The different types of ZK-EVMs
Special thanks to the PSE, Polygon Hermez, Zksync, Scroll, Matter Labs and Starkware teams for discussion and review. There have been many "ZK-EVM" projects making flashy announcements recently. Polygon open-sourced their ZK-EVM project, ZKSync released their plans for ZKSync 2.0, and the relative newcomer Scroll announced their ZK-EVM recently. There is also the ongoing effort from the Privacy and Scaling Explorations team, Nicolas Liochon et al's team, an alpha compiler from the EVM to Starkware's ZK-friendly language Cairo, and certainly at least a few others I have missed. The core goal of all of these projects is the same: to use ZK-SNARK technology to make cryptographic proofs of execution of Ethereum-like transactions, either to make it much easier to verify the Ethereum chain itself or to build ZK-rollups that are (close to) equivalent to what Ethereum provides but are much more scalable. But there are subtle differences between these projects, and what tradeoffs they are makin
Special thanks to the PSE, Polygon Hermez, Zksync, Scroll, Matter Labs and Starkware teams for discussion and review. There have been many "ZK-EVM" projects making flashy announcements recently. Polygon open-sourced their ZK-EVM project, ZKSync released their plans for ZKSync 2.0, and the relative newcomer Scroll announced their ZK-EVM recently. There is also the ongoing effort from the Privacy and Scaling Explorations team, Nicolas Liochon et al's team, an alpha compiler from the EVM to Starkware's ZK-friendly language Cairo, and certainly at least a few others I have missed. The core goal of
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