TL; DR
Full story
As we discussed in our first article:
Layer 2s are about to appear after Ethereum’s Dencun upgrade – and by ‘pop off’ we mean ‘get much cheaper’.
…but how?
We’re glad we asked!
An important factor contributing to this rate reduction is the optimization of data via zk-proofs. How can we explain this?
Let’s say you have 100 movies on a hard drive, and you asked two separate people to rank them from best to worst…
If person #1 had already seen every movie, while person #2 hadn’t seen any – who do you think would submit their list first?
definitely person #1.
Zk-proofs work in a similar way…
They process the information once (aka “watch the movie”) and then can answer basic yes/no questions based on those lessons indefinitely.
In a crypto context the question would be more like:
“Is this group of 1,000 transactions legitimate, verified, and eligible to be processed?”
Old answer: “I don’t know, let’s go through them one by one and find out.”
New answer: “Yes.”
Okay, now you know!