Scroll co-founder Haichen Shen: The launch of the Mainnet is a new starting point, and the future will focus on real-world applications.

As an open-source Layer 2 solution led by Asian entrepreneurs, Scroll has always attracted community attention. After two years of intensive development and one year of testing, Scroll officially launched its Mainnet on October 10, 2023.

As of October 27, the total locked value on the Scroll blockchain has exceeded $19.3 million. The number of Mainnet wallet addresses has surpassed 147,000, and the total verified transaction volume has exceeded 860,000. From October 20 to 26, the average daily transaction count was close to 80,000, with the highest single-day transaction volume reaching 101,375 on October 22.

Recently, Scroll held the ETH Hong Kong event at Cyberport in Hong Kong. This is the first event hosted by the Ethereum community in Hong Kong. During the event, Scroll co-founder Haichen Shen gave an exclusive interview, sharing the development history and future plans of Scroll.

Haichen stated that he worked at Amazon Web Services for several years, mainly involved in AI compiler-related work. Later, during his participation in Ethereum community events, he learned about zero-knowledge proof technology and believed it to be a highly promising field that could be used to develop practical products and systems, ultimately achieving Ethereum scalability, accommodating more transactions, and reducing user fees.

When asked why they chose to hold the Ethereum conference in Hong Kong, Haichen explained that they hope to attract Hong Kong students and Ethereum community developers from the Asia-Pacific region to participate, learn about the latest developments in Ethereum, and re-expand the Ethereum community to Hong Kong and the Asia-Pacific region. This is of significant importance for the expansion of the developer ecosystem across the region.

The hackathon event attracted nearly a hundred projects, mainly focused on providing infrastructure services for Ethereum or Layer 2, as well as enhancing user experience. Ultimately, 16 projects will be selected to enter the finals, and rewards will be given to the winners.

Regarding the official launch of Scroll's zkEVM Mainnet, Haichen believes that this marks the completion of an important phase and also serves as a new starting point. They spent about two and a half years developing the entire infrastructure components, including zkEVM circuits and block generation sequencers. After long-term testing and multiple rounds of security audits, the Scroll Mainnet now allows users to bridge assets from Ethereum and use various applications.

Haichen stated that the development since the Mainnet launch a week ago has basically met expectations. About 15 million USD has entered the Scroll chain, and some DeFi applications have begun to generate transactions. Currently, Scroll ranks 18th in Layer 2 TVL. Surprisingly, the growth rate of contract deployments has exceeded that of TVL growth, indicating that more active developers are developing on Scroll, which may lead to more innovative applications in the future.

Regarding the reasons for choosing a zkRollup solution based on zkEVM, Haichen explained that zk technology can provide users with stronger security guarantees and shorten the time for transaction finality. At the same time, EVM equivalence is crucial for user and developer experience, allowing development tools on Ethereum to be used directly on Layer 2 without any modifications.

Haichen emphasized that Scroll is technically closer to EVM, having developed corresponding zk circuit components for each EVM instruction. In addition, the number of precompiled contracts supported by Scroll is the highest among zk rollups, currently supporting 6. This provides developers with a more complete user experience, especially when developing new zk applications.

When discussing future ecological development plans, Haichen stated that Scroll will first focus on infrastructure service support, such as RPC, indexing, cross-chain bridges, and oracles. This will be followed by a wave of DeFi application deployments. In the long term, Scroll is committed to building an open and neutral platform, treating all developers equally. They will particularly focus on real-world application projects, such as stablecoin payments and AA wallet projects, as well as public goods projects that benefit ecological development.

Haichen revealed that Scroll will launch incentive programs for developers in the future, possibly using NFTs to encourage developers to deploy contracts on Scroll.

Reflecting on the entrepreneurial journey, Haichen stated that the initial financing went smoothly, but many challenges were encountered during the technology development process. Through collaboration with the open-source community and multiple rounds of code refactoring and optimization, they ultimately achieved the expected performance level.

Regarding the future development of the Layer 2 ecosystem, Haichen believes that the competition has just begun. This year, zk Rollup solutions have received more attention, but issues such as trustlessness still need to be addressed to enhance security. He emphasizes that there is still significant room for development in Layer 2, and more developers are needed to participate in innovation. Haichen believes that this is not a zero-sum game, but rather a market that can continuously expand.