Solana and Ethereum communities are arguing again, this time because of Solana's new ZK Compression technology.

Yesterday, Mert Mumtaz, CEO of Helius, an Solana ecosystem development platform, announced on the X platform that he was bringing ZK Compression to Solana, and then Light Protocol, a Solana ecosystem privacy project, announced the launch of ZK Compression. According to Mert, ZK Compression will be performed directly on L1 without L2, which will greatly improve Solana network scalability and "take a step towards building a financial computer—an unstoppable, global, synchronized atomic state machine at the speed of light."

According to the ZK Compression document, this technology is a new primitive built on Solana, allowing developers to build applications on a large scale. Developers and users can choose to compress their on-chain state, reducing the cost of state by several orders of magnitude while maintaining the security, performance, and composability of Solana L1.

ZK Compression works through a process called state compression, allowing developers to use Solana's cheaper ledger space instead of more expensive account space to store certain types of data. The 'hash' or 'fingerprint' of off-chain data is stored on-chain for verification using 'sparse state trees'.

Has the Ethereum community been "breached"?

The technical explanation may be too complicated, but simply put, this technology reduces the state cost of Solana.

In Solana, technicians face two costs - computational cost and state cost. Currently, Solana has cheap computational power but expensive state. Account allocation, rent payment, and scaling with users have all proven to be huge obstacles for Solana developers, and ZK Compression solves this problem.

Taking the cost of airdrop as an example, assuming an airdrop to 1,000,000 users, the cost of status has been reduced from over 260,000 US dollars to 50 US dollars, which is 5,200 times cheaper. Justin Bons, the founder and CIO of Cyber Capital, also believes that ZK Compression "clearly puts Solana far ahead of ETH in terms of actual L1 scalability, solving one of Solana's biggest survival problems".

Justin Bons' views have made the Ethereum community, which is struggling with scalability issues, restless and questioning the "L1 nature" of ZK Compression as they turn to rollup.

Because Mert said the data of ZK Compression is kept off-chain, the Ethereum community regards it as validium. The Solana community responded with a meme, mocking that Mert claimed to be an expert without serious research. Mert even stubbornly named ZK Compression as ZK validium.

In order to gain the trust of the Ethereum community, Mert called out Ethereum's founder Vitalik on Farcaster to comment on the technical principles of ZK Compression. Vitalik responded seriously, stating that this technology is more like a stateless client architecture.

Vitalik interprets ZK Compression into three key points: First, you have a new account class, for which only the hash of its state is stored on-chain; Second, to interact with these accounts, you need to write a TX that specifies the pre-state hash and post-state hash of N accounts and provides a validity proof (assuming this means ZK-SNARK); Third, the new state requires public disclosure (which is reasonable, otherwise you can randomly send someone money and their account will be inaccessible, you can bypass this to make it a Ut xo system, but that would be a major limitation).

In addition to interpreting, Vitalik also raised questions about the document, on the one hand, the 128-byte validity proof mentioned in the document, and on the other hand, whether the public content includes transaction content.

Later, Vitalik once again expressed his confusion. He believed that the numbers claimed by ZK Compression are like, if done separately each time, the cost of verifying SNARK would be higher than the cost of doing some small actions and hash operations (such as token transfers). The benefit of ZK rollup comes from 'one' SNARK packaging 'many' transactions.

But Vitalik's question was not answered, and his initial description of ZK Compression as a 'stateless client architecture' has greatly increased the confidence of supporters like Mert.

CEHV partner Adam Cochran firmly believes that ZK Compression is Solana's L2 solution, and he believes that 'one day, the Solana community will realize that what they are building is a good rollup based on L2 functionality/efficiency, rather than a complete chain.' Adam's firm attitude has also attracted criticism from Mert.

While Solana co-founder Anatoly Yakovenko seems "indifferent" to the debate between L1 and L2, even stating that he is "happy to designate it as L2, storage rollup, or validity-based rollup, etc.", he emphasizes that "all execution happens on L1 and is ordered by L1 validators." Although Adam's response differs from Mert's strong stance, he still insists that ZK Compression cannot be L1.

ZKsync founder Alex Gluchowski also criticizes ZK Compression. At the same time, he stated that ZKsync has been quietly building an asynchronous, composable ZK future for Ethereum. Interestingly, after the release of ZK Compression, Anatoly also published a lengthy article introducing asynchronous program execution (APE) in Solana.

Will Rollup be the perfect match for Solana?

Solana has always been searching for value in its network. Unlike Bitcoin and Ethereum, the valuation logic of various altcoin chains that emerged from the previous bull market does not completely rely on block space being cheap, making it difficult for the corresponding token prices to increase significantly. However, Solana continues to focus on compression technology and constantly reduce its own costs, which poses a huge challenge to the appreciation of SOL to some extent.

Even considering Moore's Law, even if the hardware can continue to improve performance, and Solana has optimized for this hardware progress, it does not mean that Solana can meet global demand. However, Solana will manage better than other chains depending on composability and low latency.

Unlike Ethereum, the Solana Mainnet does not intend to be a "B2B chain"; it has always been and will always be a consumer chain. Building a large-scale distributed system is challenging, and Solana has the potential to become the most valuable shared ledger for global transactions.

And for rollup, Solana rollup will be mostly abstracted for end users.

From an ideological perspective, Ethereum's rollup is top-down, meaning that the Ethereum Foundation and leaders decide that the best way to expand is through rollup, and then start supporting various Layer 2 solutions after the CryptoKitties incident. In contrast, the demand on Solana is bottom-up, coming from application developers with significant user adoption. Therefore, most current roll-up strategies are more marketing-driven and narrative-driven rather than user demand-driven. This is a significant difference that may lead to a different future for rollups compared to Ethereum.

But ZK Compression has implemented state compression for Solana, combined with Firedancer, multiple concurrent leaders, asynchronous execution, and an ecosystem consisting of thousands of developers, undoubtedly giving Solana a real opportunity in encryption.