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- Ethereum scaling solution zkSync unveils Boojum as part of the steps to make a complete move into decentralization.
- This upgrade comes with several benefits including doing transaction compressing at a cheaper cost.
Ethereum scaling solution zkSync has unveiled an upgrade as part of the effort towards decentralization. According to the report, the launch is in the shadow mode or the testing zone that runs parallel to the mainnet. Its name is said to be derived from Lewis Carroll’s poem ‘The Hunting of the Snark,’ and exists as one of the few that uses zero-knowledge (zk) rollups.
Rollups are in two varieties – zk and optimistic. What they do is that they batch transactions off of the mainnet then roll them up into smaller bundles, before compressing them into proof before settling on the Ethereum network. This process is said to be involved by prover. The compressing and the parking of all those transactions are done by this piece of technology. Interestingly, huge computing power is needed to generate the proof, hence posing a big challenge for users to participate. The latest upgrade called Boojum is expected to address this challenge. According to Carroll, Boojum is the most dangerous variety of Snark. Its role in this process is to ensure that the zkSync is secured by lowering the hardware barrier.
zkSync CEO Alex Gluchowski explained that the new prover has been designed to work with as little as 8 gigabytes of hardware.
So far, we’ve seen the benchmark competitors indicating something like north of 500 gigabytes of RAM for a prover. And as you can only run it on the cloud, it’s not ready for this [wide adoption]. Our prover requires only eight gigabytes of GPU RAM and it can run on GPUs that are compatible with gaming computers.
Some Merits of the Ethereum Scaling Solution’s Upgrade
Another interesting advantage of Boojum is that it also does that transaction compressing at a cheaper cost. With most data centers backing a blockchain network, the upgraded prover is meant to be accessible to everyone.
Just because a single transaction costs $1 to produce, or even 10 cents, or even less than that, getting through hundreds of thousands of transactions per second would mean massive expansion, and you will probably not have enough of the hardware in the vulnerable clusters to produce and sustain this load.
Gluchowski created a scenario to explain the operations of the provers. He explained that just as validators on Ethereum and miners on Bitcoin get paid to secure the network, so would the provers operate on zkSync. According to him, it is unlikely that the proof of work would be a sustainable source of business. He believes that there is a need for the Industry to move to something that provides redundant value instead of a “waste kind of work.”
Following the recent move, the next step is to decentralize the zkSync’s sequencer. This is to take charge of ordering transactions in each block. This also drops a hint of a future token launch.
When you decentralized the sequencer, you will need some way to permissionlessly verify transactions.
Ethereum (ETH) currently has a bearish sentiment and has recorded a marginal surge of 1 percent in the last seven days to trade at $1,895.86.
