Published
5 years ago on
September 24, 2018
“A form of cryptography pioneered by zcash might help scale ethereum, founder of the platform Vitalik Buterin said on a research forum Saturday. Named zk-snarks, Buterin said, by using the tech, ethereum can potentially scale ‘by a huge amount’ up to 500 transactions per second, without relying on layer-two scaling solutions.”zk-snarks allows huge amounts of information to be batched and compressed, allowing many transactions to be packaged into easier to manage blocks, ultimately speeding up the process of confirming the transactions. This frees the network up to allow more transactions to pass through per second.According to Coindesk, Buterin has said:
"We can actually scale asset transfer transactions on ethereum by a huge amount, without using layer 2s that introduce liveness assumptions (eg. channels, plasma), by using zk-SNARKs to mass-validate transactions. At this point it's widely known that optimizing snark/stark provers is super-important so I'm sure there will be more and more software engineering work going into it over time."Buterin suggests that the implementation of zk-snarks could lead to a 24 x increase in the level of Ethereum transactions per second and a stunning 50 x increase in the level of Ethereum ERC-20 based transactions per second.Is this important?Yes, it’s very important. As suggested, Ethereum is troubled by scalability, therefore the implementation of zk-snarks or another similar system would massively improve the network, once again making Ethereum based transactions far more attractive than they currently are. In order to progress, Ethereum needs to speed up, this could be the key needed to make that happen. References Coindesk Investment Disclaimer
