A brand new second layer just weeks out of the box is handling as many transactions as the eight year old ethereum global network.

zkSync Era, one of the first zkEVM to run on ethereum, processed about one million transactions in the past 24 hours according to the blockchain tracker L2Beat.

That’s the equivalent of 12 transactions per second, a first for a zkEVM, making zkSync the top second layer for this period.

The 500% jump in activity is apparently due to some apes airdrop, though seemingly unrelated to the actual apes.

Not that Arbitrum got its activity that much differently, but zkSync currently has just $260 million in assets compared to some $5 billion for Arbitrum.

Yet it is newer, and it is a fairly interesting network because its fees are actually not that low.

A Trustnodes’ testrun of zkSync earlier this month showed fees there are about 70% lower than on the base layer.

Yet they still feel a bit high as if you’d pay $20 in ethereum, you’d pay about $7 in zkSync, not the one cent you’d pay on Polygon.

Polygon however is a sidechain with a fairly centralized setup. They are also working on their own zkEVM, so that’s the one that will have to be compared with zkSync.

Because zkSync in concept is decentralized in as far as its batched transactions are secured by on-chain proofs of the accounts in those transactions. In theory you can’t cheat.

So you get instant transactions for 70% cheaper while, maybe later on once this goes through a lot more scrutiny, also potentially feeling somewhat comfortable holding the assets on that layer.

That difference of comfort can potentially determine where coders go, and the rest which will probably follow.

For now this is more like all the fruits getting ripe at once, and so you can’t pick between grapes and cherry, but loop through them.

Coders therefore are launching replicas of their dapps in all of these networks, but eventually due to many reasons – including plain preference – they will have to dedicate more time to one over the other, at least at the edges.

And through that process there would probably be an 80/20 distribution as with everything, although constraints might make it a bit different because even if a network is good enough, it might be good enough at a certain capacity.

Just what capacity is currently an open question. We’ve heard over the years all sorts of promises, claims, and estimates. Now we get to see and analyze and wait for the data.

Currently ethereum is being scaled by 3.5x from these second layers, though that’s in usage not necessarily capacity.

As can be seen in the featured image above, ethereum is a flat line, handling as much now as in the bear of 2020.

L2s on the other hand are moving up, and as long as that remains the case then they have more capacity than usage.

A 10x would obviously be an initial milestone. The 100x line would be a lot more meaningful, and whether it flatlines there or not is to be seen.

That makes it a bit exciting because it has taken a whole blocksize war in bitcoin and about eight years to get here.

So now we get to see it, during the quiet period, when we get to speak freely without bull backlash.

And it has just began, and not quite fully as some second layers are not quite out yet, but this is the bit where we build the bull so don’t get bored and don’t get distracted because code still rules here and brand new worlds are coming out from this code.

Starknet, zkSync and the Polygon zkEVMs, ConsenSys is coming out with a zkEVM, some startups are launching zkEVMs, some startups are building ‘translators’ for zkEVMs – for Starknet for example to make it Solidity native through Kakarot – and there will probably be a lot more other layers too as well as the blockchain equivalents of APIs.

All this is raw infrastructure, created by man for bots then to rely on, and frankly nothing else matters in this entire crypto space than just how exactly this story develops.

So good luck to the pioneers and theirs apes. They’re right in time too. A whole two years to enjoy and scrutinize the very edge as we hopefully stand at the down of scaling blockchains to break that years long ceiling and free this thing.

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• Source: https://www.trustnodes.com/2023/05/17/zksync-almost-surpasses-ethereum-in-transactions