What improvements does the Boojum upgrade bring to zkSync?
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What improvements does the Boojum upgrade bring to zkSync?
zkSync withstood the stress test of inscription thanks to Boojum.
Navigating Web3 tides with focused insightsAuthor: Haotian
Recently, @zksync completed the Boojum upgrade, which enabled zkSync to withstand the stress test brought by the SYNC inscription event. However, Boojum has been significantly undervalued by the market.
What kind of performance improvements does Boojum actually bring? Can it resolve the long-criticized DeFi stability issues? Here’s my take:
1) The Boojum upgrade essentially facilitates zkSync's transition from SNARK to STARK proofs. The workflow can be summarized as follows:
Once a batch is finalized, transactions within it are decomposed into multiple specialized circuits and processed in parallel at high speed to generate numerous STARK proofs. These individual STARKs are then aggregated into a single STARK proof, which is subsequently wrapped into a SNARK proof before being submitted to the mainnet for verification.
This hybrid use of STARK and SNARK ensures both efficient processing of large transaction volumes and reduced data size when submitting to the mainnet (thanks to SNARK's compactness), thereby achieving better compatibility with Ethereum.
Employing both proving systems simultaneously means major performance gains across the prover system—such as advanced compression techniques, hardware acceleration, algorithmic optimization, batch aggregation efficiency, and memory/storage optimization;
2) As explained in a tweet by @0xtaetaehoho, prior to Boojum, the average data size per transaction was 211 bytes, but after the upgrade this drops to approximately 68 bytes. This improvement in compression technology directly increases the number of transactions per Layer 2 batch, significantly boosting TPS (to around 450) and reducing per-transaction gas costs by about 65%.
The principle is straightforward: Layer 2 submits state proof data to the mainnet via calldata. Since on-chain storage capacity is limited, Layer 2’s ability to process transactions in parallel using STARKs, combined with SNARK-based compression, determines how many transactions each batch can handle and the resulting gas cost;
3) Previously, ZK-Rollups suffered from instability when handling low-frequency DeFi transactions due to inherent design tendencies that were unfavorable for DeFi stability. For instance, DeFi protocols rely on dynamic pricing fed by multiple oracles. If two related transactions are not included in the same batch, increased slippage and inefficiencies occur.
Now, with a significantly higher transaction capacity per batch, more oracle price updates can be accommodated within a single block. This effectively resolves the DeFi stability issue.
As zkSync's official @anthonykrose pointed out, regardless of how many oracle updates a block contains, the entire block state can now be processed and recorded as a single unit, requiring only one state-write cost. This brings substantial benefits to DeFi applications running on ZK-Rollup chains—lower fees, higher efficiency, and improved stability.
In theory, the Boojum upgrade should be considered a milestone advancement for zkSync.
On one hand, it validates the hypothesis that larger transaction volumes in ZK systems lead to lower gas fees and better user experience; on the other, it demonstrates that efficient utilization of off-chain prover resources—including compression, hardware acceleration, and computational optimizations—opens up immense potential for future ZK system performance.
Everyone is anticipating Ethereum’s Cancun upgrade, where Blob storage is expected to reduce Layer 2 batch submission costs. Yet, thanks to internal technical optimizations like Boojum, ZK-Rollups have already reached parity with OP-Rollups in terms of economic efficiency.
Crucially, ZK-Rollups are far more "proactive" than OP-Rollups. The long-standing narrative about ZK-Rollup’s technological advantages has now been fully substantiated through the Boojum upgrade.
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Haotian | CryptoInsight
