zkOmnichain is more worth following than zkRollup

zkRollup belongs to the Layer2 domain and aims to solve the congestion issue of Ethereum; whereas zkOmnichain belongs to the Layer0 domain, with the goal of building the entire Web3 network. Due to the significant influence of the Ethereum ecosystem, people's attention is often focused on zkRollup, neglecting zkOmnichain. However, the zero-knowledge proof-based full-chain interoperability protocol zkOmnichain is actually a key technology connecting blockchain and Web3, and its importance should not be overlooked.

If Ethereum can maintain a market share of over 70% in the long term, the concept of Omnichain becomes less important. However, in reality, Ethereum cannot maintain such a high market share forever. Data shows that Ethereum's latest market share in February 2023 has dropped to 59.24%. Although the infrastructure of Web3 may maintain a pattern of "one strong and many others" in the long run, and Ethereum's technology continues to upgrade, with Layer 2 absorbing traffic from Layer 1 and the rise of other public chains, it is expected that after 2025, Ethereum's market share will remain below 50% for a long time.

After the DeFi boom in 2020, most applications adopted the most primitive way to achieve multi-chain deployment, which is to deploy separately on each chain. This method not only brings difficulties in deployment and operation for developers but also leads to serious fragmentation of liquidity across different chains, resulting in huge price differences for the same token on different chains.

There are three main paths for achieving full-chain coverage in application implementations: the first is to interoperate with the starting chain and the target chain through an intermediary consensus protocol, represented by Cosmos, Polkadot, etc.; the second is to complete interoperability with other chains through the Optimistic mechanism, such as Synapse, LayerZero, etc.; the third is to interoperate with other chains through the full-chain interoperability protocol zkOmnichain based on zero-knowledge proofs, represented by Electron, Polymer, etc.

Another approach is to deploy applications on a brand new smart contract public chain and then achieve interoperability with other chains such as ZetaChain and Map Protocol through that chain. This method is relatively complex in terms of development and operation, requiring solutions for ledger alignment with heterogeneous chains and direct competition with existing smart contract public chains.

The first generation of intermediate chain models faces the trade-off between the number of validation nodes and security, making it difficult to bear the heavy responsibility of Web3 network infrastructure. Therefore, we need to follow non-intermediate chain models, especially the second generation opOmnichain and the third generation zkOmnichain.

The full-chain interoperability protocol in the Layer 0 space is similar to the Layer 2 space of Ethereum's scalability solutions, forming two major categories of solutions: OP and ZK. The Optimistic Oracle sub-mode in the OP scheme has decentralization and security issues, while the Optimistic Verification sub-mode, although more rigorous, still has latency problems.

zkOmnichain, as a Zero-Knowledge Verification model, offers better robustness. It achieves completeness, fairness, and conciseness through rigorous mathematics and cryptographic verification. The emergence of zkOmnichain provides the possibility for achieving trustlessness and decentralized infrastructure, with the potential to support large-scale full-chain applications deployed on various smart contract public blockchains.

The full-chain applications based on zkOmnichain will bring about multiple changes: eliminating the expensive operational costs of validation nodes, removing intermediary tokens and derivative tokens, and no longer relying on third-party oracles. This application model achieves true peer-to-peer full-chain communication through rigorous mathematical and cryptographic proofs.

From single chain to multi-chain and then to full chain, this is the basic trend of Web3 development. In the next three years, full chain applications are expected to gradually replace single chain/multi-chain applications and become the mainstream deployment model for Web3 applications. We can foresee that applications based on zkOmnichain such as full chain AMM, full chain lending, full chain SocialFi, and full chain NFT will continue to emerge, promoting the further development of the Web3 ecosystem.