Interview with Scroll Co-founder Haichen: The Mainnet Launch is a New Beginning, Focused on Real-World Applications

As an open-source Layer 2 solution developed by an Asian startup team, Scroll has always attracted attention. After two years of intensive development and one year of testing, Scroll officially launched its Mainnet on October 17, 2023.

According to data from the platform, as of October 27, the total locked value (TVL) on the Scroll chain has exceeded $19.3 million. In addition, the number of wallet addresses on the Scroll Mainnet has surpassed 147,000, with a total of over 860,000 verified transactions. Between October 20 and October 26, the average daily transaction count was nearly 80,000, with the highest single-day transaction volume being 101,375 on October 22.

Recently, Scroll co-hosted the ETH Hong Kong event at Cyberport in Hong Kong, which is the first event organized by the Ethereum community in Hong Kong. During the event, we had an exclusive interview with Scroll co-founder Haichen Shen.

Haichen is one of the three co-founders of Scroll, mainly responsible for the engineering team. He worked for many years at Amazon Web Services(AWS), focusing on the development of AI compilers. Later, he came into contact with zero-knowledge proof technology during activities in the Ethereum community and believes this is a field full of potential that can be used to develop practical products and systems, ultimately achieving Ethereum scalability, accommodating more transactions and reducing user fees.

Regarding the original intention of holding ETH Hong Kong, Haichen stated that they realized Hong Kong is more business-oriented in the Web3 field and lacks an active Ethereum community. Through this event, they hope to attract Hong Kong students and Ethereum developers from the Asia-Pacific region to participate, understand the latest developments of Ethereum, and expand the Ethereum community to Hong Kong and the Asia-Pacific region. This is of great significance for the expansion of the developer ecosystem in the entire region.

This hackathon has nearly 100 projects participating, 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 significance of the Scroll Mainnet launch, Haichen believes it is an important milestone and a new starting point. After long-term development and testing, they have ensured the stability and security of various components. In the future, they will introduce more features to further enhance security, reduce user fees, and provide developers with more tools to create more innovative applications.

One week after the launch of the Mainnet, the 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 platform. Surprisingly, the number of contract deployments has increased rapidly, indicating that more developers are actively participating.

Scroll's selection of a zkEVM-based zkRollup solution was explained by Haichen, who stated that zk technology can provide users with stronger security guarantees and shorten the final confirmation time. They place special emphasis on EVM equivalence, which allows developers to directly develop on Layer 2 without modifying existing tools, reducing the risk of errors and providing a more reliable execution environment.

Technically, Scroll is highly compatible with the Ethereum EVM. They have developed corresponding zk circuit components for each EVM instruction to ensure that the instructions are executed correctly. Currently, the number of precompiled contracts supported by Scroll is the highest in zk rollups, reaching 6. This provides developers with a more complete user experience, especially in areas such as elliptic curve operations.

Regarding the ecological development plan, Scroll will initially focus on infrastructure support, such as RPC, indexing, cross-chain bridges, and oracles. More DeFi applications will be deployed online afterward. In the long run, Scroll is committed to creating an open and neutral platform that treats all developers equally. They pay special attention to real-world applications, such as stablecoin payments and AA wallet projects, as well as the development of public goods that benefit the entire ecosystem.

Haichen believes that the competition in the Layer 2 ecosystem has just begun. Key issues that need to be addressed in the future include improving the level of decentralization, enhancing security, and attracting more developers to participate in innovative project development. He emphasized that the Layer 2 market is not a zero-sum game, but a field with huge growth potential.