Consensys, a market-leading Web3 company, has announced that their zkEVM is now ready for public testnet.
In short
- ConsenSys will open an EVM-equivalent zkEVM rollup to public testnet on March 28th, 2023
- Our zkEVM is the culmination of years of research by ConsenSys R&D and offers unrivaled scalability and performance.
- We’ve had positive feedback and encouraging results during our private beta which has already processed over 460,000 transactions and onboarded dozens of dapps.
- Our innovative lattice-based prover offers leading performance in proof generation, resulting in cheap transaction fees. ConsenSys zkEVM offers fast finality, high throughput, and the security of Ethereum settlement.
- EVM equivalence means existing apps can be migrated with little to no rework. Out of the box integrations with popular tools like Infura, Truffle, and MetaMask removes friction for developers and users alike.
- If you’re interested in exploring current apps or submitting your own project go to the Explore tab here.
Introduction
From the genesis block, ConsenSys has worked to build and democratize Ethereum. From creating developer tools such as Infura that have become industry standards, to developing Hyperledger Besu and Teku as open-source software, ConsenSys has strived to keep the collective interest of the Ethereum community top of mind.
For the past four years, our Protocols teams helped to shape and deliver critical upgrades to Layer 1 Ethereum. During this time ConsenSys R&D was designing Layer 2 infrastructure that can unlock trustless execution at scale. In March, we will take an important next step: providing permissionless access to an EVM-equivalent zkEVM rollup.
After releasing the specification for our zkEVM at DevCon last fall, we launched a private testnet that allowed Solidity developers to build, test and launch dapps on an EVM-equivalent network with the skills they have and the tools they already know. Our goal was to not only test our zkEVM at scale, but also to create a seamless developer experience. With native integrations with other ConsenSys products such as MetaMask and Truffle, we wanted to allow builders to focus only on innovation.
The response from early users and partners has been overwhelmingly positive. Shane Fontaine, Co-Founder and COO, Hop Protocol, said: “We are excited to support ConsenSys’ new zkEVM to allow users to bridge between Ethereum and their new chain using the familiar Hop interface. The ConsenSys zkEVM team engaged with the Hop community to make the integration happen in a quick and professional way. The ease of integration, tooling, compatibility, and responsiveness from the ConsenSys team allowed this integration to work seamlessly with the existing Hop development stack.”
We have been encouraged by the demand and performance of the network during private beta and believe that opening it up for broader testing will spur new innovation. Starting March 28th, any dapp developer or protocol will be able to join the network, test smart contracts, and build decentralized applications.
A developer-friendly approach
ConsenSys zkEVM is a combined effort from teams across Infura, Truffle, and MetaMask, alongside developers on Besu and Gnark. We have built thoughtful integrations and features that remove developer complexity, improve security, and reduce onboarding time.
We are particularly excited about three things:
Zero switching costs
With ConsenSys zkEVM, you get unrivaled scalability using the apps, tooling, and infrastructure you love, with full EVM equivalence. You can build on our zkEVM and migrate existing dapps with no code changes or smart contract rewrites.
Additionally, our lattice-based prover allows our zkEVM to deliver industry-leading throughput and benefit from next-generation scaling.
ConsenSys zkEVM is highly composable. It is designed to work seamlessly with all other EVM-based dapps and allows for quick communication between them. Our developer-friendly design ensures that you do not need to be an expert in zero-knowledge technology to use it. In addition, it uses ETH for gas and has no reliance on third-party transpilers or custom middleware.
Easy onboarding
We know that building new technology is hard. We want to make it simple for you.
With ConsenSys zkEVM, you get native integrations with industry-leading tools such as Infura, MetaMask, and Truffle. Builders can onboard users easily with MetaMask, the leading web3 wallet. In addition, with Infura’s easy-to-use API you can ship dapps faster and scale with the confidence of 99.9% uptime.
Developers can also build, test, debug and deploy their Solidity smart contracts with best-in-class L2 developer environments from Truffle or using popular developer environments such as Hardhat, Foundry and Brownie. Built-in compatibility with Ganache and Diligence enables local testing and auditing of code, respectively.
That’s not all. Our native, trustless bridge and access to MetaMask’s user-friendly Bridge allows developers to safely move tokens on and off the network.
Best in class performance
Our R&D team spent four years perfecting an innovative prover design. Our recursion-friendly, lattice-based zkSNARK prover is more performant than standard schemes and verifiable on Ethereum mainnet. In addition, our prover, built with award winning in-house zkSNARK libraries, delivers ultra-low gas fees.
Open-source software is an important driver of long-term value creation in the Ethereum ecosystem. Since ConsenSys’ founding, we’ve supplied grants to fund open-source projects, maintained public Ethereum clients — Besu and Teku — and helped design the Merge specification and Ethereum’s Engine API. Our zkEVM will be no different: It will be maintained as an open-source public good, now and in the future.
The open, flexible architecture of our zkEVM will enable developers to configure dapps for their unique privacy, data availability, and access control needs.
A new chapter
As we join other Ethereum builders this week in Denver, we’re excited to connect with developers, dapps and the flowering ecosystem of protocols exploring the possibilities of a highly scalable Ethereum.
“General purpose zero knowledge blockchains have been positioned as the next big thing to scale Ethereum. The accepted understanding in the blockchain world is that this tech with full EVM equivalence is years away for developers. With ConsenSys’ launch – the future is now. Very excited to be partnering with ConsenSys to bring data accessibility and verifiability to their zkEVM through our Unified API,” says Ganesh Swami, co-founder and chief executive of Covalent, an open-source protocol that aggregates data from leading blockchain networks.
We are in the early chapters of Ethereum’s story and are proud to count some of web3’s brightest minds as partners with us on this journey.
The future is bright and the future is now. As we open up our permissionless testnet, we’re hoping you’ll join us to help scale Ethereum. If you’re interested in exploring current apps or submitting your own project go to the Ecosystem Portal.
In the meantime join our Discord and follow ConsenSys on Twitter for the latest news, information on upcoming community calls and insights from our engineers, developers and partners.
Scaling Ethereum is something we do together and we’re excited to take the next step with each of you.