Hey guys,

I am new here.

I believe Ethereum is on of the big players in the blockchain world in the future!

But there are (still) some problems related to gas fees and scalability which could delay global adoption.

In relation to that we have layer 2 solutions which should solve these issues.

Vitalik says ZK Rollups will win against all the other technologies like optimistic rollups, sidechains, plasmas etc.

BUT

Here is my assumption.

As long as Etherums shard chains (2023) are not live Validiums will be preferred over ZK rollups.

Why?

Because currently ZK Rollups gas fees are ~100x cheaper compared to L1 but still not trivial.

Examples:

• Loopring (ZK rollup) NFT minting on L2 costs around 2.50$
• Immutable X NFT Minting costs around 0.30$

Although that is cheap it is still to expensive for big game studios who will mint millions of NFT's. For this Loopring would be way to expensive and also Immutable X ZK Rollups would introduce very high costs.

Solution (short term at least)

Validiums:

https://preview.redd.it/wncpo1rjira81.png?563&format=png&auto=webp&s=c0d24b348c5b5dbda10187ca6ac462813dc00312

By having the data availbility off chain less L1 resources are needed which will result in way more scalbility and way cheaper gas fees. But this comes with a security trade off though since they do not inherit Ethereum security.

Here are their numbers.

Starkware Validium (off chain data)

https://preview.redd.it/dibj02xljra81.png?620&format=png&auto=webp&s=a06d321a54c5181a0d704645919c6386d016ea41

This would reduce the gas fees to FRACTION of cents.

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As soon as ETH sharding is live I think most people would prefer to go back to ZK rollups since they inherit Ethereums security and their scalability and gas fees improve significantly.

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CONCLUSION

Short to mid term Validium will be the preferred solution over ZK rollups as long as Eth sharding is not live. As soon as Eth sharding is live Validiums will lose more and more market dominance to ZK Rollups.

What do you guys think?