Matter Labs acquires $50 million to build EVM-compatible zk-rollups.

Matter Labs has revealed a new round of funding to continue developing zkSync, the second version of its Ethereum-based rollups.

On November 9, Matter Labs stated that it has raised $50 million in a Series B round led by Andreessen Horowitz, with existing investors Placeholder and Dragonfly Capital participating. Several new investors, including Crypto.com, ConsenSys, and OKEx, participated in the new round, which followed Matter Labs' $6 million Series A in February.

The funds will be utilised to further develop zkSync v2, the firm's Ethereum second-layer rollups solution, which is currently focused on supporting low-cost payments.

Rollups are a second-layer scaling solution that "rolls up" transaction data in batches for faster layer-one processing. Matter's zkSync solution makes use of zero-knowledge proofs to reduce the amount of data kept in these bundled transactions, reducing the computational and storage resources needed to validate blocks.

zkSync v2 will enhance on the present iteration by providing support for composable Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) smart contracts.Dan Boneh, Professor of Computer Science at Stanford, explained:“zkSync will enable Ethereum transactions at a much higher rate and lower gas fees than mainnet. The math used by Matter Labs is really quite beautiful, and it is remarkable to see this coming to fruition at a massive scale so soon.”

Users can try out the first version of zkSync v2 on testnet, which includes a port of Uniswap v2 named "UniSync." Since its launch in June, the site has processed over 2 million transactions.

Matter Labs was an early supporter of rollups, releasing the first public zk-rollup prototype in early 2019.

Vitalik Buterin, co-founder of Ethereum, believes that layer two solutions like zkSync will address the network's scaling difficulties until sharding is implemented in late 2022.

Buterin anticipated in a blog post in January that zk-rollups will become Ethereum's main scaling solution over “the medium to long term in all use cases.”