Binance Research Publishes Report on “zkEVM and the Future of Ethereum Scaling”

Ethereum is scaling, and it is scaling fast. The Ethereum community is busy building, and multiple approaches to scaling Ethereum have found traction over the past few months - one that Binance Research looked at in more detail is that of zkEVMs. zkEVM itself is a virtual machine (on Ethereum) that generates zero-knowledge proofs to verify the correctness of a statement. But there is more to it, and in an old-fashioned way, the report breaks down the different components of zkEVM to understand them better.
Both zero-knowledge proofs and Ethereum Virtual Machines are concepts that have been around for some time now but bringing them together in a fully operational way, this soon after the Ethereum merge, might heat the debate around Layer 2 scaling solutions again

According to Binance Research, zero-knowledge Ethereum Virtual Machines (or simply zkEVM) might introduce substantial benefits to zk-rollups that will make them more competitive in the long term. STARKs and SNARKs both have their benefits, and while we see a higher adoption rate of SNARKs in the foreseeable future, this might change, considering some of the technical advantages that STARKs bring.

There are a few elements that make building zkEVMs difficult. Special opcodes, a stack-based architecture, high storage overhead, and high proving costs are just some of them. However, once implemented successfully, we will likely benefit from faster finality, capital efficiency, and more secure scaling overall. Since different zkEVM projects adopt different approaches to combining EVM execution with zero-knowledge proof computation, Binance Research looks closely at some of the projects currently building zkEVMs in a later section of their report.