Interview | Frank, PANews

Written by | zen, PANews

As an open-source Layer2 solution led by Asian entrepreneurs, Scroll has always been highly anticipated and closely watched by the community. After two years of intensive development and one year of testing, on October 10, 2023, the Scroll mainnet generated the genesis block at 2 p.m. that day, and a week later, Scroll officially announced the launch of the mainnet on October 17.

As of October 27, according to L2beat data, the total value locked (TVL) on the Scroll chain has exceeded $19.3 million; according to Blockscout data, the number of Scroll mainnet wallet addresses has exceeded 147,000, with a total verified transaction volume of over 860,000. During the period from October 20 to October 26, the average daily transaction volume was nearly 80,000, with the highest daily transaction volume reaching 101,375 transactions on October 22.

This week, Scroll and Web3 venture capital firm Newman Group jointly hosted the ETH Hong Kong event at the Hong Kong Cyberport, which is also the first event organized by the Ethereum community in Hong Kong. During the event, PANews conducted an exclusive interview with Scroll co-founder Haichen Shen, the details of which are provided below.

PANews: Please briefly introduce yourself and Scroll

Haichen: Hello, it's a pleasure to be here for an interview with PANews today. I'm Haichen, one of the three co-founders of Scroll, and within the Scroll team, I mainly oversee the entire engineering team. To briefly introduce my background, I previously worked at Amazon Web Services (AWS) for several years, mainly focusing on AI compilers. Later, while participating in Ethereum community activities, I met ZhangYe and Sandy, learned about some information related to zero-knowledge proofs, and became very interested in it. I believe this is a very promising field and can be used to develop practical products and systems, ultimately scaling Ethereum to handle more transactions and reduce user fees.

PANews: Why did Scroll host the Ethereum event in Hong Kong?

Haichen: We realized that Hong Kong may be more focused on business and may not have a strong Ethereum community. By hosting this event here, we can involve many Hong Kong students and builders from the Ethereum community in the Asia-Pacific region, allowing them to understand the latest developments in Ethereum and re-extend the Ethereum community to Hong Kong and the Asia-Pacific region. We believe this will have significant implications for the development ecosystem of developers in Hong Kong and the Asia-Pacific region, which is why we organized this event here.

PANews: What are the main focuses of the projects participating in this hackathon, and what information are you expecting?

Haichen: There are nearly 100 projects participating in this hackathon, and we will select 16 projects from these 100 to enter the final round of presentation competition, and we will ultimately select some winners and reward them. These projects mainly provide infrastructure services to Ethereum or Layer2 for community developers to use, as well as some projects aimed at improving user experience.

PANews: After running on the testnet for a year, Scroll has officially launched the zkEVM mainnet. What does this milestone signify?

Haichen: This is a very important milestone for us. We have spent approximately two and a half years completing the development of the entire infrastructure components, including the zkEVM circuit and the sequencer for block generation. After a long period of testing on the testnet, we have ensured that everything is in place. In the last few months, we have focused on various security optimizations, invited independent external audits, and ensured that all code has been audited by various third-party organizations.

With the mainnet live, users can now bridge assets from Ethereum to Scroll and use various applications on Scroll. This is a very important milestone, but it is also a new beginning. We will continue to introduce more features in the future to further enhance security, reduce actual user costs, and provide developers with more features to build better and more innovative applications.

PANews: One week after the launch, has the development of the Scroll ecosystem met expectations, and what are the points worth noting?

Haichen: Overall, it has met our expectations. Since we announced the launch of the mainnet until now, which is just over a week, approximately $15 million has entered our Scroll chain. We have already seen some defi applications generating transactions on Scroll, and overall, it is a relatively satisfactory achievement. After about a week, we are currently ranked 18th in the entire Layer 2 TVL. What surprised us is that we have seen a lot of contract deployments, and many developers have started deploying more contracts on it. The growth in contract deployments is actually more than the TVL. We believe this is a very healthy development because in the future, we are more likely to see more active developers developing on it, and we are also more likely to see more innovative applications deployed on Scroll for users to use.

PANews: Why did Scroll choose the zkRollup solution based on zkEVM, and where does the importance of EVM equivalence manifest?

Haichen: First, let me explain why we chose the zk route. Firstly, we believe zk is a great solution for scaling Ethereum. Zk provides users with more security, and compared to Optimistic Rollup, zk Rollup actively submits proofs rather than passively waiting for challenges, providing users with faster and stronger security guarantees. Because all transactions generated on Layer 2 are proven correct by zk, it also provides a better user and developer experience. The finality time of the entire Layer 2 will be shorter, approximately within one to several hours, allowing the confirmation of a batch of Layer 2 transactions and the safe use of this state route.

