The Solana and Ethereum communities are at it again, this time over Solana’s new ZK Compression technology.
Yesterday, Mert Mumtaz, CEO of Helius, the Solana ecosystem development platform, announced on the X platform that ZK Compression was being introduced to Solana. Shortly after, the Light Protocol privacy project within the Solana ecosystem announced the launch of ZK Compression. According to Mert, ZK Compression will be implemented directly on L1 without the need for L2, which will greatly enhance Solana’s network scalability, taking a step closer to building a financial computer that is unstoppable, global, and operates at the speed of light.
According to the ZK Compression documentation, this technology is a new primitive built on Solana that allows developers to build applications on a large scale. Developers and users can choose to compress their on-chain state, reducing the state cost by several orders of magnitude while maintaining the security, performance, and composability of Solana L1.
ZK Compression works through a process called state compression, which allows developers to use cheaper ledger space on Solana to store certain types of data instead of more expensive account space. The “hash” or “fingerprint” of off-chain data is stored on-chain for verification using “sparse state trees.”
The technical explanation may be too complex, but in simple terms, this technology reduces Solana’s state cost. In Solana, technical professionals face two costs – computation cost and state cost. Solana already has cheap computational power, but state is expensive. Allocating accounts, paying rent, and scaling with users have all been proven to be major obstacles for Solana developers, and ZK Compression solves this problem.
For example, Mert used the cost of airdrops as an example. Assuming an airdrop to 1,000,000 users, the state cost would decrease from over $260,000 to $50, a reduction of 5,200 times. Justin Bons, Founder and Chief Information Officer of Cyber Capital, also believes that ZK Compression “clearly puts Solana far ahead of ETH in terms of actual L1 scalability, solving one of Solana’s biggest survival problems.”
Justin Bons’ statement has unsettled the Ethereum community, which has been grappling with scaling issues and has resorted to rollups. They question the “L1 nature” of ZK Compression. Mert stated that the data for ZK Compression is kept off-chain, leading the Ethereum community to view it as validium. In response, the Solana community used a meme to mock the lack of thorough research by the Ethereum community, with Mert even defiantly naming ZK Compression as ZK validium.
To convince the Ethereum community, Mert specifically called out Ethereum founder Vitalik on Farcaster to comment on the technical principles of ZK Compression. Vitalik responded seriously, stating that the technology is more like a stateless client architecture.
Vitalik interpreted ZK Compression in three key points: first, there is a new account type with the hash of the state stored on-chain; second, to interact with these accounts, a TX must be written, specifying the pre-state hash and post-state hash of N accounts and providing a validity proof (assuming this means ZK-SNARK); third, the new state must be made public. He also raised questions about the 128-byte validity proof mentioned in the documentation and whether the public content contains transaction details.
Vitalik’s questions were not answered, and his initial description of ZK Compression as a “stateless client architecture” boosted the confidence of its supporters.
Adam Cochran, a partner at CEHV, firmly stated that ZK Compression is Solana’s L2 solution and criticized those who disagreed. However, Solana co-founder Anatoly Yakovenko seemed indifferent to the L1 or L2 debate, emphasizing that “all execution happens on L1 and is ordered by L1 validators.” Despite Adam’s differing opinion, he still insists that ZK Compression cannot be L1.
Alex Gluchowski, the founder of ZKsync, also expressed criticism of ZK Compression. At the same time, he stated that ZKsync has been quietly building an asynchronous composable ZK future for Ethereum. Interestingly, after the release of ZK Compression, Anatoly also published a lengthy article introducing asynchronous program execution (APE) in Solana.
Will Rollup be the perfect partner for Solana? Solana has been searching for value in its network for a long time. Unlike Ethereum, Solana’s mainnet does not intend to become a “B2B chain”; it has always been and will always be a consumer chain. Building large-scale distributed systems is extremely challenging, and Solana has the potential to become the most valuable shared ledger for global transactions.
Solana’s rollup will mostly be abstracted for end-users. From an ideological standpoint, Ethereum’s approach to rollup is top-down, while Solana’s approach is bottom-up, driven by significant user adoption by application developers. The current roll-up plays are mostly marketing tactics, more narrative-driven than user-demand-driven. This is a significant difference that may lead to a different future for rollups than Ethereum.
However, ZK Compression has achieved state compression for Solana, combined with Firedancer, multiple concurrent leaders, asynchronous execution, and an ecosystem of thousands of developers, which undoubtedly gives Solana a real chance in the world of crypto.