Uniswap Votes to Launch V3 on zkSync

Acting on a governance proposal by students from the University of Pennsylvania, Uniswap v3, the top decentralized exchange by trade volume, will deploy on the zkSync Layer 2 network following a vote on Oct. 14.

The vote for v3’s zkSync deployment closed with 62.4M votes cast in favor compared to just 120 votes against. The launch is expected to take roughly four to six weeks to complete.

Sixth Deployment

ZkSync will be Uniswap v3’s sixth deployment, following launches on Ethereum, Arbitrum, Optimism, Polygon, and Celo.

The Ethereum deployment of v3 processed more than $1.1B worth of trades over the past 24 hours, followed by Polygon with $114M, Arbitrum with $81.5M, and Optimism with $43M, according to CoinGecko.

Uniswap is the No. 5 DeFi protocol by TVL with $5B, according to The Defiant Terminal. Uniswap’s UNI token also boasts a market cap of $4.8B, although the price of UNI is down 62% since the year began.

On Thursday, Uniswap Labs, the company behind the DEX announced it had raised $165M from venture capital firms, bestowing it with a $1.B valuation and unicorn status.

FranklinDAO, a decentralized organization comprising students from University of Pennsylvania, published the proposal in partnership with Matter Labs. FranklinDAO is a governance delegate for many top DeFi protocols including MakerDAO, Aave, dYdX, and Uniswap.

Uniswap introduced its v3 iteration on Ethereum in May 2021. The platform pioneered concentrated liquidity, which allows liquidity providers to select specific price ranges for which their assets are used to settle trades.

Pool of Liquidity

The system offers greater capital efficiency than traditional automated market maker exchanges, which pool all of liquidity providers’ assets for settlement regardless of the price at which a given asset is trading for.

Uniswap launched v3 under a Business Source License, protecting its code against unauthorized commercialization for two years. Matter Labs, the team behind zkSync, will receive a usage grant allowing it to deploy Uniswap v3 on zkSync. Matter Labs is permitted to use subcontractors to launch the deployment.

ZkSync is a Layer 2 network built on Ethereum with $53M in assets locked, according to L2beat. The network is a pioneering zero-knowledge (ZK) proof-based Layer 2 rollup, offering smart contract execution thanks to its programming language, Zinc.

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The Defiant

Zero-knowledge proofs allow data to be validated without publicly revealing transaction data on a blockchain, with only counterparties able to access detailed information on transactions.

Rollups powered by ZK proofs offer significant speed and privacy benefits over the Optimistic rollups that currently dominate the Layer 2 sector, but do not offer full compatibility with the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM), Ethereum’s smart contract engine.

While zkSync is not EVM-compatible, Matter Labs’ forthcoming zySync 2.0 chain promises to comprise a fully EVM-compatible zero-knowledge rollup.

Public Testnet

Matter Labs said it had already been tinkering with zkSync 2.0 on testnet for six months on July 20, the same day that Polygon and Scroll announced their own forthcoming zkEVM rollups. Matter Labs predicted zkSync 2.0 would be deployed to mainnet within 100 days, scheduling a “baby alpha” launch for November of this year.

The three teams are now facing to be first to market. Polygon launched a public testnet for its zkEVM with limited throughput capacity on Oct 10. Scroll upgraded the pre-alpha testnet for its zkEVM to enable smart contract deployments on the same day.