Analyzing zkSync: Why ZK Technology Could Be the Endgame?
TechFlow Selected TechFlow Selected
Analyzing zkSync: Why ZK Technology Could Be the Endgame?
Let Starknet's bullets fly for a moment—zkSync is gathering momentum.
Navigating Web3 tides with focused insightsBy Haotian
Recently, after the grand conclusion of Starknet's massive airdrop, global attention has almost entirely shifted to @zksync. As a dominant force in the ZK-Rollup space, zkSync still leads across most key metrics, making market expectations around it entirely justified.
However, zkSync has not disclosed any airdrop plans and instead repeatedly emphasized "ZK is the Endgame." Is ZK technology truly the endgame for Layer 2? Here’s my take:
1) The technical debate between OP-Rollup and ZK-Rollup has been the focal point over the past year or two. It's widely believed that ZK-Rollup's main advantage lies in eliminating the 7-day challenge period. This stems from ZK's ability to rapidly verify transaction states between Layer 2 and the mainnet while ensuring each transaction's validity. In contrast, OP-Rollup operates under an optimistic assumption about transactions submitted from Layer 2, requiring a 7-day window during which fraud can be challenged to prevent malicious activity.
In practice, users only care about immediate state finality when withdrawing funds. Most common interactions like swaps and transfers are completed entirely within Layer 2, with only some data and state updates periodically submitted to the mainnet for final settlement. As such, most users barely notice the 7-day challenge period.
Over time, the OP-Rollup camp has become complacent regarding this critical security mechanism, and there have been few battle-tested cases of actual 7-day challenges.
Perhaps many OP-based projects believe that as long as market sentiment and ecosystem metrics look good, issues related to “decentralization” and the “7-day challenge” can be temporarily ignored by the market. In contrast, ZK’s security advantages are inherently built-in and fundamental.
In my view, pushing forward aggressively with strategies like OP Stack is fine, but OP-Rollup must simultaneously accelerate implementation of robust 7-day challenge mechanisms. Otherwise, under the surge of one-click chain deployment enabled by OP-Stack, the more Sequencer nodes submitting data across various chains, the higher the risk of exploitation via vulnerabilities tied to the 7-day challenge window.
2) Since the Boojum upgrade, zkSync's technical performance has remained strong. While upgrading from SNARK to STARK proofs helped, the real win was achieving the promised ZK vision: lower gas fees as user volume increases.
According to Growthpie data, over the past two months zkSync has maintained one of the lowest gas fees among the four major Layer 2s, averaging around $0.12 per transaction—already outperforming both Arbitrum and Optimism. During recent inscription stress tests, while other platforms saw gas prices spike under heavy traffic, zkSync not only hit new TPS highs but actually experienced declining gas costs.
Moreover, following the Dencun upgrade and the introduction of blob storage, zkSync’s low-gas advantage will be further solidified. Here’s why:
1. OP-Rollup costs are almost entirely driven by data publication and verification overhead on the mainnet. Although blobs increase data capacity and reduce gas costs, access to blob space is subject to market competition. We can expect multiple Layer 2 teams to bid aggressively for priority blob usage, driving up overall gas prices and reducing expected savings from fee sharing.
2. ZK-Rollups will also compete for blob space, increasing total gas consumption. However, unlike OP-Rollups, ZK doesn’t need to post all raw transaction data on-chain. The newly freed storage space allows posting far more compressed SNARK proofs, significantly increasing the effective TPS throughput from ZK Layer 2 to the mainnet—and thus lowering average shared gas fees compared to OP.
Although off-chain Prover systems in ZK do incur certain operational costs, ongoing algorithmic improvements and hardware acceleration from solutions like @RiscZero and @ProjectZKM continue to drive these costs down.
Clearly, whether through greater data compression potential or dedicated ZK hardware acceleration, ZK-based projects have more control over cost optimization. In contrast, OP-based projects remain heavily dependent on the underlying DA (data availability) characteristics of the Ethereum mainnet, limiting their room for meaningful gas reduction compared to ZK.
3) zkSync continues close collaboration with prominent NFT communities such as @pudgypenguins, @apecoin, and @moonbirds. On official social channels and Spaces livestreams, recurring themes include Account Abstraction, Paymaster (gas sponsorship), onboarding new users, gaming, UX improvements, and expanding into incremental markets.
This suggests zkSync is intentionally steering market perception toward a long-term view of ZK technology, reflecting its core values as a comprehensive Layer 2: consistently bringing net-new users and market expansion to Ethereum.
Recently, many have discussed the implications of Paymaster. In my opinion, Account Abstraction has always been a foundational focus for zkSync. With Paymaster functionality, projects can directly subsidize user gas fees. This opens the door for widespread gas subsidy wars across the ZK ecosystem, incentivizing high-quality dApps to build on zkSync and creating a fertile environment for rapid ecosystem growth—even amid intense competition.
The slow development of the ZK ecosystem has long been criticized, primarily due to the high technical barrier of ZK circuits and knowledge gaps around ZK data structures and algorithm optimization, resulting in subpar application experiences. Starknet is now addressing this head-on with tokenomics—a market-driven incentive model designed to accelerate adoption.
Per L2beat data, shortly after the STRK airdrop, Starknet’s TVL surged from outside the top 10 to fourth place, growing sixfold to reach $1.3 billion. The impact of well-designed tokenomics is undeniable. Given similar fundamentals, if zkSync deploys its own powerful tokenomics strategy and combines it with Paymaster-driven gas subsidies, the resulting boom in ZK ecosystem activity would be inevitable.
4) Both zkSync’s proposed Layer 3 Hyperchain and Optimism’s heavily promoted Superchain represent long-term strategic moves by Layer 2 teams to elevate their brand positioning through modular stack architectures.
Currently, Superchain focuses on forming a Layer 2 alliance, aiming to spawn numerous new Layer 2s built on the open-source OP Stack framework, ultimately interconnected via shared Sequencer components to form a unified “superchain.”
In comparison, Hyperchain offers greater flexibility—supporting simultaneous development of both Layer 2 and Layer 3 chains. It leverages Layer 2 to expand partnerships with teams needing high-demand Prover infrastructure, while deploying upper-layer Layer 3 app-chains to capture fast-moving, high-frequency markets like gaming.
Application-specific chains are crucial for ZK technology. The native technical strengths of ZK-based Layer 2s—high TPS, low gas fees, superior UX—are not necessarily decisive in pure DeFi use cases. But when considering highly scalable, UX-optimized environments targeting gaming and broader mass-market applications, the potential of ZK-Rollup expands dramatically.
That’s all.
In summary, ZK technology is foundational infrastructure for the next era of mass adoption—an essential catalyst for next-generation application chains. If OP-Rollup captured attention before the Dencun upgrade by fueling a wave of one-click chains via tokenomics and stack-based innovation, then post-upgrade, a confluence of technological, market, and ecosystem factors will propel ZK-Rollup to become the standout star in the Layer 2 landscape.
Let Starknet’s bullets fly a little longer—zkSync is quietly building momentum. ZK is the Endgame!
Note: This article is submitted to the essay contest hosted by @CNzksync Chinese community — “zkSync, The Future is Here.”
Join TechFlow official community to stay tuned
Telegram:https://t.me/TechFlowDaily
X (Twitter):https://x.com/TechFlowPost
X (Twitter) EN:https://x.com/BlockFlow_News
Haotian | CryptoInsight
