Matter Labs’ zkSync Era, a zero-knowledge (ZK) rollup aimed at scaling Ethereum, has seen a surge in capital recently. According to data source L2Beat, the total value locked (TVL) on zkSync Era rose above $500 million early Monday, a 12% increase in one week. This metric is widely used to track the total value of digital assets locked or staked on a decentralized finance platform.
zkSync is now the third-largest rollup by total value locked, behind Arbitrum and Optimism. As of press time, more than 220,000 Ether (ETH), or around $378.3 million, 121 million USDC (a dollar-pegged stablecoin) and 14.43 million MUTE, worth $7.53 million, were locked on zkSync. MUTE is the native cryptocurrency of a zkRollup-based decentralized exchange, Mute.
The daily active addresses have steadily increased since May, averaging 175,000 in the past four weeks. Recently, liquid staking solution Rocketpool went live on zkSync Era, joining the list of decentralized applications moving to layer 2 platforms. Alex Thorn, head of research at Galaxy Digital, said in a newsletter dated June 2, The prioritization of EIP 4844 as the next major code change in Ethereum’s forthcoming Cancun/Deneb upgrade slated to activate sometime this Fall or Winter next year affirms the importance of rollups for the long-term scalability of Ethereum and the need for dapps built on Ethereum to eventually migrate the majority of their operations to a more cost-effective rollup.
The increased user demand for rollups is likely driven by Ethereum core developers’ focus on implementing the Ethereum Improvement Proposal (EIP) 4844. This new transaction type will accept blobs of data and reduce transaction fees on rollups. Activity on other ZK rollups like Starknet and Polygon zkEVM also remains brisk, leading some to call it a Zk season – a crypto market slang for a period where ZK rollups outperform other market sectors by a significant margin.