ZkSync Developer Releases Toolkit for Building Ethereum Rollups

Matter Labs, the company behind the recently launched zkSync Era blockchain, released a suite of tools to help blockchain developers easily build networks powered by zero-knowledge (ZK) proofs.

Called ZK Stack, the software development toolkit (SDK) introduced by Matter Labs on Monday will allow developers to spin up new “hyperchains” based on zkSync Era’s codebase.

“The idea is to have this out-of-the-box toolkit for people to deploy hyperchains, to be able to build what we're thinking of as this future internet of value, in which we have these connected permissionless systems, this network where you can start to scale Ethereum,” Anthony Rose, senior vice president of technology at Matter Labs, told CoinDesk.

ZkSync Era is a layer 2 rollup built atop Ethereum – designed to offer faster and cheaper transactions with similar security guarantees. Transaction fees on the layer 1 Ethereum chain can be prohibitively expensive for some use cases, especially during times of high network activity, so rollups like zkSync Era are increasingly the go-to method by which users access apps within the Ethereum ecosystem.

With ZK Stack, Matter Labs joins Optimism and Arbitrum among Ethereum rollup teams trying to democratize access to its tech – in keeping with the open ethos of crypto.

“The motivation for this is not commercial,” says Rose. “The vision for the system has always been that we are one contributor of many.” Viewed through a business lens, however, the move could be viewed as a way to help Matter Labs draw more developers into the zkSync Era ecosystem.

ZkSync Era was among the first general-purpose layer 2 blockchains to use zero-knowledge (ZK) proofs. It went live in March 2023 and recently reached $500 million worth of assets circulating in its ecosystem, making it the third-largest Ethereum layer 2 by total value locked (TVL) according to L2beat.