On March 28, ConsenSys, the company that develops the MetaMask wallet, will open its zkEVM testnet to the public. The use of this layer 2 can be an opportunity for investors to become potentially eligible for airdrops, from the various applications building on it.
ConsenSys zkEVM testnet to be opened to public
Last December, ConsenSys launched the testnet of its zkEVM, a layer 2 network using ZK Rollups technology and aiming to improve the performance of the main blockchain on which it is deployed: Ethereum (ETH).
Until now, this Layer 2 was permissioned, meaning that only a few players were allowed to do work on it. But this is about to change, as ConsenSys has just announced that the testnet of its zkEVM will be open to the public as of March 28th :
From creating developer tools to open-source software, @ConsenSys has worked to democratize Ethereum since the genesis block.
Now, we are taking an important next step by providing permissionless access to our EVM-equivalent zkEVM rollup.
– ConsenSys (@ConsenSys) March 3, 2023
This is all happening on top of the Goerli testnet, and it’s the final stretch before a deployment on Ethereum.
On the investors’ side, this will be the opportunity to perform actions on the different applications composing the network, to hope, maybe, to become eligible to airdrops of different tokens when this zkEVM will go into mainnet.
A layer 2 programmed in Solidity
The specificity of an Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) compatible blockchain is that it greatly facilitates the deployment of decentralized applications (dApps) already present on such networks. And for good reason, since these dApps are written in Solidity, they do not need to completely rewrite new code in another language, thus facilitating the integration work. Note that it is ETH that is used to pay the gas fees.
Concerning Zero Knowledge Proof, a central element in the ZK Rollups technology allowing to attest the validity of transactions, ConsenSys relies on the open source zkSNARK technology.
Several applications already build on this layer 2, such as the decentralised exchange (DEX) Uniswap or the Hop Protocol bridge. In addition, the well-known MetaMask wallet, developed by ConsenSys, is of course compatible with the network.
To date, the ConsenSys zkEVM testnet has more than 66,700 addresses with more than 530,000 transactions:
Statistics from ConsenSys’ ZK Rollup at the time of writing
While Ethereum is an evolving technology that is still in its infancy, ZK Rollups are gaining interest as the network scales. For their part, the ConsenSys teams are optimistic about the future:
“We are very excited about the future of the ZK Rollups.
We are in the early chapters of the Ethereum story and are proud to have some of the brightest minds in Web3 partner with us on this journey. […] As we open our unlicensed testnet, we hope you will join us in helping to evolve Ethereum.”
