zkSync and its efforts to recover 921 ETH: The how and why of it all

• The L2 project had the task of helping retrieve ETH stuck in its ecosystem.
• zkSync’s TVL continued to increase.

zkSync, the layer two scaling solution for Ethereum [ETH], was again faced with another challenge after the Gemholic ecosystem ran into a problem. Gemholic operates under the zkSync protocol, and had 921 ETH, a proceed of its recent presale, stuck in a smart contract due to a user error. 

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According to the protocol, created to speed up transactions and lower gas fees, Gemholi reached out for assistance. Hence, zkSync considered it necessary to make the update public.

@GemholicECO, who ran into a problem with their smart contract on zkSync Era, has reached out to us for support, which we provided.

We’d like to give the community an update and further context on their issue in full transparency, as we always have and always will.

🧵👇

— zkSync ∎ (@zksync) April 7, 2023

zkSync: Designed to solve

Following the incident, the Zero-Knowledge (ZK)-based project assured investors that the funds were safe. However, it did take time to explain the cause of the freeze. zkSync pointed out that the Gemholic presale took place in the zkSync Era.

It is noteworthy to mention that the protocol has the zkSync Lite segment and the zkSync Era. For the latter, its Mainnet launched on 16 February. And its function is to deliver all Ethereum functions by providing faster transactions and cost-effectiveness.

zkSync mentioned that equating the zkSync Era to the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) would end up in the situation Gemholic found itself in. It added that zkEVM still had a complex nature while the Era section did not. The tweet from its official handle read:

“zkSync Era is not EVM equivalent. This is a deliberate design choice. Era has a diverging, dynamic gas metering, which allows some transaction types to be 10x to 1000x cheaper than on any other EVM rollup”

The project also pointed out that Gemholic’s action led to an increase in gas fees – this was not supposed to be the case. Meanwhile, it also admitted that it had developed a solution that reduced the initial gas billed, and recovered the funds in full.

Thriving confidence amid expectations

However, this issue marks the second problem the project has experienced in less than a week. A few days back, there was a challenge with full block production. But like that period, the zkSync Total Value Locked (TVL) maintained its hike.

Source: DeFi TVL

The TVL shows the amount of smart contracts deposits locked in a protocol. According to DeFi Llama, the zkSync Era TVL was 66.1 million — 12.80% up in the last 24 hours. This increase implies that there has been a remarkable amount of liquidity flowing into the zkSync ecosystem.

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The motive behind this could be connected to expectations of a native ZK token, and possible rewards for early participants. A similar thing happened when Arbitrum [ARB] distributed its AirDrop.

Nonetheless, zkSync has not yet confirmed if there would be a reward distribution program. But speculation about it has continued to thrive as users believe that Ethereum’s first zkEVM would go the route. Additionally, zkSync mentioned that it would provide an update on the Gemholic issue on 8 March.