The blockchain industry currently has countless Layer-1 projects, including Bitcoin, Ethereum, BNB Chain, Polygon, Solana, Avalanche, Near, Fantom, and Tron. Even in this era of fierce competition, new L1 public chains with different characteristics and advantages are also appearing one after another, and their technologies are constantly iterating. We expect that in the future almost all Layer1 including Aptos and Sui will eventually embrace zkEVM-based zkRollup and Omnichain zkRollup will emerge.
New public chain Aptos/Sui and Move smart contract language
By 2022, the most eye-catching among many new industrial chains is the so-called Diem L1 public chain, including Aptos and Sui, which focus on Move smart contract language. Aptos/Su was initiated by engineers who worked at Meta (formerly Facebook) on Diem (formerly Libra), the name for Meta’s proprietary blockchain and its stablecoins. These projects inherit many of Diem’s capabilities and differ from the existing L1 public chain in terms of performance, programming language, and mechanisms.
The unique feature of Move, the programming language adopted by Aptos/Sui, is that it completely redefines the “module structure”, enabling tokens, NFT, smart contracts, and other assets to be succinct and modular defined using a single data module. This is something Ethereum’s EVM cannot match — anyone who has developed using EVM will know how difficult it is to use a modular structure (and nested structure) in Solidity. Consider the classic Re-entrancy Attack. This has plagued EVM projects for a long time, often costing millions or tens of millions of dollars, and because the Move language uses a resource-based approach, reentry attacks are unlikely.
Whether Aptos/Sui can stand out as a mainstream public chain in the future is not only related to the language adopted, but also depends on the imagination of the projects on the future chain. If ETH is a four-lane road, though the lane is not wide, there is a constant flow of people, occasionally mixed with complaints about the congested road, then Aptos/Sui is just like an eight-lane highway, with the best asphalt and the most advanced and safe signal lights, but there doesn’t seem to be much flow. For public chain, on the one hand, it is the technological innovation, on the other hand, it is the project on the public chain to the traffic of the public chain itself feeding, no application of public chain even if the technology is good, it is difficult to stand out.
In order to capture the huge traffic of the EVM system, Aptos and Sui will eventually embrace the EVM system and Layer2 network, especially the most advanced zkEVM-Based zkRollup.
How to set up zkEVM-based zkRollup on Aptos/Sui
In the long term, zkRollup will be one of the most concise, secure and efficient capacity expansion solutions. In principle, a zkRollup can be deployed on any network (as long as the network can verify the proof sent by the zkRollup), so we can definitely set up a zkEVM zkRollup on Aptos/Sui. So what’s the benefit? The first is to incorporate developers and users from EVM. For developers, deploying a product on Aptos/Sui with a highly compatible Zkevim-based zkRollup is similar to deploying a product on Ethereum or another EVM-compatible chain without much code and design modification. This means that with zkRollup, developers in the EVM ecosystem can migrate their applications to the Aptos/Sui ecosystem at near zero cost. At this time, as long as there was a small incentive, a large number of successful projects in the EVM system could be attracted to migrate and deploy, bringing a large number of ecology and field environment to Aptos/Sui. On the other hand, for the user, zkRollup allows the user to further enjoy lower (or even non-sensationalized) fees and the opportunity to have a similar experience to a traditional app in terms of interaction speed and payment patterns. Such a vision is undoubtedly exciting, so how can we build a zkEVM-based zkRollup on Aptos/Sui? Let’s take a look at the generic Zkevem-based zkRollup model designed by Fox Tech.
First of all, we need a Sequencer, which is responsible for receiving the transactions on zkRollup and executing the transactions through a node with EVM to ensure EVM compatibility. In this process, Sequencer will also produce a Trace of the execution process that is easy to prove. And send it to the proof packer, zkProver. zkProver is a proof producer with zk-EVM. zk-EVM finally has a complete zero-knowledge proof circuit designed according to EVM, which can verify whether the process of execution record is correct (that is, whether it is consistent with the execution rules of EVM), and finally uses a set of zero-knowledge proof algorithm to generate zero-knowledge proof. And send the proof to Aptos/Sui. Finally, we need to deploy several contracts on Aptos/Sui: We need a contract to host the zkRollup assets, which will manage the flow of assets between Aptos/Sui and zkRollup. We also need a validation contract to validate the certificates sent by zkProver and a governance contract to manage permission issues (such as logging the asset types in the Prover and registering the zkRollup).
The Web3 network will eventually have Omnichain zkRollup
In the future, the ecosystem of Web3 network will not be dominated by Ethereum, but multi-public chains will coexist and compete against each other. Therefore, cross-chain and cross-chain interaction of assets have become important requirements. If you think about the traditional cross-chain Bridges, if you don’t care about security, then you only need 3 cross-chain Bridges if you have only 3 chains, but you need 10 cross-chain Bridges if you have 5 chains, and you need nearly 200 cross-chain Bridges if you have 20 chains to achieve direct communication between these pairs of chains.
Thus, an Omnichain zkRollup could eventually become the ultimate home for cross-chain or even full-chain applications. On top of the above generic zkEVM-based zkRollup, an Ominichain Interoperation Protocol (a very important track for the next five years, Players have LayerZero, HyperLane, Way Network, etc.), thus forming the so-called Omnichain zkRollup. It will gather asset liquidity from the whole chain and act as the executive level of the whole chain. It ensures the correct type of transaction through zero-knowledge proof and enjoys the security equivalent to the total of the whole chain. We envision an Omnichain zkRollup that will implement fully programmable interactions between assets and information from across the chain. Users can initiate such interactions by sending transactions on the Omnichain Zkrollup that will change the state of accounts from each chain. Omnichain zkRollup calculates and updates the status on each chain on a block basis and submits proof of the status update.
Omnichain zkRollup’s vision includes endless possibilities on which one can deploy decentralized exchanges that bring together all chains; You can create GameFi and SocialFi with a full chain of users; Even more diverse, diverse and borderless applications will be possible.