zkSync Era is the main product of Matter Labs. Its development took four years, and the alpha version of the product was released to the public on March 24th.

zkSync Era is a Layer 2 protocol that scales Ethereum and adds the ability to use zkEVM — a tool for “scaling Ethereum’s smart contracts without compromising on security, decentralization, cost, or performance,” which at its core contains zero-knowledge proof technologies.

💡 Zero-knowledge proof is one of the cryptographic protocols that allows one party to prove the truth of any statement to the other party, but at the same time, without providing any other information. The simplest example, in our opinion, would be the following situation: Alice wants proof that Bob knows the password to his Twitter account. How can Bob prove to Alice that he knows the password without giving the password? Bob just has to log in to his account and twitt something to Alice. Thus, Bob proves to Alice that he knows the password without naming it and without providing any information. This is the essence of the zero-knowledge proof concept.

Since the launch of zkSync Era on March 24, there have been many interesting events that reflect the high level of attention to the project. The use of zkSync Era has been announced by: The Graph, LBank.com, Pyth Network, SpaceFi, zkEagles, rhino.fi, Ramp Network, Omnisea, Kreatorland, Redstone Finance, Nexon Finance, SYNTHR, Deri Protocol, Viva Leverage and Symbiosis.

Also, zkSync Era is now integrated into OpenZeppelin’s Defender — security ops platform.

On the fourth day after the launch, the TVL (Total Value Locked) of zkSync Era exceeded $50 million. At the time of writing, according to L2Beat, the TVL of zkSync Era exceeds $240 million.

Already on the second of April, zkSync Era took third place in popularity among all Layer2 solutions. This is despite the fact that the product is in alpha version.

But, of course, it was not without problems. On the first of April, the zkSync Era network was shut down for several hours due to an error with the production of blocks. However, the developers quickly fixed everything and once again reminded everyone that the network is in the alpha version.

On the seventh of April, Gemholic Ecosystem encountered a problem with the smart contract on zkSync Era. When deploying their token contract, Gemholic Ecosystem used the .transfer() function, which did not work on zkSync Era, resulting in an error. As a result, 921 ETH became stuck in the smart contract. The developers immediately announced that they would be able to return the funds.

And, after a while, the problem was actually solved. The .transfer() function along with the .send() function now work properly in the zkSync Era.

On April 14th, zkSync’s Twitter account was hacked, but the hacker was unable to gain access to the account because two-factor authentication was enabled on it. (Advice: Turn it on for your accounts too.)

Overall, zkSync Era is doing very well. Halborn conducted an audit for Matter Labs and zkSync Era, and Aave users voted to deploy Aave V3 on zkSync Era.

The increased interest in zkSync Era proves that zero-knowledge proof is a technology with a great future. We continue to Observe.