zkSync Launches “Baby Alpha” Testnet for Mainnet 2.0

On the evening of October 28, zkSync, the layer-2 scaling solution for Ethereum, announced the rollout of its next testnet phase, named “Baby Alpha.”

Matter Labs, the team behind zkSync, recently unveiled “Baby Alpha,” the next iteration of its mainnet 2.0 testing phase.

Read More: [zkSync Airdrop Guide: Get to Know Testnet, Just Like the Arbitrum Airdrop]

As a test phase, access to zkSync will be restricted to internal Matter Labs developers and will not be open to other Ethereum projects or the broader user base just yet.

Despite this, zkSync has garnered significant attention from the Ethereum community and the crypto space at large, driven in part by the “Layer-2 boom” alongside other projects like Arbitrum, Optimism, and StarkWare. Unlike its predecessors that utilize Optimistic Rollups, zkSync aims to achieve Ethereum scalability through zk-Rollups, introducing what they refer to as “zkEVM.”

Over the next month, “Baby Alpha” will focus on testing zkSync’s security and processing capabilities. If successful, zkSync will advance to the “Fair Alpha” phase, allowing other project developers to connect to zkSync and begin product development. More than 100 Ethereum projects have already expressed interest in zkSync, including leading names like DEX Uniswap.

Upcoming zkSync Development Roadmap

Ultimately, zkSync plans to open its platform to all Ethereum crypto users by the end of 2022. There are rumors that zkSync might launch its own token and potentially airdrop it to early users who interact with the project’s ecosystem.

However, Matter Labs has faced criticism from the crypto community for allegedly overstating zkSync’s capabilities. The company has claimed that zkSync is the first and superior zkEVM application compared to competitors like Polygon and Scroll, even though the underlying zk-SNARKs technology has yet to be fully validated.

According to L2Beat, Optimistic Rollups projects such as Arbitrum and Optimism currently hold $4.2 billion in TVL, accounting for over 82% of the total TVL for Ethereum layer-2 solutions. Thus, zkSync and other zkEVM solutions face significant challenges moving forward.

Top Layer-2 Solutions TVL Statistics on Ethereum as of the morning of October 29, 2022. Source: L2Beat