Vince Yang, CEO of zkLink, on the Current State of L3s | Ep. 345

In an exclusive interview with Cryptonews Podcast’s Matt Zahab, zkLink CEO Vince Yang discussed why using blockchains is difficult and ‘painful’ and how this can be fixed.

He talked about the need for Layer 3s, why Layer 2s must succeed first, and the trends in the L3 space.

Lastly, Yang touched on zkLink’s successes, as well as the upcoming developments and partnerships.

Using Blockchains Shouldn’t Be Painful

zkLink is building Layer-3 and ZK Rollup to solve the real problems users and the blockchain space face daily, Yang said.

These include scalability, liquidity fragmentation, user experience, and general interoperability in the blockchain space.

For example, there have been thousands of new chains and roll-ups emerging rapidly over the past few years.

This requires users to understand what is going on at all times and learn how to use each of these chains.

However, this is “a little bit painful and also very difficult,” Yang said. But it shouldn’t be.

Therefore, abstraction and unification of chains are necessary.

The Need for the Third Layer

We have just started understanding the need for Layer 2s (L2s), so what’s the point of Layer 3s (L3s)? Isn’t it too early?

To back up and explain, Layer 1 (L1) is the monolithic chain – the one on which everything else is layered. This includes Bitcoin and Ethereum, among the major ones.

L2s are built on top of the L1s to move the computation off L1s. This improves scalability, user experience, speed, and price.

However, there are problems L2s can’t solve. They are limited by their own bandwidth.

Simply put, L2s – such as Arbitrum, Optimism, and Base – have many users and hundreds of applications.

It means that these apps must compete for the total sum of the bandwidth.

When an app has thousands or millions of users, it must enable a smooth user experience. It doesn’t want to compete for the limited bandwidth that could disrupt its functions.

However, an L3 running on top of an L2 provides “full bandwidth, full sovereignty over all the other resources for one application.” There is no sharing.

So, unlike L2s, which are typically built for general purposes, an L3 serves one specific purpose for one app.

Also, it is customizable and can be optimized for specific use cases.

There are plenty of other benefits in terms of scalability, speed, price, privacy, and regulatory compliance, Yang argued.

The Present and Future of L3s: L2s Must Succeed for L3s to Rise

To reply to the second question asked above – yes, it’s still “super early in the lifecycle or the curve of development for L3s,” Yang said. “We’re still even early in for L2s.”

Notably, he stressed that “L3s cannot emerge and successful […] without the success of L2s.”

Just a year ago, people were busy building L2s. Barely anybody spoke of L3s.

And finally, this year, many L2s launched their mainnets, becoming more mature and production-ready.

This needed to happen first for L3s to be built on top of them.

On the L3 side, these products also need to be mature enough for launch. Currently, the most developer- and production-ready is Optimistic Rollups, Yang argued.

Also, “since most of the ZK Layer-2s also launched the mainnet, a lot of new Layer-3s on top of [them] will emerge.”

Notably, it’s impossible to have an unlimited number of general-purpose chains. All of them are also competing for the limited number of developers.

Therefore, general-purpose chains will “probably adopt the approach to build micro-chains,” Yang argued – something in between an application-specific chain (L3) and a general-purpose chain (L2).

We’re actually already seeing this. An example is RWA-focused L2s, he said.

Plenty More in the Pipeline

The team launched the new platform zkLink Nova in March.

The ecosystem has grown “quite a bit” since. The total value locked on the zkLink Nova chain hit $1 billion. It also has more than 800,000 unique wallets, over 11 million transactions, and over 50 applications live on the chain.

“And there’s another 50-100 applications building right now, coming very soon,” the CEO said.

The purpose of this new platform is to unify the liquidity fragmented across different Ethereum L2s, including Ethereum L1 itself. “So, consolidate and provide a unified access to different Layer 2s.”

The team is also working on the token and the zkLink Nova AirDrop. A successful launch is necessary for the ecosystem to grow.

It is “the most important instrument” to sustain the momentum, incentivize builders and users, decentralize the network, and govern the community and protocol development.

Finally, the team has many more key partnerships “that we want to announce in the coming weeks and months,” Yang said.

“We’re working with the best projects in the space to build out the ecosystem.” This includes DeFi products and blue chips, he added.

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That’s not all.

In this interview, Yang also discussed:

• what ZK proofs are;
• the usefulness of the ZK tech;
• providing verification without sharing personal information;
• ZK machine learning as a major trend and a powerful use case of ZK;
• benefits of L3s compared to L2s and L1s;
• benefits of zkLink Nova and having a unifying chain for builders/users;
• general-purpose chains vs application-specific chains;
• the price L3s pay.

You can watch the full podcast episode here.

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About Vince Yang

Vince Yang is the CEO of zkLink, a unified multi-chain trading infrastructure secured with zk-Snarks.

Its team develops zero-knowledge blockchain solutions for the Ethereum ecosystem.

The company has created its zero-knowledge Aggregated Layer 3 zkEVM Rollup network, zkLink Nova, to bridge the gap between different Layer 2 rollup ecosystems.

This is meant to reduce liquidity fragmentation, as well as provide scalability and security.

A Bitcoin hodler and former engineer, Yang’s crypto journey started with Bitcoin mining. It gradually evolved into a deeper exploration of ZK Proofs.