Scroll co-founder Haichen: The launch of the Mainnet is a new starting point, with a focus on real-world applications in the ecosystem.

Scroll, as an open-source Layer 2 solution led by Asian entrepreneurs, has always received significant attention from the community. After two years of intensive development and one year of testing, Scroll produced its genesis block on October 10, 2023, and officially launched its Mainnet on October 17.

As of October 27, the total locked value on the Scroll chain is (TVL), exceeding 19.3 million USD. The number of Mainnet wallet addresses has surpassed 147,000, with a total verified transaction volume exceeding 860,000 transactions. From October 20 to 26, the daily average transactions were nearly 80,000, with the highest single-day transaction volume on October 22 reaching 101,375 transactions.

Recently, Scroll and Newman Group jointly held the ETH Hong Kong event at Cyberport in Hong Kong, which is the first event organized by the Ethereum community in Hong Kong. During the event, we conducted an exclusive interview with Scroll co-founder Haichen Shen.

Haichen stated that he had worked for many years at Amazon Web Services(AWS), mainly engaged in AI compiler-related work. Later, he came into contact with zero-knowledge proof technology while participating in Ethereum community events, believing that this is a highly promising field that can be used to develop practical products and systems, ultimately achieving Ethereum's scalability, accommodating more transactions and reducing user fees.

When talking about why to host the ETH Hong Kong conference, Haichen believes that Hong Kong focuses on business but lacks an active Ethereum community. Holding this event allows Hong Kong students and Ethereum community developers from the Asia-Pacific region to get involved and learn about the latest developments in Ethereum, which helps to expand the Ethereum community back to Hong Kong and the Asia-Pacific region, and is of great significance for the expansion of the developer ecosystem in the entire region.

This hackathon had nearly 100 projects participating, mainly focused on providing infrastructure services for Ethereum or Layer 2, as well as enhancing user experience. Finally, 16 projects will be selected to enter the final round of competition, and rewards will be awarded to the winners.

Regarding the milestone of the Mainnet launch, Haichen stated that this marks the completion of Scroll's development of infrastructure components, including zkEVM circuits and the sequencer for generating blocks. In the past few months, the team has focused on various security optimizations and invited independent external organizations for code audits.

After the Mainnet launch, users can now bridge assets from Ethereum to Scroll and use various applications. This is not only an important milestone but also a new starting point. In the future, Scroll will introduce more features to further enhance security, reduce user costs, and provide developers with more functionalities to enable them to create more innovative applications.

Since going live for more than a week, the development of the Scroll ecosystem has basically met expectations. Approximately $15 million has entered the Scroll chain, and some DeFi applications have begun to generate transactions. Currently, Scroll ranks 18th in Layer 2 TVL. What surprises the team is that the growth rate of contract deployments has exceeded the growth of TVL, indicating that more active developers are developing on Scroll, and we may see more innovative applications in the future.

Haichen explained the reasons for Scroll's choice of a zkEVM-based zkRollup solution. He believes zk is an excellent solution for Ethereum's scalability, offering users higher security and a better experience. zk Rollup actively submits proofs rather than passively waiting for challenges, thus providing faster and stronger security guarantees. Additionally, EVM equivalence is crucial for users and developers, allowing developers to directly migrate development tools from Ethereum to Layer 2 without any modifications.

On a technical level, Scroll is highly compatible with the Ethereum EVM. The team has written zero-knowledge proof circuits in a way that is closest to the EVM, providing corresponding zk circuit components for each EVM instruction. Scroll currently supports the largest number of precompiled contracts in zk rollup, having supported 6 so far. In addition, Scroll's sequencer deployment is based on Go-Ethereum(Geth), which is a widely used implementation of Ethereum nodes.

Regarding the ecological development plan, Scroll will initially focus on infrastructure service support, such as RPC, indexing, cross-chain bridges, and oracles. This will be followed by a wave of DeFi application deployments. The long-term goal is to build an open and neutral platform that treats all developers equally. Scroll pays special attention to real-world application projects, such as stablecoin payments and AA wallets, as well as public goods projects that are beneficial for ecological development. In the future, incentive activities aimed at developers will also be launched, possibly in the form of NFTs.

Regarding the competition and development of the Layer 2 ecosystem, Haichen believes that the entire track is still in its early stages. This year, the market's focus has shifted from Optimistic Rollup to zk Rollup. In the future, zk Rollup needs to solve the trustless issue, enhance security, and attract more developers to participate. In addition, there is still significant development space for Layer 2, including the creation of new applications to achieve faster information exchange between Layer 1 and Layer 2. Haichen emphasizes that the Layer 2 market is not a zero-sum game, but rather an ecosystem that can continue to expand.