Introducing Scroll - Vision and Values
06/13/2022
The promise of Ethereum is to build a decentralized computing platform widely accessible to all. Though it has come a long way towards achieving this vision, untenably high gas fees and frequent congestion on the current network present a significant challenge for true accessibility. Of course, the Ethereum community is aware of these issues and has adopted a rollup-centric roadmap to increase throughput. This roadmap focuses Ethereum on being the most decentralized settlement layer and moves execution to rollups on Layer 2.
We have long believed that rollups are the only viable way today to scale blockchains without sacrificing decentralization and security. However, until recently, technical obstacles meant that they were impractical to scale, driving users to alternative Layer 1s and sidechains, where scalability comes at a cost. Early last year, as researchers working in this field, we realized recent breakthroughs in ZK proof systems and hardware acceleration meant it was finally practical to build a general purpose EVM-equivalent ZK-rollup. Using the magic of ZKPs, this removes the tradeoff between security and scalability, offering the best solution for blockchain users and developers -- minimal trust assumptions, fast finality, and seamless migration from the base layer.
While coming to these ideas, we were inspired by the community-centric, open and collaborative values of the Ethereum community. In addition to technical considerations, we believe this cultural and social bonding creates a robust foundation for a global settlement layer and is hardly matched by any other crypto community.
With this in mind, we set out to build Scroll -- an EVM-equivalent ZK-rollup in early 2021 as part of the vibrant Ethereum ecosystem. Scroll uses zkEVM as its core component to prove the native EVM execution trace and leverages a decentralized proving network to solve the efficiency problem on the prover side. As we move closer to a public release one year in, this post lays out our vision and the values that inspired this effort.
We believe that decentralized computing platforms will play such a crucial role that they should not belong to any one team or company but instead uphold and promote principles representing the broader community. Like Ethereum, we expect Scroll to be shaped by the community over time, but we begin with the following core values:
Scroll aims to scale blockchains so that it can be assessible for billions of users. This requires making them both scalable and cheap enough to be accessible for all as well as being secure and easy-to-use for the ordinary user.
The current state of the Ethereum fee market means that high-stake applications such as DeFi and NFT trading are crowding out non-financial use cases as well as making Ethereum inaccessible to ordinary users with smaller amounts of capital. By using ZK-powered magic, Scroll will increase transaction throughput and reduce fees dramatically. It will unlock the potential for these new applications and users. We are excited to see new application layer innovations which will result in due course.
While achieving this, we believe Ethereum scaling solutions must meet developers and users where they are. That means giving them the benefits of scaling while minimizing any obstructions to their current workflows and interfaces. By starting with an EVM-equivalent solution, we allow existing applications and developer tooling to migrate from Ethereum to Scroll without deep modifications or rewrites.
Of course, we won't stop there; after this first step, we plan to add experimental new features extending EVM's capabilities to allow developers to create richer user experiences on Scroll. By acting as a live proving ground for these VM-level changes, Scroll will provide users access to bleeding-edge applications and at the same time assessing demand for experimental features to later be upstreamed to the base layer EVM itself.
Scroll is built to be community-centric and fully open-source from day one. We believe such important technology should be open to everyone to understand and audit. We use public specs and repos, and we are collaborating with community members from the Ethereum Foundation Privacy and Scaling Explorations team to build the zkEVM in the open.
When building a platform which can define ownership of financial assets, the ability to openly audit and verify the code is essential. Otherwise, what if the platform is faking proofs or not actually following the protocol? By being open-source, we enable a fundamental level of community trust in Scroll. Even in the development phase, anyone can check on our progress simply by viewing our Github repos. This forces us to be transparent and responsible to our community.
From a developer's perspective, building in the open leads to more secure and better designed systems. By virtue of being accessible, Scroll's code constantly receives both internal and external peer review. Moreover, by implementing designs and improvements from community contributors, such open systems are able to aggregate the best ideas from a growing community of values-aligned developers.
