Scroll Co-founder Haichen: The launch of the Mainnet is a new starting point, and the ecosystem will focus on real-world applications.

Recently, Scroll and Newman Group co-hosted the ETH Hong Kong event at Cyberport, which is the first event in Hong Kong organized by the Ethereum community. During the event, Scroll co-founder Haichen Shen was interviewed, sharing the development history and future plans of Scroll.

Haichen has experience working as an AI compiler at Amazon Web Services(AWS). He met the other two co-founders while participating in Ethereum community activities and developed a strong interest in zero-knowledge proof technology. He believes this technology has great potential for developing practical products and systems, ultimately achieving Ethereum scalability, accommodating more transactions, and reducing user fees.

When discussing why they chose to hold the Ethereum conference in Hong Kong, Haichen stated that they realized that while Hong Kong is business-oriented, it lacks an active Ethereum community. Through this event, they hope to attract Hong Kong students and Ethereum community developers from the Asia-Pacific region to participate, learn about the latest developments in Ethereum, and expand the Ethereum community back to Hong Kong and the Asia-Pacific region.

The hackathon attracted nearly 100 projects, and ultimately 16 projects will be selected to enter the final round of competition. These projects mainly focus on providing infrastructure services for Ethereum or Layer 2, as well as improving user experience.

When talking about the official launch of the Scroll Mainnet, Haichen stated that this is an important milestone and a new starting point. After two and a half years of development and a year of testnet operation, Scroll has completed the development of a full set of infrastructure components, including the zkEVM circuits and block generation sequencer. Before the mainnet launch, the team also focused on optimizing security and invited independent external agencies for a comprehensive audit.

One week after the Mainnet launch, the ecological development of Scroll is basically in line with expectations. Approximately $15 million has entered the Scroll chain, and some DeFi applications have begun to generate transactions on the chain. Notably, the growth rate of contract deployments has exceeded the growth of TVL, which is seen as a healthy development signal, indicating that more innovative applications may be deployed on Scroll in the future.

In terms of technology selection, Scroll chose a zkRollup solution based on zkEVM. Haichen explained that zk technology can provide users with higher security and a better user experience. Compared to Optimistic Rollup, zkRollup actively submits proofs instead of passively waiting for challenges, thus offering faster and stronger security guarantees. Additionally, EVM equivalence is also an important feature of Scroll, allowing developers to migrate development toolkits from Ethereum to Layer 2 for use without any modifications.

In the future ecological development plan, Scroll will first focus on infrastructure service support, such as RPC, indexing, cross-chain bridges, and oracles. Subsequently, a wave of DeFi applications will be deployed on Scroll. In the long term, Scroll is committed to building an open and neutral platform that treats projects of all sizes equally. Notably, Scroll will focus on supporting some real-world application projects, such as stablecoin payments and AA wallet projects, as well as public goods projects that benefit ecological development.

Regarding the competition and development of zkEVM and the L2 track, Haichen believes that the competition in the entire Layer 2 ecosystem has only just begun. This year, the industry's focus has shifted from Optimistic Rollup to zk Rollup solutions. However, zk Rollup still faces some challenges, including how to achieve a higher degree of trustlessness and how to provide stronger security guarantees. Haichen emphasizes that the Layer 2 market is not a zero-sum game, but rather a field that can continuously expand, and in the future, more developers are needed to create innovative projects on zk Rollup.