tl;dr from the past week of EF workshops in Berlin: Ethereum is all-in zkVMs for scaling the L1.
Real-time proving showed that massively scaling the L1 with ZK is possible today. Justin Drake even outlined a path to eventual enshrinement of zkVMs in the L1.
They are far more serious about this effort than I realized.
Solana going “war mode” on Hyperliquid and CLOBs tells you all you need to know: single-chain architecture ngmi, ZK-powered L2s/rollups/network extensions, whatever you want to call them, are the way forward.
Real ones know and have been building for a long time (some with SP1): @hibachi_xyz, @bulletxyz_ , @Lighter_xyz , @tradeparadex and a few more in stealth 👀
In Q1 of this year, we went hard with the "every rollup will be a ZK rollup" messaging. At this point, this transition seems inevitable--although it'll take some time to play out, as technology adoption always does.
This quarter, we've been seeing the rise of non-rollup use-cases for ZK that are equally exciting: • ZK identity aka "Proof of Whale" (h/t @freakmycrypto who used it to bootstrap an anonymous X account) • Private stablecoins, like @MyntUSD • Verifiable exchanges aka "ZK Hyperliquid", announcements Soon TM