana far ahead of ETH in terms of actual L1 scalability, solving one of Solana's biggest survival problems."

Has the Ethereum community been "broken"?

Blockchains face a "trilemma", which means that it is difficult for distributed networks to balance decentralization, security, and scalability. While maintaining the first two, in order to improve scalability, Ethereum chose to outsource its execution layer business to L2.

From the initial plasma to the current rollup, L2 has indeed solved Ethereum's scalability problem, making Ethereum an "asset of everything". However, this choice has also brought an unexpected state of chaos to Ethereum. As L2 gradually fragments, Ethereum's own value capture ability has been gradually weakened. On June 29, the Ethereum mainnet gas fee even dropped to 1 Gwei.

The recent debate between Ethereum and Solana also targeted L2. It can be said that the L2 solution is a gamble for Ethereum. However, this dilemma was solved by Solana. Ethereum believers naturally could not easily accept this reality and questioned the "L1 nature" of ZK Compression.

Related reading: "Solana and Ethereum "quarreled", how should the community stand? "

In Ethereum's L2 solution, Validium's mechanism is very similar to zkRollup, and all its transaction validity is enforced using zero-knowledge proofs. The main difference is that in zkRollup, data availability is on-chain, while Validium is kept off-chain.

For this reason, when Mert Mumtaz, CEO of Solana's ecological development platform Helius, said that ZK Compression's data was kept off-chain, the Ethereum community regarded it as validium. Among them, 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."

Even though Anatoly emphasized that "all executions occur on L1 and are ordered by L1 validators", Adam still insisted that ZK Compression could not be L1.

The Solana community responded with a meme, satirizing Ethereum believers who claimed to be experts without doing serious research. Mert even named ZK Compression ZK validium out of spite.

Solana airdrop cost is 5200 times cheaper

ZK Compression is a blockchain expansion solution jointly launched by Solana ecosystem development platform Helius and Solana ecosystem privacy project Light Protocol. According to Helius CEO Mert Mumtazt, ZK Compression will be performed directly on L1 without 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 synchronized 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. "Hashes" or "fingerprints" of off-chain data are stored on-chain for verification using "sparse state trees."

The purely technical explanation may be too complicated, but in simple terms, the technology reduces Solana's state costs.

In Solana, technicians face two costs - computational 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 used the example of the cost of airdrops, assuming that an airdrop is made to 1,000,000 users, the state cost spent is reduced from over $260,000 to $50, which is 5,200 times cheaper.

In order to make the L1 nature of the technology more convincing, 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 interprets 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 this means ZK-SNARK); third, the new state requires public (this 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 interpretation, Vitalik also questioned the document, on the one hand, the 128-byte validity proof mentioned in the document, and on the other hand, whether the public content includes the transaction content.

Later, Vitalik posted again to express his doubts. He believed that the numbers claimed by ZK Compression were like, if done separately each time, 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 Solana's supporters more confidence, believing that the technology is L1.

Will Rollup be the perfect match for Solana?

Solana has been looking for value for its network. The valuation logic of the 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 to increase its value 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 be mostly 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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