Pro
The Onchain Economics of ZK Rollups
Key Insights
- The underlying cryptographic primitives of zero-knowledge (ZK) technology give rollups the ability to execute transactions at lower unit costs relative to other rollup solutions.
- As ZK rollups achieve scale, unit costs will continue trending downward as they are amortized across a wider range of transactions.
- Data publishing (or data availability) generally remains the highest onchain cost for rollups. While Ethereum rolls out EIP-4844, its first phase of increasing data availability for rollups, new solutions such as Celestia and Eigenlayer DA are entering the market as optimized data availability layers.
The What: Maturation of ZK Rollups
ZK tech promises to significantly scale transaction execution by effectively batching together large numbers of offchain transactions and proving their correct execution down to a secure base chain like Ethereum.
Since many ZK rollup implementations generate a single proof of constant size and then verify it onchain, the gas execution cost for proof verification remains fixed and independent of rollup growth.
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Prior to joining Messari, Seth worked in traditional finance software and services, and has a MSc in Applied Mathematics. Seth is a Senior Research Analyst on the Enterprise Research team, and focuses on infrastructure, verifiable compute, and the AI x Crypto intersection.