We believe the open-source DNA at the very heart of Scroll will make it the most secure and robust ZK-rollup, and we will continue collaborating with the community and contributing our solutions back to Ethereum. Our ultimate goal is to advance the end goal of Ethereum scaling -- "zk-SNARK everything".
While building towards greater blockchain scalability, we believe it is essential to preserve the core properties of decentralization and censorship resistance that makes Ethereum so powerful. As an end goal, Scroll aims to achieve the same levels of decentralization and censorship resistance as base layer Ethereum itself, although we will approach these step by step.
From the beginning, we view the safety of user assets as paramount and will preserve the same security guarantees as Layer 1. By using Ethereum for both consensus and data availability, we inherit the same level of decentralization. Even in the case of a catastrophic failure, we are building forced exit into the protocol so that users are able to withdraw their funds.
Censorship resistance is more challenging to achieve for rollups, and we are approaching it step by step. First, we have designed a decentralized proving protocol which allows rollup proofs to be outsourced to a community of Rollers. We hope to foster a robust Roller ecosystem competing to improve prover performance with hardware acceleration, and more importantly, enable users to run prover themselves and force their transactions to a rollup batch in case of the censorship. As a second step, we aim to achieve full decentralization by decentralizing the sequencer. By then, anyone will be able to run a sequencer so that transactions cannot be censored. This final step is an area of active research, and we hope to build it in conjunction with the community.
If our vision of scaling Ethereum in an open and community-driven way resonates with you, we are looking for values-aligned individuals to help Scroll become the most developer- and user-friendly scaling solution for Ethereum.
To learn more about these roles and about Scroll, check out our website, Twitter, Discord, or jobs page. If you want to get straight to the code and build with us, you can find our repos at github.com/scroll-tech and github.com/privacy-scaling-explorations/zkevm-circuits.
以太坊的承诺是建立一个所有人都可以访问的去中心化计算平台。尽管实现这一愿景已经走了很长一段路，但当前网络上难以承受的高昂gas费用和频繁的拥塞对真正的可访问性提出了重大挑战。当然，以太坊社区已经意识到了这些问题，并采用了以汇总为中心的路线图来提高吞吐量。该路线图将以太坊的重点放在成为最去中心化的结算层，并将执行转移到第 2 层上的汇总。
