How zkEVMs Can Keep Ethereum Competitive with Alternative Layer-1s

Key Insights

• 80% of TVL in DeFi lives on EVM-compatible blockchains.
• zkEVMs can keep Ethereum competitive with emerging execution environments like Fuel and StarkNet.
• If efforts to build a zkEVM are successful, the Ethereum ecosystem will remain competitive with alternative L1s.
• An enshrined zkEVM rollup is the latest effort to scale compute on Ethereum at the core protocol level.

Scaling public blockchains is our industry's hottest, most contentious topic. From Solana’s single, composable computing network to Celestia’s hyper-modular, highly specialized architecture, several strategies with different tradeoffs have emerged to address the problem of scaling Web3.

For Ethereum users and developers, there is a glaring bottleneck in the race for scale: the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM). The EVM is an execution environment (a platform that developers utilize to build smart contracts) that powers most of today’s popular decentralized applications. However, broad adoption of the EVM prevents core protocol developers from making substantial changes to the execution environment to preserve backward compatibility with applications already deployed on mainnet.