Exclusive Interview with Scroll Co-founder Haichen Shen: The Launch of the Mainnet Opens a New Chapter, Focusing on Real-World Applications

Scroll, as a highly regarded open-source Layer 2 solution, officially launched its Mainnet in October 2023 after two years of intensive development and one year of testing. As of October 27, the total locked value on the Scroll chain has exceeded 19.3 million USD, with over 147,000 Mainnet wallet addresses and a total of over 860,000 verified transactions.

Recently, Scroll held the ETH Hong Kong event at Cyberport in Hong Kong. During the event, Scroll co-founder Haichen Shen was interviewed, sharing the development history and future plans of Scroll.

Haichen introduced that he previously worked on AI compilers at Amazon Web Services ( AWS ). Later, he met the other two co-founders through Ethereum community activities and developed a strong interest in zero-knowledge proof technology, believing that this technology can be used for practical product and system development, ultimately achieving Ethereum scaling.

When discussing why he chose to hold the ETH event in Hong Kong, Haichen expressed his hope to attract Hong Kong students and Ethereum developers from the Asia-Pacific region to participate in the event, learn about the latest developments in Ethereum, and thus expand the Ethereum community in the Asia-Pacific region. This hackathon has nearly 100 projects involved, mainly focusing on providing infrastructure services for Ethereum or Layer 2, as well as enhancing user experience.

Regarding the official launch of the zkEVM Mainnet by Scroll, Haichen believes this marks a new beginning. The team spent two and a half years developing the infrastructure components such as the zkEVM circuits and block generation sequencers. After the Mainnet goes live, users will be able to bridge assets from Ethereum to Scroll and use various applications. In the future, Scroll will also launch more features to further enhance security, reduce usage costs, and provide developers with more functionalities to develop innovative applications.

Since the launch of the Mainnet over a week ago, the development of Scroll 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. Surprisingly, the number of contract deployments has grown rapidly, showing the enthusiasm of developers.

When discussing the reasons for choosing the zkEVM solution, Haichen explained that zk solutions can provide users with stronger security guarantees and shorten final confirmation times. The EVM equivalence allows developers to migrate Ethereum development toolkits directly to Layer 2 without modification, avoiding the introduction of additional bugs and maintaining consistency at the underlying logic level.

In terms of technical implementation, Scroll adopts the approach closest to EVM for writing zero-knowledge proof circuits, providing corresponding zk circuit components for each EVM instruction. Currently, the number of precompiled contracts supported by Scroll is the highest among zk rollups, having supported 6. In addition, Scroll's sequencer is based on Go-Ethereum with only minor targeted adjustments, offering stronger compatibility for users and developers.

For the ecological development plan, Scroll will initially focus on infrastructure service support, such as RPC, indexing, cross-chain bridges, oracles, etc. After that, there will be a wave of DeFi application deployments. In the long run, Scroll is committed to building an open and neutral platform that treats projects of all sizes equally. The team will pay more attention to real-world application projects, such as stablecoin payments and AA wallets, while also supporting public product projects like developer tools. In the future, incentive activities aimed at developers will also be launched, potentially using NFTs.

Looking back on the entrepreneurial journey, Haichen stated that the team had smooth early-stage financing, while the main challenge was technology development. Through internal discussions and collaboration with the open-source community, the team overcame many difficulties in the development of zkEVM. After multiple rounds of code refactoring and optimization, they ultimately reached the expected level.

Regarding the development prospects of the Layer 2 track, Haichen believes that the competition has just begun. This year, zk Rollup solutions have received more attention, but issues such as decentralization still need to be addressed to enhance security. He believes there is still a lot of room for growth in Layer 2 and looks forward to seeing more innovative applications emerge. Haichen emphasizes that this is not a zero-sum game, but a market that can continuously expand.