长期以来，我们一直认为汇总是当今在不牺牲去中心化和安全性的情况下扩展区块链的唯一可行方式。然而，直到最近，技术障碍意味着它们无法扩展，迫使用户转向替代的第 1 层和侧链，在这些地方，可扩展性是有代价的。去年年初，作为该领域的研究人员，我们意识到ZK 证明系统和硬件加速方面的最新突破意味着构建通用 EVM 等效的 ZK-rollup 终于可行。使用 ZKP 的魔力，这消除了安全性和可扩展性之间的权衡，为区块链用户和开发人员提供了最佳解决方案——最小的信任假设、快速的确定性以及从基础层的无缝迁移。
在提出这些想法时，我们受到以太坊社区以社区为中心、开放和协作的价值观的启发。除了技术方面的考虑之外，我们认为这种文化和社会纽带为全球结算层奠定了坚实的基础，任何其他加密社区都难以与之匹敌。
考虑到这一点，我们着手在 2021 年初构建 Scroll——一个等效于 EVM 的 ZK-rollup，作为充满活力的以太坊生态系统的一部分。Scroll 使用zkEVM作为其核心组件来证明原生 EVM 执行轨迹，并利用去中心化的证明网络来解决证明方的效率问题。随着我们接近一年后的公开发布，这篇文章阐述了我们的愿景和激发这项努力的价值观。
我们相信去中心化计算平台将发挥如此重要的作用，它们不应该属于任何一个团队或公司，而是要维护和促进代表更广泛社区的原则。与以太坊一样，我们希望 Scroll 会随着时间的推移被社区塑造，但我们从以下核心价值观开始：
Scroll 旨在扩展区块链，使其可供数十亿用户评估。这需要使它们既可扩展又足够便宜，以供所有人使用，并且对普通用户而言安全且易于使用。
以太坊费用市场的现状意味着，DeFi 和 NFT 交易等高风险应用正在挤占非金融用例，并使资金较少的普通用户无法访问以太坊。通过使用 ZK 驱动的魔法，Scroll 将提高交易吞吐量并显着降低费用。它将释放这些新应用程序和用户的潜力。我们很高兴看到新的应用层创新将在适当的时候产生。
在实现这一目标的同时，我们相信以太坊扩展解决方案必须满足开发人员和用户的需求。这意味着为他们提供扩展的好处，同时最大限度地减少对其当前工作流程和界面的任何障碍。通过从等效于 EVM 的解决方案开始，我们允许现有应用程序和开发人员工具从以太坊迁移到 Scroll，而无需进行深度修改或重写。
当然，我们不会止步于此；在这第一步之后，我们计划添加扩展 EVM 功能的实验性新功能，以允许开发人员在 Scroll 上创建更丰富的用户体验。通过充当这些 VM 级别更改的现场试验场，Scroll 将为用户提供对前沿应用程序的访问权限，同时评估对实验功能的需求，以便稍后将其上传到基础层 EVM 本身。
Scroll 从一开始就以社区为中心并且完全开源。我们认为，如此重要的技术应该开放给所有人理解和审计。我们使用公共规范和存储库，我们正在与来自以太坊基金会隐私和扩展探索团队的社区成员合作，以公开构建 zkEVM。
在构建可以定义金融资产所有权的平台时，公开审计和验证代码的能力至关重要。否则，如果平台伪造证明或没有真正遵循协议怎么办？通过开源，我们实现了对 Scroll 的基本社区信任。即使在开发阶段，任何人都可以通过查看我们的 Github 存储库来检查我们的进度。这迫使我们对我们的社区保持透明和负责。
从开发人员的角度来看，开放式构建会导致更安全和设计更好的系统。由于易于访问，Scroll 的代码不断地接受内部和外部的同行评审。此外，通过实施社区贡献者的设计和改进，这样的开放系统能够从不断增长的价值观一致的开发者社区中汇集最佳想法。
我们相信 Scroll 核心的开源 DNA 将使其成为最安全和最强大的 ZK-rollup，我们将继续与社区合作，并将我们的解决方案回馈给以太坊。我们的最终目标是推进以太坊扩容的最终目标——“zk-SNARK Everything”。
在构建更大的区块链可扩展性的同时，我们认为保留使以太坊如此强大的去中心化和抗审查的核心特性至关重要。作为最终目标，Scroll 旨在实现与基础层以太坊本身相同水平的去中心化和审查阻力，尽管我们将逐步实现这些目标。
从一开始，我们就将用户资产的安全视为最重要的，并将保留与第 1 层相同的安全保证。通过使用以太坊来实现共识和数据可用性，我们继承了相同级别的去中心化。即使在灾难性失败的情况下，我们也在协议中构建强制退出，以便用户能够提取他们的资金。
对于汇总而言，要实现审查阻力更具挑战性，我们正在逐步接近它。首先，我们设计了一个去中心化的证明协议，允许将汇总证明外包给 Rollers 社区。我们希望培育一个强大的 Roller 生态系统，通过硬件加速来提高 Prover 的性能，更重要的是，让用户能够自己运行 Prover，并在审查时强制他们的交易汇总到一批。作为第二步，我们的目标是通过去中心化排序器来实现完全去中心化。届时，任何人都可以运行定序器，这样交易就不会被审查。最后一步是一个积极研究的领域，我们希望与社区一起建立它。
如果我们以开放和社区驱动的方式扩展以太坊的愿景与您产生共鸣，我们正在寻找与价值观保持一致的人，以帮助 Scroll 成为以太坊对开发人员和用户最友好的扩展解决方案。
要了解有关这些角色和 Scroll 的更多信息，请查看我们的网站、Twitter、Discord或工作页面。如果您想直接获取代码并与我们一起构建，您可以在github.com/scroll-tech和github.com/privacy-scaling-explorations/zkevm-circuits找到我们的存储库。