Future Development Trends of Layer-1 Projects

The blockchain industry has a multitude of Layer-1 projects, including well-known public chains such as Bitcoin and Ethereum, as well as emerging players like BNB Chain, Polygon, Solana, Avalanche, Near, Fantom, and Tron. Despite intense competition, new L1 public chains with unique characteristics and advantages continue to emerge, and technology is continuously iterating. The industry anticipates that most Layer 1 projects, including Aptos and Sui, will adopt zkRollup technology based on zkEVM in the future, ultimately forming an Omnichain zkRollup ecosystem.

Aptos/Sui and the Move Smart Contract Language

In 2022, the most notable emerging public chains are Aptos and Sui, which utilize the Move smart contract language. These two projects were initiated by engineers who previously participated in the development of a blockchain project for a certain social media platform, inheriting multiple features of that project while differing from existing L1 public chains in terms of performance, programming language, and mechanisms.

The uniqueness of the Move language lies in its redefinition of the "module structure," allowing tokens, NFTs, smart contracts, and other assets to be succinctly modularly defined using a single data module. This feature is hard to match with Ethereum's EVM. For example, the Move language adopts a resource-based approach, which naturally avoids the reentrancy attack issues that have plagued the EVM ecosystem for years.

Whether Aptos/Sui can become a mainstream public chain depends not only on the language used but, more crucially, on the innovation capability of on-chain projects. Currently, while these new public chains have advanced technology, they lack sufficient application ecosystem support. For public chains, while technological innovation is important, the feedback of on-chain projects to the traffic of the public chain is equally critical. To capture the enormous traffic of the EVM ecosystem, Aptos and Sui are likely to embrace the EVM system and Layer 2 networks in the future, especially the advanced zkRollup technology based on zkEVM.

Building zkEVM-based zkRollup on Aptos/Sui

In the long run, zkRollup will become a concise, highly secure, and efficient scaling solution. Theoretically, zkRollup can be deployed on any network that can verify its proofs, so building a zkEVM zkRollup on Aptos/Sui is feasible. The main benefits of doing this are twofold:

1. Attract developers and users from the EVM ecosystem. Developers can migrate applications from the EVM ecosystem to the Aptos/Sui ecosystem at almost zero cost.

2. Provide users with lower or even negligible transaction fees, and offer a user experience close to traditional applications.

To build a zkEVM-based zkRollup on Aptos/Sui, the following key components are required:

1. Sequencer: Responsible for receiving transactions, executing transactions, and generating execution records.

2. zkProver: Responsible for generating zero-knowledge proofs and sending them to Aptos/Sui.

3. Smart Contracts: Contracts for managing assets, verifying proofs, and governance deployed on Aptos/Sui.

The Future of Omnichain zkRollup

With the development of the multi-chain ecosystem, the demand for asset cross-chain and cross-chain interaction is increasing. Traditional cross-chain bridges face scalability issues in a multi-chain environment. Therefore, Omnichain zkRollup is expected to become the ultimate solution for cross-chain and even full-chain applications.

Omnichain zkRollup is built on a general-purpose zkEVM-based zkRollup and connects to cross-chain interoperability protocols to achieve the aggregation of all-chain asset liquidity and the role of the all-chain execution layer. It ensures transaction correctness through zero-knowledge proofs, enjoying a level of security equivalent to that of the entire chain.

On the Omnichain zkRollup, users can achieve fully programmable interactions with assets and information from all chains. This architecture provides endless possibilities for innovative applications, such as decentralized exchanges that aggregate all chains, cross-chain GameFi and SocialFi projects, as well as more diverse and borderless application scenarios.