A Quick Look at =nil; Foundation

=nil; (NIL)  is a zero-knowledge rollup (ZKR) that intends to leverage validity proofs and sharding to scale Ethereum’s throughput. Unlike typical ZKRs that use validity proofs to settle a single environment’s state, NIL utilizes validity proofs to settle the state of multiple shards. These proofs are recursively stacked into a single proof that gets posted to the main shard. The final validity proof, along with the complete transaction data, is then posted to Ethereum to finalize the states of the main shard and all the execution shards.

This architecture is analogous to the proof recursion-enabled layer 3s (L3s) that both Matter Labs and StarkWare have previously mentioned. The main difference between NIL’s architecture and L3s is their consensus mechanism: NIL uses HotStuff-2, an algorithm that is theoretically more optimized than the commonly used ones like Tendermint or PBFT. Put simply, HotStuff-2 is meant to have a reduced communication complexity than PBFT and also lower latency than Tendermint.