ZK Rollups
Perhaps you are familiar with the term ZK rollup. After all, everyone was throwing it left and right
I usually tend to wander around in my articles and speak whatever is popping into my mind. So today, I thought that maybe was time to take a different approach and focus on something more specific. Therefore I decided to approach the ZK Rollup narrative.
ZK Rollup Is one term that makes people look wise and fresh out of school. I, personally understand what it means but had some difficulty piecing it together. In all honesty never understood why the “Zero Knowledge” term is suitable for what this kind of "tech" does. Until now! But let’s start.
ZK -Rollup means Zero Knowledge Rollup, a Layer 2 protocol intended to improve the scalability and efficiency of Blockchain networks, like Ethereum. So far so good?
It allows a large number of transactions to be processed off-chain, with only a small set of data periodically submitted to the main blockchain for verification. But shouldn’t everything be on the blockchain? Well, yes…and it is! But there is a logic behind it.
Here's a simple explanation:
Imagine you have a big cooking book with many of your grandma’s recipes ( grandma can cook) that she left you before visiting the angels, and your friend does not believe that your grandma left the book to you, because she used to love your sister way more, since you continuously skipped church (you naughty, naughty dawg).
So how can you prove to your friend that this is indeed true? One way would be to show the cookbook, but you don’t want to do it, because he will steal your beloved grandmother’s masterpieces ( I saw food fights starting for less).
The solution? You bake a cake and give it to your friend without showing them the original book. In this case, the cake acts as proof that you have the cookbook, without showing your friend all the recipes.
This was a very stupid example but for the sake of tastiness help me out here.
A step-by-step "recipe" to ZK-Rollups:
- Users do a large number of transactions off-chain.
- A cryptographic technique called zero-knowledge proofs is used to bundle these transactions into a single batch or "rollup." - This is the origin of the term (no shit Sherlock).
- This bundled data is then submitted to the main blockchain, which can verify the truth of the transactions without needing to process each one individually.
- This means more scalability and fewer costs associated with the transactions. Thank you ZK-Rollup!
In a nutshell, the purpose of ZK-Rollups is to come up with a more efficient way of processing a large number of transactions on a blockchain, increasing scalability while maintaining the security and decentralization of the underlying network. So every time that someone mentions ZK Rollups or brings Grandma’s cookbook, you will understand why it is a big deal.
As a disclaimer, I had a bit of help from CHAT GPT to help me understand the concept in an easier manner. Not a very technical guy, but trying to dig a bit more step by step.
Also, fam, would really appreciate it if you could drop a follow on 👉🏽Twitter(X)👈🏽
See you soon!
