Matter Labs Unveils Ethereum L2 Scaling Solution Better than Optimistic Rollups

Matter Labs has announced that it has made a significant success in its zkPorter development. The firm claims zkPorter will increase Ethereum’s throughput to over 20k transactions per second (TPS) and it offers more security than the much talked about optimistic rollups, according to a blog post on April 13, 2021.

A Breakthrough Ethereum Scaling System

While members of the Ethereum ecosystem are hopeful that the network’s scalability issues and high transaction fees will become a thing of the past with the impending launch of Layer-2 scaling solutions such as optimistic rollups, zkRollups, and others, Matter Labs, a research and development company that claims to be scaling Ethereum with zero-knowledge proofs, has revealed that rollups may not provide a lasting solution to Ethereum’s problems.

“As protocols move from Ethereum base layer to optimistic rollups and EMV-compatible zkRollups, many hope we’ll finally make on-chain fees manageable. But everyone working on Ethereum scaling knows the industry’s dirty secret: even with rollups, we’ll probably end up right back where we started, as any realistic increase in throughput will quickly get eaten up by induced demand,” Matter Labs wrote.

Matter Labs says despite the hype, rollups can only offer a “linear” increase in throughput, whereas the only solution to the challenges at hand is one that offers an exponential increase in throughput.

Specifically, Matter Labs notes that optimistic rollups can only scale Ethereum by roughly 25x, while zkRollups offers ~100x increase and both will not give Ethereum the capacity to survive “mainstream adoption.”

Enter zkPorter

The team says its zkPorter solution, which is scheduled to go live in the next six months with zkSync 2.0, will significantly boost throughput by over 20,000 transactions per second (TPS) and it’s far more secure than optimistic rollups.

What’s more, the team has hinted that its zkSync 2.0  L2 state is divided into two sides: zkRollup, which holds on-chain data and zkPorter with off-chain data availability. 

Both sides will be interoperable, however, the zkPorter side offers users very low gas fees and everyone will be able to choose the layer they need their data on.

The team says the data availability of zKPorter accounts will be secured by zkSync token holders called Guardians, whose duties will be to sign blocks to confirm data availability of zkPorter accounts.

Whether it’s optimistic rollups or zkPorter that finally solves the Ethereum scalability equation, at the end, it’s a win-win scenario for Ethereum and its users.

At press time, the price of ether (ETH) sits at $2,356, with a market cap of $272.22 billion, as seen on CoinMarketCap.