Secondly, we believe that EVM equivalence is a very important indicator, providing users and developers with a better user experience. Developers can directly move the developer kits on Ethereum to Layer 2 without installing new plugins and without making any modifications. So compared to some other zkEVM solutions, they may require some changes to a greater or lesser extent. For example, zkSync requires the installation of some plugins. This may introduce more bugs in the overall development, and there may be some differences in the underlying logic, leading to unexpected reactions in some corner cases, ultimately causing some problems with the entire transaction or application. Therefore, we believe that EVM equivalence is very important, and the EVM model has undergone extensive testing and has been proven to be a reliable execution model. We believe it also provides users and developers with more guarantees, such as security guarantees.

PANews: Considering technical principles and other aspects, what makes Scroll unique among the various ZK-EVM solutions?

Haichen: I just briefly mentioned that our compatibility with Ethereum EVM is very high. In terms of more detailed development, we write zero-knowledge proof circuits under the conditions closest to EVM. For every instruction in EVM, we have corresponding zk circuit components to prove that the instruction is executed correctly. Currently, although we have not fully supported all precompiled contracts within zk rollup, we support the most precompiled contracts, currently supporting about 6.

We know that many zk developers may want to deploy new zk applications, so we will support the elliptic curve operations needed, providing users and developers with a more complete user experience. For example, EC add (elliptic curve addition), EC MUL (elliptic curve multiplication algorithm), EC Pairings (elliptic curve pairings). In addition, in terms of the Sequencer, our sequencer deployment is based on Go-Ethereum (Geth), which is a popular Ethereum node implementation. We have made some adjustments for the Scroll chain, but other parts are used in the same way as the Go-Ethereum client, so it can provide users and developers with stronger compatibility, and basically all native Ethereum APIs can be fully replicated on Scroll.

PANews: Regarding Scroll's token, is there any related information that can be disclosed?

Haichen: Currently, there is no information that can be disclosed.

PANews: What are the plans for the next steps for Scroll in terms of ecosystem and developer incentives? Which projects will be given priority support?

Haichen: In the early stages, we mainly focused on infrastructure services support in the first two weeks, including RPC, indexing, various third-party cross-chain bridge ecosystem support, and oracles, which are necessary development environments and tools for developers. After these are fully supported, we will have a wave of DeFi applications. Of course, we have seen many DeFi applications already interacting on Scroll. We have communicated with various DeFi projects, and they will start deploying on Scroll in the next two to three weeks, so we will see more interaction with DeFi applications.

In the future, we will build a more open and neutral platform for various developers to come and develop and deploy. So we will not favor large or small projects, but treat them all equally, allowing them to enjoy the same support on Scroll. However, we may want to focus more on some real-world application projects, such as stablecoin payments or AA (Account Abstraction) wallet projects. We may focus more on these projects. We will also pay more attention to supporting public goods, such as developer tools that are beneficial to ecosystem development and support for everyone. I can reveal that we will have some developer incentive activities in the future, possibly using NFTs to provide more incentives to developers to deploy contracts on Scroll.

PANews: Born in a bull market, matured in a bear market, has Scroll encountered difficulties and challenges in the entrepreneurial process?

Haichen: We started in a relatively large bull market, and our rounds of financing went relatively smoothly at that time. Overall, I think everything has been relatively smooth from development to the present. We raised some funding in the early stages, which ensures that we can focus on development for a long time to develop the entire zkEVM and community ecosystem.

I think the main challenges come from the technical aspects. When building the entire zkEVM, we encountered many challenges that were not initially anticipated. Later, through internal discussions and discussions with the open-source community (such as the Ethereum Foundation's Privacy and Scaling Explorations, PSE), we discussed how to solve the technical roadmap for zkEVM and developed it together. Everyone would review each other's code to see if there were any bugs. This way, more people would be looking at the code, resulting in higher reliability of our entire code. Of course, there were also some challenges, including finding that the overall performance of the solution was not particularly optimal after the initial solution was completed. So we went through one or two rounds of code refactoring and optimization, and finally reached the level we expected.

PANews: As a participant in the ZK-based L2 track, how does Scroll view the competition and development of zkEVM and the L2 track?

Haichen: Personally, I think the competition in the entire Layer 2 ecosystem is still in its early stages. There has been a significant shift this year, with more zk Rollup solutions emerging compared to the previous two years when the focus was more on Optimistic Rollup solutions. However, zk Rollup still has some issues to address, including the need to make the entire Layer 2 more trustless, not relying on a single project to provide technical support but allowing more developers to participate. This will provide more security guarantees for Layer 2, making users more confident in the security of zk Rollup and safely placing assets on Layer 2.

Secondly, I believe there is still a lot of development space in Layer 2, including the ability to develop new applications through zk Rollup, enabling faster information exchange between Layer 1 and Layer 2. There is a need for more developers to develop more interesting and innovative projects on zk Rollup. I think the entire market is not a zero-sum game, but a game that can be expanded.

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