Measuring Each Other’s Rollups

Money, technological progress, personal ambitions and achievements. There’s a whole lot at stake as new EVM-compatible zk-rollup blockchains vye for market share, development and users.

It’s probably not a surprise that, in these exciting and formative times for zkEVM, disagreements and discussions among leaders of competing projects have spilled out into the public arena.

In the past few days, leaders of Polygon zkEVM, zkSync Era and Scroll have been engaging with one another on Twitter, variously taking issue with claims about their projects, disputing characterizations of others’, and attempting to diffuse the perceived tension with peacemaking remarks.

Polygon Zero Co-Founder Brendan Farmer tussled with Alex Gluchowski, Co-Founder and CEO of zkSync creator Matter Labs over relative efficiency and gas costs.

Then, fellow Polygon Zero Co-Founder Daniel Lubarov published an article attempting to “clarify some facts about Polygon zkEVM and how it compares to others.”

The article mainly compares Polygon zkEVM to zkSync Era, in regard to EVM compatibility, performance and security.

Gluchowski took issue with Lubarov’s analysis, calling it “extremely biased and misleading.”

He said, “The honest way to do a credibly neutral comparison is to reach out to the other party *before* you publish. Otherwise it's a marketing brochure.”

In the meantime, Farmer posted a separate Twitter thread parsing the difference between EVM-compatibility and EVM-equivalence, saying that definitions are arbitrary but arguing that Polygon zkEVM is EVM-equivalent for nearly 100% of smart contracts on the layer-1 Ethereum blockchain.

He then brought up a December 2022 comment from Scroll Senior Researcher Toghrul Maharramov, who had said Polygon’s rollup was “not a zkEVM.”

Polygon Labs President Ryan Watt made a Twitter post saying that, compared to his experience at Google, Web3 is a much smaller arena and projects need to “think bigger and more collaboratively.”

Scroll Co-Founder Sandy Peng retweeted Watt’s post with praise for Polygon’s product and marketing.

Fellow Scroll Co-Founder Ye Zhang tweeted her agreement, saying that there was more smoke than fire in the recent “spicy” Twitter arguments among the competing zkEVM projects.