ZK Sync has a brand new identify but additionally recent particulars about its increasing constellation of related chains.
What have been as soon as often called Hyperchains has, following a trademark collision, been rebranded to the Elastic Chain, together with the ZKsync 3.0 community improve final month.
This community goals to deal with the challenges of liquidity fragmentation and irritating consumer experiences which have plagued multichain ecosystems. ZK rollups constructed on the ZK Stack are set to achieve native, trust-minimized, and low-cost interoperability, in keeping with a ZK Sync weblog put up.
Learn extra: zkSync welcomes AI knowledge warehouse as newest addition to hyperchain
The core drawback with present multichain programs lies of their reliance on third-party bridges, even the most effective of which introduce safety dangers and operational prices.
The Elastic Chain mitigates these issues by means of an structure that emphasizes cryptographic safety and seamless interoperability.
ZK Sync’s rebrand borrows from the financial idea of elasticity, the place provide can increase proportionally to elevated demand. To take action, the community of chains depends on recursive ZK proofs, enabling parallel proof technology and constant-time verification. Which means the Elastic Chain can confirm the validity of a computation in a hard and fast period of time, whatever the dimension or complexity of the computation.
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This property is essential for the scalability of zk rollups, because it permits the community to deal with a excessive quantity of transactions with out growing the time or value required for verification. Extra transactions can, considerably counterintuitively, make the entire system cheaper.
Till just a few months in the past, posting transaction batches to Ethereum mainnet was the main driver of layer-2 charges, however the brand new blob storage in EIP-4844, launched in March and extensively adopted by April, has radically modified the image.

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Position of the ZK Token
The Elastic Chain contains a number of key parts, a few of which presumably will make use of the newly launched ZK token, such because the ZK Gateway.
Initially the token’s position is one in all governance, with choices, reminiscent of protocol upgrades, validator insurance policies and different important features of the community’s improvement being put to a token holder vote. To this point, ZK holders can delegate their vote to themselves or others, however precise governance votes are a methods off.
The ZK Gateway would facilitate transaction settlement between related ZK Stack chains extra cheaply than settling on to Ethereum. The gateway could be managed by a decentralized set of validators, incentivized to take care of the community’s resilience and reliability.
As an illustration, bridging and state diff knowledge charges — related to the transmission and storage of the variations (or “diffs”) in chain state — could possibly be paid in ZK.
The weblog put up doesn’t explicitly name for this utility of ZK, however it’s implied:
“The participation on this decentralized validation course of requires an ERC20 token. ZKsync community governance will designate a token for this goal (for instance, it could possibly be the ZK token),” the put up states.
For customers, the Elastic Chain community goals to imitate a single blockchain, utilizing the identical deal with and signature by means of modular good accounts with passkeys.
Bridging the hole
ZK Sync’s Elastic Chain is most straight akin to the Polygon CDK and AggLayer, which additionally natively assist a verifiable shared interoperability.
Learn extra: Espresso companions with Polygon Labs to unravel rollup interoperability
However in keeping with exams revealed by Matter Labs, the lead ZK Sync’s developer, Elastic Chain will achieve this at a TPS of 180, in comparison with Polygon’s 5.
That’s in regards to the distinction between a industrial airliner and a bicycle.
In fact none of those options are literally dwell in manufacturing, so we’ll have to attend and see how they carry out with actual utilization. However for Web3’s early adopters beset by fixed Metamask RPC switching, latency and uncertainty of bridges, a streamlines expertise can’t come quickly sufficient.