ConsenSys Logo. Source: Medium
Consensys – a leading Ethereum Software company – recently launched ConsenSys Rollups in collaboration with payment giant Mastercard. The software solution will help provide scalability and privacy to Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) compatible blockchains.
Consensys announced its new software in a company blog post on Thursday. It will reportedly provide “enterprise-grade scalability” to applications built on the Quorum tech stack. Quorum is ConsenSys’s fully-managed open-source protocol layer for building on Ethereum. ConsenSys Rollups can either be used directly on Ethereum’s mainnet, or on ConsenSys Quorum networks.
Part of the technology leverages zero-knowledge (ZK) proofs for enhanced transaction privacy. ZK proofs allow a sending party to prove a transaction without actually executing it on the network. Unlike regular transactions, they can hide details like account balances, senders, recipients, and amounts.
What’s more, they allow transactions to scale exponentially. By not actually executing transactions on a given blockchain network, up to 10 000 transactions per second can be achieved through ConsenSys Rollups. This is vastly greater than the 300 TPS possible on private chains, or the mere 15 TPS possible on Ethereum’s mainnet.
“ConsenSys Rollups enables vastly more scalability in addition to strong privacy protections to both enhance solutions for existing use-cases and enable new use-cases, ” said Madeline Murray – Global Lead of Protocol Engineering at ConsenSys. “This innovative solution will help accelerate the building of the future of finance”.
Vitalik Buterin – co-founder of Ethereum – has recognized Ethereum’s lack of scaling viability in its current state. The mass volume of NFT and Defi transactions the network is processing has caused its transaction fees to soar. He proposed Rollups as one viable solution for scaling Ethereum 100X in March.
According to ConsenSys, Rollups may help institutions and governments implement a range of ideal technologies. These include Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs), decentralized exchanges, and micropayment applications. CBDC’s in particular would see a strong benefit, as ZK proofs would help ease the privacy concerns that central bank-issued currencies have risen.
Rollups are a similar scaling solution for Ethereum to Bitcoin’s lightning network, which uses deferred settlement to theoretically allow for infinite transaction throughput. Bitcoin’s base layer has even less throughput than Ethereum, at merely 7 TPS.