2023 Summary for Zero-knowledge Rollups

This research piece summarizes some of the notable developments made by zero-knowledge rollups (ZKRs) in 2023. Thus far, there are no clear leaders in ZKR adoption. Although dYdX has dominated the ZKR space in TVL for quite a while, it has begun its transition to a Cosmos Layer 1 chain. The next two ZKRs that are competing fiercely are zkSync Era, with $440 million in TVL, and Starknet, with $140 million in TVL. Though zkSync Era has significantly more TVL than Starknet, part of its TVL originally came from zkSync Lite. With these two ZKRs potentially launching governance tokens in 2024, they currently garner a great deal of interest and activity. 

Following closely behind zkSync Era and Starknet, we have Polygon zkEVM, Loopring, and Linea. Except for Loopring, the other ZKRs mentioned here are all general-purpose rollups capable of supporting applications with different logic. This is particularly unique to ZKRs, as the infrastructure for generating a validity proof can get quite complex, making it difficult to build a general-purpose ZKR compared to an app-specific one.