Matter Labs raises $50M for developing EVM-compatible zk-rollups
According to a recent official announcement, Matter Labs is making a major funding round for developing the second version of its Ethereum-backed rollups known as zkSync.
The announcement was made on November 9 that Matter Labs said it had secured a Series B funding round of $50 million, led by Andreessen Horowitz, that included participation from investors Placeholder and Dragonfly Capital.
The new round is a follow up of Matter Labs’ $6 million Series A that happened in February, seeing participation from many new investors, including ConsenSys, Crypto.com and OKEx.
The new funding would be channelled into the development of zkSync v2, the firm’s second-layer rollups solution for Ethereum that is presently focussed on facilitating low-cost payments.
Rollups are a second-layer solution for scaling that literally “rolls up” transaction data in batches for a guaranteed efficient processing on Ethereum’s layer-one. Matter’s zkSync solution utilizes zero-knowledge proofs for minimizing the data held in these bundled transactions, for reducing the computing and storage resources required for validating blocks.
zkSync v2 would be building on the current iteration by supporting Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) composable smart contracts.
Stanford’s Professor of Computer Science, Dan Boneh, explained that zkSync would enable Ethereum transactions at higher rates and lower gas fees than mainnet. He stated that “the math used by Matter Labs is really quite beautiful” and that it has been “remarkable” to see this being achieved into fruition at a massive scale so soon.
The initial version of zkSync v2 is presently live on testnet with a port of Uniswap v2 dubbed “UniSync” that the users can use for experimentation. The platform has reportedly processed more than 2 million transactions since its launch in June 2021.
Matter Labs has been an early proponent of rollups that launched the first public zk-rollup prototype in early 2019.
Co-founder of Ethereum, Vitalik Buterin, has shown confidence in layer two solutions such as zkSync, stressing that they would solve the network’s scaling issues till the time sharding is rolled out by late 2022.
In a January 2021 blog post, Buterin had predicted that zk-rollups would emerge as Ethereum’s dominant scaling solution over “the medium to long term in all use cases.”
