Solana and Ethereum communities are at it again, this time over Solana’s new ZK Compression technology. Yesterday, Mert Mumtaz, the CEO of Helius, the Solana ecosystem development platform, announced on the X platform that they are integrating ZK Compression into Solana. Following this, the Solana ecosystem’s privacy project, Light Protocol, also announced the launch of ZK Compression. According to Mert, ZK Compression will be implemented directly on L1, without the need for L2, greatly enhancing Solana’s network scalability, taking a step towards building a financial computer that is unstoppable, global, and atomically synchronized at the speed of light.
According to the ZK Compression documentation, this technology is a new primitive built on Solana, allowing developers to build applications on a large scale. Developers and users can choose to compress their on-chain state, reducing the state cost by several orders of magnitude, while maintaining the security, performance, and composability of Solana L1.
ZK Compression works through a process called state compression, allowing developers to use cheaper ledger space on Solana rather than more expensive account space to store certain types of data. The “hash” or “fingerprint” of off-chain data is stored on-chain for verification using “sparse state trees.”
In simple terms, the technology reduces Solana’s state cost. In Solana, technical staff face two costs – computational cost and state cost. Solana already has cheap computational power, but the state is expensive. Allocating accounts, paying rent, and scaling with users have proven to be huge obstacles for Solana developers, and ZK Compression solves this problem.
Mert cited the example of airdrop costs, stating that if an airdrop were to be conducted for 1,000,000 users, the state cost would decrease from over $260,000 to $50, a reduction of 5,200 times. Justin Bons, the founder and CIO of Cyber Capital, also believes that ZK Compression “clearly puts Solana far ahead of ETH in terms of practical L1 scalability, solving one of Solana’s biggest survival problems.”
However, the Ethereum community has raised questions about the “L1 nature” of ZK Compression. Mert’s statement that ZK Compression’s data is kept off-chain has led the Ethereum community to view it as validium. In response, the Solana community used a meme to mock them, suggesting that they had not done thorough research but were claiming to be experts. Mert even provocatively named ZK Compression “ZK validium.”
To convince the Ethereum community, Mert called on Ethereum founder Vitalik to review the technical principles of ZK Compression. Vitalik responded seriously, stating that the technology seems more like a stateless client architecture.
Vitalik interpreted ZK Compression as having three key points: first, a new account class where only the hash of the state is stored on-chain; second, to interact with these accounts, a TX needs to be written specifying the pre-state hash and post-state hash of N accounts, and providing a validity proof (assuming this means ZK-SNARK); third, the new state needs to be public.
Vitalik also raised questions about the 128-byte validity proof mentioned in the documentation and whether the public content includes transaction contents.
Despite Vitalik’s questions, his initial labeling of ZK Compression as a “stateless client architecture” boosted the confidence of its supporters.
Adam Cochran, partner at CEHV, firmly stated that ZK Compression is Solana’s L2 solution. He believes that “one day, the Solana community will realize that they have built a good roll-up based on L2 functionality/validity, rather than an entire chain.” However, Solana co-founder Anatoly Yakovenko seemed indifferent to the L1 vs. L2 debate, emphasizing that “all execution happens on L1 and is ordered by L1 validators.” Although Adam disagreed with Mert’s stance, he still insisted that ZK Compression could not be L1.
ZKsync founder Alex Gluchowski also criticized ZK Compression, stating that ZKsync has been quietly building an asynchronous composable ZK future for Ethereum. However, it is interesting to note that after the release of ZK Compression, Anatoly also released a lengthy article introducing asynchronous program execution (APE) in Solana.
Will rollup be the perfect partner for Solana?
Solana has been seeking value for its network for a long time. Unlike the previous round of altcoins that emerged from the last bull market, its valuation logic is not entirely like that of Bitcoin and Ethereum. Because block space is cheap, the corresponding token price is unlikely to rise significantly. Despite this, Solana continues to focus on compression technology, continually reducing its costs, which in turn poses a huge challenge for the appreciation of SOL.
Even considering Moore’s Law, even if hardware continues to improve performance, and Solana has optimized for this hardware progress, it does not necessarily mean that Solana can meet global demand. However, Solana will manage better than other chains in a scenario where composability and low latency are essential.
Unlike Ethereum, the Solana mainnet does not intend to become a “B2B chain”; it has always been and will always be a consumer chain. Building a distributed system on a large scale is extremely challenging, and Solana has the most potential to become the most valuable global shared ledger for transactions.
For rollup, Solana rollup will be mostly abstracted for end-users. Ideologically, Ethereum’s rollup is top-down, with the Ethereum Foundation and leaders deciding that the best way to scale is through rollup, and then supporting various Layer 2 solutions after the CryptoKitties incident. In Solana, the demand is bottom-up, coming from app developers with significant user adoption. Therefore, most current roll-up strategies are marketing strategies, more narrative-driven than user demand-driven. This is a significant difference that could lead to a different rollup future than Ethereum.
However, ZK Compression has achieved state compression for Solana, along with Firedancer, multiple concurrent leaders, asynchronous execution, and an ecosystem consisting of thousands of developers, undoubtedly giving Solana a real chance in the crypto space.
