Big day yesterday! Three blockchain teams made announcements all in one day!

All of them working on solutions that use zero-knowledge proofs (that thing I said would change blockchain forever):

1. Polygon announced Polygon zkEVM
   
2. Scroll announced their pre-alpha
   
3. zkSync announced they are "100 days away" from full launch
   

Ok, so they're not *real* announcements since one of them announced a comically early version of their product and another announced that... they will announce the actual thing later(?)

Stick with me here. Let me dive into the significance of these milestones so that we can make sense of why these products are important.

Part 1: Ethereum is really slow. 35 transactions per second. There's this idea that we can use "rollups" to scale Ethereum: these are separate blockchains that specialize in packing a ton of transactions into 1 of those 35 so that Ethereum can process more stuff at once.

Part 2: Zero-knowledge proofs are one way to implement those rollups. They essentially calculate some crazy math and send that math to Ethereum. Ethereum checks the math (which is way, way faster than checking the actual stuff that happened) and says, "Ok cool, I'm gonna fast forward the tape!"

Part 3: But the rollups are limited right now. Specifically, the rollups are either designed for very specific use cases (e.g., exchanges and nothing else) or you have to use a different type of computer than the one Ethereum uses (which can be really complicated).

For these types of rollups to work well, we need to build one that thinks like Ethereum's computer thinks, while supporting every use case that Ethereum can support, while supporting the same programming language that Ethereum supports, while spitting out that crazy math.

Whew.

But that's what these teams are working on. The "Ethereum computer" is called the EVM (Ethereum Virtual Machine) and these teams are working on zkEVMs - EVMs with zero-knowledge proofs (that crazy math) embedded.

Each has a different approach to writing these zkEVMs. For example, one approach is to make each individual command in the EVM spit out a zk version of that individual command. Another approach is to literally rewrite each individual command to a zk verison.

The summary: finally, we'll have a zero-knowledge rollup that scales Ethereum, is easy-to-use by developers (they can literally copy and paste code instead of having to rewrite it) and supports any use case (vs. existing ones that only do certain things).

The infrastructure continues to improve!

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