100 Days to Mainnet

We are proud to announce zkSync 2.0 will be launching to Mainnet in 100 days, and unveil our public roadmap.

Editor’s note: On December 13, 2022, we publicly updated our roadmap to make room for our ongoing security audits. We now expect to reach our Fair Onboarding Alpha milestone in Q1 2023 and Fair Launch Alpha milestone in Q2 2023.

We are very proud to announce zkSync 2.0 will be launching to Mainnet in 100 days.

Launching the first EVM compatible zkRollup into production will be a huge accomplishment, and we want to thank our development team, our ecosystem partners, and our community for your patience and support as we have set out on a journey to build the №1 Layer 2 solution for developers.

It starts with our mission: to accelerate the mass adoption of crypto for personal sovereignty. It’s important to know the values and principles of the project and we’d like to share ours with you.

At zkSync, we embrace:

• The ethos of Ethereum.
• The value of Ethereum’s trustless security.
• Decentralization — for both our technology and for our company.
• The importance of letting our ecosystem partners have choice.
• The power of being fully open source.
• The commitment to being truly community owned.
• Scaling without degrading security or decentralization.

Beyond instilling our values into everything we do, we’ve done our best to listen and create a solution built by developers, for developers. Our goal is to provide you with the most powerful, trusted, and compatible solution that makes your life easy.

To that end, below are the features of zkSync 2.0:

• zkSync is EVM and web3 compatible.
• We support Solidity and Vyper: no security re-audit required.
• Porting is effortless: 99% of tooling will work out of the box.
• With zkSync your project will inherit the full security of Ethereum.
• You will benefit from more transactions per second and lower gas fees.
• Build on zkSync 2.0 now and be permanently future-proof.

Also, zkSync 3.0 is coming sooner than you may think.

Over the last couple of years, zkSync has been pretty heads down working on the research and development needed to make our journey successful. And we know that our community has wanted greater insight into our roadmap, our processes, and the ability to interact with us and ask more questions.

To that end, we are very proud to commit to the following:

• We have elected to adopt the use of a public roadmap from this moment forward.
• Each update to our public roadmap will be paired with AMA session that will include access to our founding CEO, chief product officer, and head of engineering.
• Each milestone will detail exactly what will be delivered.
• For key milestones, like launching on mainnet, we will share release dates as the milestones approach.
• For milestones further in the future, we will always include a high-level assessment of long-term timelines so you can make appropriate decisions.
• On our road to mainnet, there should be no breaking changes under almost all circumstances. However, if there is ever a situation where a breaking change does occur we will detail it in advance, and plan for a developer-friendly deprecation timeline.

zkSync Public Roadmap

Below are the sequential milestones in our 2022 roadmap.

[ February 2022 ] THE BEGINNING — Early this year, we launched zkSync 2.0 on a public testnet — the first ever zkEVM implementation. In this first stage, we began the process of implementing pieces of the production architecture on to testnet. The idea was to build small working systems that we could test at each major milestone, while getting feedback from developers.

[ May 2022 ] zkEVM ARCHITECTURE UPGRADE — After running on testnet for several months, we learned many new things that led us to make significant improvements to the zkEVM that set us up for better scalability, better performance, better security, and lay the foundation for future features.

• Major Architecture Overhaul — We made significant changes to our VM architecture that creates a strong foundation for future improvements and for future proofing our production system.
• Implementation of Account Abstraction — A significant enhancement to the default behavior of EVM. One of the big advancements with zkSync 2.0 is the concept of Account Abstraction — The decoupling of the object holding tokens (the account) from the object authorized to move tokens (the signer). This will enable developers to turn accounts into smart contracts with their own logic.
• Future Feature Support — Beyond account abstraction, the overhaul sets us up to move towards better performance, security, and for support of Layer 3.

[ July 2022 ] BETTER COMPATIBILITY — One of our primary goals is to make it easy for developers to port to zkSync. We understand that our developer community uses various versions of tools and we’ve included a major upgrade in our support for older versions of tools so developers don’t need to upgrade to use zkSync 2.0.

Two improvements that make porting to zkSync 2.0 easier:

• Solidity Support — Support for Solidity 0.4.11 onwards.
• Vyper Support — Full support for Vyper 0.3.3.

[ Summer 2022 ] DYNAMIC FEES — Developers should only pay for what they use and we’ve included a major upgrade to the fee modeling system to make sure that fees are charged in the most accurate manner.

• Implementation Dynamic Fee Model — Ensures accurate pay-for-use fees.

[ Early Fall 2022 ] PROOF MERGING — This is what many people have been waiting for: ZK proofs for EVM smart contracts in the live production environment. We’ve had fully functional circuits in our development environment for some time, but this milestone will enable everyone on our testnet to experience our ZK Prover.

• Merge of the prover — Integrating of the prover with the witness generator into the live block production system.
• Testing — Significant testing for proof performance and verification.

[ October 2022 ] PROJECT REGISTRATION — Once engineering approves the previous milestones, we will open up registration and begin working with ecosystem partners to prepare them for onboarding.

• Registration — You will be able to register to launch on mainnet.

[ November 2022 ] BABY ALPHA — Launch to mainnet at first with no external projects where we are putting the system through a series of real-money stress tests that will help us verify the production system is working correctly and performing as expected.

• 3rd Party Audit — Security audit with top-tier auditors.
• Dev Rel — Full prep of our developer relations team.
• Technical Documentation — Final review and posting of technical documentation.
• FAQ — Final review and posting of our zkSync 2.0 FAQ.
• Tutorials and Examples — Final review of tutorials and examples to make it easy for developers to onboard into zkSync 2.0.

[ Q1 2023 ] FAIR LAUNCH ALPHA — Once the system is tested, we will carefully execute a Fair Launch onboarding process. Fair Launch means that we welcome all of our ecosystem projects and we will not participate in picking winners or favorites. The idea here is we want to make sure we can handle the onboarding of new ecosystem partners wisely. We want each of our ecosystem partners to have a high-quality experience, and with each onboarding we want to improve our systems, processes, and support. At this stage, user access will remain limited.

• Ecosystem — Projects can deploy.
• Block Explorer — Upgraded block explorer that offers enhanced UX, optimized performance, and additional features such as a debugger tool.
• Bridging — Limited to testing purposes.
• Bug Bounties — Open Immunefi bug bounty program.
• Open Source — Circuits may not yet be open source, but we will be working on this process.

[ Q2 2023 ] FULL ALPHA — zkSync 2.0 Alpha is live.

• zkSync 2.0 is available for all projects and users.
• Open Source — we will fully open source zkSync 2.0.
• Prover — Improved performance upgrades.
• Bridging — expanded bridging and announcement of bridging partners.
• Developer Support — improvements and additions to documents, tutorials, and examples based on developer feedback.
• Bonus — zkSync 3.0 update ;)

Get on the zkSync 2.0 testnet now and join in on our road to mainnet.