Aave Votes to Deploy on Ethereum Layer-2 Solution zkSync

Following a three-day voting period, Aave community members approved Matter Labs’ proposal to deploy the decentralized lending protocol Aave on its Ethereum scaling product zkSync.

Matter Labs is the development team behind the layer-2 scaling solution.

Nearly all voters supported the proposal, while a mere 0.02% abstained. More than 561,000 Aave governance tokens (AAVE) were used in the voting process.

However, the approved proposal is to deploy Aave to zkSync’s testnet. For mainnet deployment, Matter Labs would need to propose a new vote.

“Earlier today, the proposal for Aave to deploy on zkSync 2.0 passed, and we’re excited to share what the integration of their open-sourced liquidity protocol will mean for our ecosystem,” tweeted zkSync.

zkSync’s team has already verified Aave’s open-source smart contracts and their possible integration to their rollup during proposal creation. A rollup is one of the many methods to scale Ethereum, bundling various transactions off-chain to ease congestion on the number two blockchain.

“Deploying Aave V3 on zkSync is essential to ensuring the safety and scalability of DeFi protocols, which will result in long-term industry adoption,” said Stani Kulechov, Aave’s Founder and CEO. “zkSync will further Aave’s expansion cross-chain, reinforcing Aave’s place as the top liquidity market.”

As of this writing, Aave’s total value locked (TVL) stands at $5.32 billion, per data from DefiLlama, and is the fourth-largest DeFi protocol.

zkSync has also onboarded DeFi behemoths, including MakerDAO, Uniswap, and Sushiswap, to its testnetin February 2022.

In September, Uniswap’s community also voted to deploy on zkSync, with 0% of voters voting against the proposal.

What is zkSync?

zkync is an Ethereum scaling solution built by Matter Labs. The product’s name refers to its use of Zero-Knowledge rollups (ZK-rollups). 

During the latest bull market, as well as back in 2017, high congestion due to rising activity revealed the limits of the Ethereum blockchain. Though the network never crashed, transaction costs soared as block space become limited. 

To help Ethereum scale, multiple concepts, including sidechains, optimistic rollups, and zk rollups, were introduced. 

All these scaling solutions perform off-chain computation and store the final result on Ethereum. In Ethereum, gas fees are related to the computation cost utilized, by shifting it to a cheaper network would reduce the overall gas costs for the user.

zkSync launched its first version of testnet around February 2022, and its mainnet alpha was released last week.