Hermez Network, a layer 2 blockchain scaling solution on the Ethereum network, is now live on the mainnet. Hermez's launch on Ethereum hopes to solve some of the transaction bottlenecks that have plagued the network.
Cheaper and Faster Transaction Speed
This is a major relief for developers who rely on Ethereum to run their applications.
Hermes uses the Zk-rollup, which compiles hundreds of transactions into a single transaction while eliminating data storage and gas fees for verifying transaction blocks.
Hermez’s zk-rollup is set to address this issue with the off-chain aggregator and promises to increase transaction speed 100 times over.
Jordi Baylina, head of tech at
Hermez, said this latest release would see users save around 90% in gas fees.
With each transaction on the Ethereum network
costing roughly $17, a 90% discount would see developers pay a meager $1.60 per transaction.
The first set of digital assets supported by
Hermez includes Tether, Ether, Wrapped Bitcoin, Dai, and Hermez’s token HEZ.
The development team says other crypto-assets will be added as time goes by.
The Ethereum blockchain has witnessed network congestion and
higher gas fees in recent months.
This is due to many reasons. Chief of which includes the popularity of the decentralized finance (DeFi) of 2020 and the non-fungible token (NFT) frenzy of 2021.
These bottlenecks have seen gas fees climb as high as $40 per transaction making the Ethereum network unfavorable for users.
Gas fees are not the only issues that have plagued Ethereum. The transaction speed or throughput, as experts call them, is also a major problem. Ethereum presently averages 15 transactions per second (TPS) which is slow compared to Polkadot’s 1000 TPS.
Layer 2 blockchain solutions using rollups have helped Ethereum stay in the DeFi game despite its challenges. Rollups are of two types zero-knowledge proof (zk-rollup) and optimistic rollup (ORU).
Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin has
spoken highly of zk-rollups being the future as the world waits for the deployment of Ethereum 2.0. Buterin said zk-rollups would win in all use cases, both in the medium and long-term scenario.
In speaking of the sister scaling solution, Buterin said ORU would address short-term computational needs.
Hermez Pursuing Full Decentralization
The Hermez zk-rollup is a big win for the Ethereum community, which is seriously challenged in the DeFi market by blockchain projects like
Polkadot and
Cardano. The layer 2 scaling solution is just an overlaying blockchain on the Ethereum mainnet and is a nested blockchain.
Operating mostly off-chain and consuming as little as 10 bytes per smart contract transaction, Hermez’s zk-rollup solution is touted as a major plus for the Ethereum network. In contrast to the optimistic rollup offering, funds are easily withdrawn from the network without a lockdown window.
Pol Lanski, lead of ecosystem development Hermez, said there are still some parameters the development team is working on to make it a fully decentralized network. The company said 40% of all gas fees they receive would be channeled towards building more decentralized software.
bitcoinexchangeguide.com
25 March 2021 13:25, UTC