17
zkTube Labs has officially launched its Mainnet on 10 September 2021 as the Ethereum Layer 2 scaling solution. It’s based on Ethereum's Zero-Knowledge Proof technology that provides large capacity and efficient services for Ethereum and its ecosystem in the coming years.
zkTube Labs has developed a network protocol to solve Ethereum’s scaling solution. It is a blockchain company with more than 50 people headquartered in Melbourne, Australia. The core leadership team consists of a MIT-educated CEO Daniel Puzny, CTO John Sajadi, COO Raul Heraud and co-founders Lance Zhang and Charlene Fan.
Ethereum has grown to be the most powerful smart contract platform in the blockchain industry. Due to DeFi's explosive growth and profits, more and more developers are using Ethereum for project development. Soon, there will be more than 300,000 developers using the Ethereum network.
A growing number of applications have created greater use of the Ethereum platform leading to challenges for founder Vitalik Buterin and his team. Ethereum is now facing increasing transactions, high fees and frequent security threats. While the Ethereum Foundation has continuously deployed enhancement proposals such as EIP1559, the underlying infrastructure is still a work in progress including performance and mining solution on Ethereum 2.0.
Current scaling solution to the Ethereum problem relies on Layer 2: A blockchain infrastructure that is independent of the Ethereum chain where applications can run and will update the state of the run to the Ethereum main chain.
CEO Daniel Puzny of zkTube Labs has spent more than 30 years in technology and the last 7 years on blockchain projects during which he has cultivated an ethos comparable to Wall Street investment for long-term and value creation.
For Daniel Puzny, he is on familiar grounds to lead the development of an Ethereum-based DeFi or GameFi applications. These applications take less time and low bar to develop but with high returns bringing millions of dollars when they are launched.
Contrary to the above beliefs, zkTube Labs is not into quick money. Daniel Puzny mentioned that in the face of economic setbacks and recession caused by the pandemic, many European and North American countries have responded by providing an unlimited money supply and sending paychecks directly to the people. This approach is short term focussed and benefited the people but it is not a long term solution. By contrast, some countries have invested money into infrastructure projects to create jobs and consolidate underlying infrastructure for long-term benefits.
Compared to her peers, zkTube Labs prefers to be the latter by focusing on infrastructure construction.
In an interview, Daniel Puzny stated that he was inspired by the Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin who led the development of the Ethereum project. In seven years, Ethereum has reached a market value of $450 billion, a growth rate that is unsurpassed in the global internet industry.
The success of Ethereum is largely due to the thought leadership of Vitalik Buterin. An enduring project with enterprise grade applications must have a good underlying foundation and long term strategic goals. There were many speculator projects at the same time when the Ethereum platform was launched. Many have floundered and some are no longer visible today, but Ethereum has continued to survive and prosper.
The philosophy behind zkTube Labs is not to recreate Ethereum but to provide complementary solutions on Ethereum to make it a prosperous and a sustainable blockchain platform of choice. The zkTube protocol comes under the ZK-Rollup scaling solution promoted by Vitalik Buterin. zkTube protocol enables applications to run on an independent Layer 2 architecture, and a rollup smart contract on the Ethereum mainnet will post the transaction states to it using generated Zero-Knowledge proofs. In this work process, chip calculations will be introduced for complex cryptographic calculation.
Among the many Layer 2 solution choices, zkTube Labs chose ZK-Rollup to provide a secure and safer platform for the zkTube network. Security threats are emerging to be more serious in the blockchain industry. For instance in August 2021, hackers stole more than $600 million in digital assets from Poly Network users causing the biggest blockchain security incident. Hackers returned most of the funds but security incidents like this cannot be ignored in the future.
The combination of zero-knowledge proof and chip computing provides a more secure operating environment for the zkTube network. It will protect against intrusion and theft by hackers. That is an important reason why Vitalik Buterin pushed for such a protocol.
Earlier in 2021, zkTube received a grant from the Ethereum Foundation and was fully acknowledged by Vitalik Buterin at the Ethereum Enterprise Alliance Summit. Subsequently, zkTube has received investment from many institutions totalling more than $15 million.
At the zkTube Testnet launch, 130,000 nodes were deployed. zkTube has started token mapping for Mainnet and it was officially launched on 10 September 2021. An important wallet product based on the protocol called PayTube is now providing live services. PayTube development will play a vital role in opening up the Ethereum Layer 2 network in the future.
In conclusion, zkTube is the most basic and best network protocol for Ethereum Layer 2 scaling solution. Layer 2 platform will allow developers to develop large and complex applications on it including current popular applications such as Metaverse, DeFi, GameFi and many others. Notwithstanding the above, zkTube will also open up the Layer 2 solution choices for Ethereum platform. The Ethereum network topology will be like a road and bridge network connecting to urban clusters.
