Scroll co-founder Haichen talks about Mainnet launch and ecosystem development

Recently, the Scroll Mainnet was officially launched, marking an important milestone. As an open-source Layer 2 solution led by Asian entrepreneurs, Scroll has always attracted community attention. After more than two years of development and one year of testing, Scroll produced its genesis block on October 10, 2023, and announced the official launch of the Mainnet on October 17.

According to data platforms, as of October 27, the total locked value on the Scroll chain has exceeded $19.3 million. The number of Mainnet wallet addresses has surpassed 147,000, with a total of over 860,000 verified transactions. Between October 20 and 26, the average daily number of transactions was close to 80,000, with the highest single-day transaction volume occurring on October 22, reaching 101,375 transactions.

Recently, Scroll co-hosted the ETH Hong Kong event with Newman Group at Cyberport in Hong Kong, which is the first event organized by the Ethereum community in Hong Kong. During the event, Scroll co-founder Haichen Shen was interviewed and shared his views on the development of Scroll.

Haichen introduced himself as one of the three co-founders of Scroll, mainly responsible for the engineering team. He previously worked at Amazon Web Services for several years, focusing on AI compiler-related work. Later, he met the other two co-founders while participating in Ethereum community activities and developed a strong interest in zero-knowledge proofs, believing it to be a highly promising field that could be used to develop real products and systems, ultimately achieving Ethereum's scalability to accommodate more transactions and reduce user fees.

When discussing why they chose to hold the Ethereum event in Hong Kong, Haichen stated that they found that while Hong Kong is business-oriented, the Ethereum community is relatively small. Through this event, they can involve Hong Kong students and Ethereum community developers from the Asia-Pacific region, allowing them to learn about the latest developments in Ethereum and to re-expand the Ethereum community back to Hong Kong and the Asia-Pacific region. This is of great significance for the expansion of the developer ecosystem in the entire region.

For this hackathon, Haichen revealed that nearly 100 projects participated, and ultimately 16 will be selected for the final round of competition. These projects mainly focus on providing infrastructure services for Ethereum or Layer 2, as well as enhancing user experience.

When talking about the significance of the launch of Scroll Mainnet, Haichen believes it is an important milestone and a new starting point. After long-term development and testing, they have completed the development of infrastructure components, including zkEVM circuits and sequencers for generating blocks. In the last few months, the team has focused on security optimization and invited independent third-party organizations for code audits.

Since the Mainnet launched more than a week ago, Scroll's development has generally met expectations. Approximately 15 million USD has entered the Scroll chain, and some DeFi applications have begun generating transactions. Currently, Scroll ranks 18th in the Layer 2 TVL rankings. Even more encouraging is the rapid growth in the number of contract deployments, indicating an active developer ecosystem.

Regarding the reasons for choosing the zkEVM solution, Haichen explained that zk technology can provide users with stronger security guarantees while shortening the final confirmation time. At the same time, EVM equivalence can bring a better user experience for both users and developers, allowing development tools on Ethereum to be migrated to Layer 2 without additional modifications.

In terms of technical features, Scroll is developed as closely as possible to the EVM, creating corresponding zk circuit components for each EVM instruction. Currently, the number of precompiled contracts supported by Scroll is the highest in zk rollups, reaching 6. In addition, Scroll's sequencer is based on Go-Ethereum implementation, maintaining a high level of compatibility.

Regarding the future ecological development plan, Haichen stated that the initial focus will be on supporting infrastructure services such as RPC, indexing, cross-chain bridges, and oracles. This will be followed by a wave of DeFi application deployments. In the long run, Scroll hopes to create an open and neutral platform that treats all developers equally. They may pay more attention to real-world application projects such as stablecoin payments and AA wallets, as well as public goods projects that benefit ecological development.

Haichen revealed that Scroll is planning some incentive activities for developers, which may utilize NFTs to encourage developers to deploy contracts on Scroll.

Looking back at the entrepreneurial journey, Haichen stated that it has been relatively smooth overall. Early financing provided the team with sufficient funding to support long-term development. The main challenges came from the technical aspect, particularly encountering many unforeseen issues during the construction of zkEVM. By collaborating with the community, such as working with the Ethereum Foundation's privacy and scalability exploration group, these technical difficulties were jointly addressed.

Regarding the competition and development of the Layer 2 track, Haichen believes that it is still in the early stages. This year, zk Rollup solutions have started to receive more attention, but issues such as trustlessness still need to be addressed to enhance user confidence in the security of Layer 2. He believes there is still significant growth potential for Layer 2 and looks forward to seeing more innovative applications emerge. Haichen emphasizes that this is not a zero-sum game, but rather a market that can continue to expand.