Scroll Co-founder Haichen Shen: The Mainnet launch is a new starting point, focusing on real-world applications

Scroll, as an open-source Layer 2 solution led by Asian entrepreneurs, has always attracted community attention. After two years of intensive development and one year of testing, Scroll generated its genesis block at 2 PM on October 10, 2023, and officially announced its Mainnet launch on October 17.

As of October 27, the total locked value on the Scroll chain ( TVL ) has exceeded 19.3 million USD. According to the data, the number of Scroll Mainnet wallet addresses has surpassed 147,000, with a total of over 860,000 verified transactions. From October 20 to 26, the average daily transaction volume was nearly 80,000, with the highest single-day trading volume recorded on October 22 at 101,375 transactions.

Recently, Scroll co-hosted the ETH Hong Kong event at Cyberport in Hong Kong, which is the first major event organized by the Ethereum community in Hong Kong. During the event, Scroll co-founder Haichen Shen was interviewed, sharing insights on Scroll's development and future plans.

Haichen stated that as one of the three co-founders of Scroll, he is primarily responsible for managing the engineering team. Before joining Scroll, Haichen worked for several years at Amazon Web Services(AWS), mainly focusing on AI compiler work. Later, by participating in Ethereum community activities, he was introduced to zero-knowledge proof technology and developed a strong interest in it, believing it to be a highly promising field for developing practical products and systems, ultimately achieving Ethereum scalability, increasing transaction throughput, and reducing user fees.

When talking about why they chose to hold the Ethereum conference in Hong Kong, Haichen explained that they realized Hong Kong's development in the Ethereum community has lagged behind. By hosting such an event, they can attract Hong Kong students and Ethereum community developers from the Asia-Pacific region to participate, learn about the latest developments in Ethereum, and re-expand the Ethereum community to Hong Kong and the Asia-Pacific region. He believes this is significant for the expansion of the developer ecosystem in Hong Kong and the Asia-Pacific region.

Regarding this hackathon event, Haichen revealed that nearly 100 projects participated, and ultimately 16 projects will be selected to enter the final round of competition, with winners receiving rewards. The participating projects mainly focus on providing service infrastructure for Ethereum or Layer 2, developer tools, and improving user experience.

Regarding the significance of Scroll officially launching the zkEVM Mainnet, Haichen stated that this marks an important achievement in their two and a half years of development work. Before the Mainnet went live, they completed the development of a full set of infrastructure components, including zkEVM circuits and sequencers for generating blocks, and underwent a long period of testing on the testnet. In the last few months, the team focused on various security optimizations and invited independent third-party organizations to conduct a comprehensive audit of all the code.

Haichen emphasized that the launch of the Mainnet is an important milestone, but it also marks a new starting point. In the future, Scroll will continue to introduce more features, further enhance security, reduce user costs, and provide developers with more functionalities to support them in developing more innovative applications.

A week after the Mainnet launch, Haichen stated that the development of the Scroll ecosystem is basically in line with expectations. In just over a week, approximately $15 million has entered the Scroll chain, and some DeFi applications have started generating transactions on Scroll. Currently, Scroll ranks eighteenth in the Layer 2 TVL rankings. Surprisingly, the growth in the number of contract deployments has even exceeded the growth in TVL, indicating that more active developers are developing on Scroll, and more innovative applications may emerge in the future.

When discussing why they chose the zkRollup solution based on zkEVM, Haichen explained that they believe zk is one of the best solutions for Ethereum scalability. Compared to Optimistic Rollup, zk Rollup provides users with faster and stronger security guarantees by actively submitting proofs rather than passively waiting for challenges. In addition, zk Rollup can confirm the finality of Layer 2 transactions in a short period of time, typically within one to several hours, ( providing a better experience for users and developers.

Haichen emphasized the importance of EVM equivalence. Scroll is committed to achieving a high level of compatibility with the Ethereum EVM, allowing developers to port developer kits from Ethereum to Layer 2 without the need to install new plugins or make any modifications. This not only reduces the risk of introducing bugs but also prevents unexpected reactions in certain edge cases that could lead to issues with transactions or applications.

In terms of technical details, Haichen introduced that Scroll writes zero-knowledge proof circuits in a way that is closest to EVM, providing corresponding zk circuit components for each instruction in the EVM to prove its correct execution. Although not all precompiled contracts are fully supported yet, the number of precompiled contracts supported by Scroll is the highest among zk rollups, currently supporting 6. This offers developers who intend to develop zk applications a more complete user experience, supporting operations such as elliptic curve addition, multiplication, and pairing.

In terms of the sequencer ) Sequencer (, Scroll is deployed based on Go-Ethereum ) Geth (, which is a widely used implementation of Ethereum nodes. By fine-tuning the Scroll chain while retaining most of the usage patterns of the Go-Ethereum client, it provides stronger compatibility for users and developers, allowing almost all Ethereum native APIs to be fully replicated on Scroll.

Regarding the future ecological development plan of Scroll, Haichen stated that the current focus is on supporting infrastructure services, such as essential tools and environments for developers like RPC, indexing, cross-chain bridges, and oracles. Once these infrastructures are ready, a wave of DeFi application deployments will follow. Haichen revealed that they have already communicated with several DeFi projects, which are expected to start deploying on Scroll in the next two to three weeks.

In the long run, Scroll aims to build a more open and neutral platform, providing equal development and deployment opportunities for all types of developers. Haichen stated that they would not favor large or small projects, but rather provide equal support for all projects. However, Scroll may pay more attention to certain real-world application projects, such as stablecoin payments or AA)Account Abstraction( wallet projects. In addition, some public goods projects that benefit the development of the entire ecosystem, such as developer tools, will also receive focused support.

Haichen also revealed that Scroll plans to launch incentive activities for developers, which may use NFTs to encourage developers to deploy contracts on Scroll.

Looking back at the entrepreneurial journey of Scroll, Haichen stated that the overall progress has been relatively smooth. Although some initially unforeseen challenges were encountered during the technical development process, these difficulties were successfully overcome through internal team discussions and collaborations with the open-source community ), such as the privacy and scalability exploration group of the Ethereum Foundation (. He specifically mentioned that collaboration with the community not only helped solve technical issues but also improved the overall reliability of the code through code reviews.

Regarding the competition and development of zkEVM and the L2 track, Haichen believes that the entire Layer 2 ecosystem competition is still in its infancy. He pointed out that this year the market focus has shifted from Optimistic Rollup to zk Rollup solutions. However, zk Rollup still faces some issues that need to be addressed, such as how to achieve a higher degree of trustlessness, reduce dependence on specific projects' technology, attract more developers to participate, and further enhance user confidence in the security of zk Rollup.

Haichen emphasizes that there is still huge development space in the Layer 2 field, including developing new applications through zk Rollup to achieve faster information interaction between Layer 1 and Layer 2. He believes that the market is not a zero-sum game, but rather a field that can continuously expand, requiring more developers to create interesting and innovative projects on zk Rollup.