Matter Labs is raising $ 50 million to create EVM-compatible zk rollups

Matter Labs has announced a major new round of funding to further develop the second version of Ethereum-based rollups, zkSync.

On November 9, Matter Labs announced that it had raised $ 50 million in a Series B round led by Andreessen Horowitz, which includes participation from existing investors Placeholder and Dragonfly Capital. The new round follows Matter Labs’ $ 6 million Series A in February, which attracted many new investors, including Crypto.com, ConsenSys, and OKEx.

The new cash injection will flow into the advancement of zkSync v2, the company’s second-layer roll-up solution for Ethereum, which is currently focused on facilitating low-cost payments.

Rollups is a second tier scaling solution that “rolls” transaction data in stacks for more efficient processing on the first tier of Ethereum. Matter’s zkSync solution uses zero-knowledge proofs to minimize the data stored in these accompanying transactions, thereby reducing the computational and storage resources required to validate blocks

zkSync v2 will build on the current iteration by supporting the poolable smart contracts of the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM). Dan Boneh, professor of computer science at Stanford, explains:

“ZkSync will enable Ethereum transactions at much higher rates and lower gas fees than the mainnet. The math used by Matter Labs is actually pretty beautiful, and it’s noteworthy that it’s about to become a reality on such a large scale soon. “

The first version of zkSync v2 is currently live in the test network with a Uniswap v2 port called “UniSync” that users can experiment with. The platform has processed over 2 million transactions since its launch in June.

Related: Ethereum layers reportedly process more transactions than Bitcoin

Matter Labs was an early proponent of the roll-up and launched the first public zk-rollup prototype in early 2019.

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin is confident that Layer 2 solutions like zkSync will solve the network’s scaling problems until sharding is implemented in late 2022.

In a blog post in January, Buterin predicted that zk rollups would turn out to be Ethereum’s dominant scaling solution over “medium to long term in all use cases”.

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