Scroll Co-founder Haichen: 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 significant attention from the community. After two years of intensive development and one year of testing, the Scroll Mainnet produced its genesis block at 2 PM on October 10, 2023, and officially launched on October 17.

As of October 27, the total locked value on the Scroll chain has exceeded $19.3 million. The number of 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 count was nearly 80,000, with the highest single-day transaction volume reaching 101,375.

Recently, Scroll held the ETH Hong Kong event at Hong Kong Cyberport, which is the first event organized by the Ethereum community in Hong Kong. During the event, Scroll co-founder Haichen Shen was interviewed and shared the development history and future plans of Scroll.

Haichen worked for many years at Amazon Web Services, mainly engaged in AI compiler-related work. He learned about zero-knowledge proof technology while participating in Ethereum community events and believes it is a field with great potential for building practical products and systems, ultimately achieving Ethereum scalability, accommodating more transactions and reducing user fees.

When discussing why the Ethereum conference is held in Hong Kong, Haichen stated that they realized Hong Kong focuses on business but lacks an Ethereum community. Through this event, they hope to attract Hong Kong students and Ethereum community developers from the Asia-Pacific region to participate, understand the latest developments in Ethereum, and re-expand the Ethereum community to Hong Kong and the Asia-Pacific region. He believes this is of significant importance for the expansion of the developer ecosystem in the entire region.

This hackathon attracted nearly 100 projects, and finally 16 projects will be selected for the final round of competition. The participating projects mainly focus on providing infrastructure services for Ethereum or Layer 2, as well as improving user experience.

Regarding the official launch of the zkEVM Mainnet by Scroll, Haichen stated that this marks the completion of an important phase and also a new starting point. The team spent two and a half years completing the development of infrastructure components, including zkEVM circuits and block generation sequencers. After extensive testing and security optimization, Scroll now allows users to bridge assets from Ethereum to Scroll and use various applications.

Haichen revealed that after a week of launch, the ecological development of Scroll is basically in line with expectations. About 15 million USD has entered the Scroll chain, and some DeFi applications have started to generate transactions. Surprisingly, the growth rate of contract deployments has exceeded the growth of TVL, which is seen as a healthy development trend, indicating that more innovative applications may emerge in the future.

Regarding the choice of zkRollup solutions based on zkEVM, Haichen explained that zk technology provides users with stronger security guarantees and a better user experience. Scroll pays special attention to EVM equivalence, which allows developers to directly use the developer toolkit on Ethereum without installing new plugins, thereby avoiding potential bugs and logical discrepancies.

The uniqueness of Scroll lies in its high compatibility with the Ethereum EVM. The team writes zero-knowledge proof circuits under the development conditions closest to EVM and supports the most precompiled contracts. Furthermore, Scroll's sequencer is based on Go-Ethereum, providing users and developers with stronger compatibility.

When discussing the ecological development plan, Haichen stated that Scroll will initially focus on infrastructure service support, such as RPC, indexing, cross-chain bridges, and oracles. Subsequently, there will be a wave of DeFi application deployments. In the long term, Scroll is committed to building an open and neutral platform that treats all developers equally. They pay special attention to real-world application projects, such as stablecoin payments and AA wallet projects, as well as public goods projects that benefit ecological development.

Haichen believes that the entire Layer 2 ecosystem competition is still in its infancy. Future issues that need to be addressed include increasing the level of decentralization, enhancing security guarantees, and encouraging more developers to participate in innovative project development. He emphasized that the Layer 2 market is not a zero-sum game, but a field that can continue to expand.