ZKsync to Retire Its Original Ethereum Rollup Next Year

ZKsync, an Ethereum scaling option made by Matter Labs, stated Sunday that it prepares to retire ZKsync Lite, the network it introduced in June 2020 as Ethereum’s early zero-knowledge payment rollup, next year.

” This is a prepared, organized sundown for a system that has actually served its function and does not impact any other ZKsync systems,” the group composed on X.

They included that ZKsync Lite was a “proof-of-concept” and “confirmed vital concepts” in the context of Matter Labs’ rollout of production variations of its zero-knowledge systems.

Those early advancements later on assisted construct out the systems that now underpin ZKsync Age and the ZK Stack.

” It did its task: show what’s possible and lead the way for the next generation,” the group composed.

The statement formalizes a shift that started when Matter Labs rebranded ZKsync 1.0 to ZKsync Lite in February 2023. A month later on, the laboratory stopped actively upgrading its engineering work for ZKsync Lite and moved its group to ZKsync Age and its wider ZK Stack.

At the time, Matter Labs’ head of engineering, Anthony Rose, informed Decrypt that ZKsync Age would “certainly be an alpha variation of the system,” acknowledging that they were not declaring it currently was “the system that [we] anticipate it to be.”

Rose then predicted approximately “2 or 3 years” of “more engineering work to do” and validated that ZKSync Age would form the “core skeleton” of Matter Laboratory’s zkEVM community.

Lite was constructed as a light-weight system for transfers, NFT minting, and standard swaps. Nevertheless, it did not assistance clever agreements, an element that restricted its long-lasting effectiveness when general-purpose zkEVM styles emerged.

When Age went reside in 2023 with complete EVM compatibility, designers started combining liquidity and tooling around the more recent stack. Wallets and decentralized apps then phased Lite out of their user interfaces, lowering active use to less than 200 day-to-day operations this month, according to information from L2Beat.

Lite still holds approximately $49 million in worth through its canonically bridged properties, which stay withdrawable to Ethereum through the network’s L1 agreement.

ZKsync validated that withdrawals to Ethereum “will keep working” throughout the deprecation procedure and dedicated to releasing timelines and guidelines in the coming year.

The statement comes simply over a year after Matter Labs exposed layoffs in September of in 2015, affecting 24 staff members, as validated with Decrypt

At the time, Matter Labs CEO Alex Gluchowski stated the layoffs were performed in the context of a “huge boost in need for ZK Chains.”

Decrypt has actually connected to Matter Labs and the Ethereum Structure for more remark.