Ethereum’s zkSync Era Records Impressive Milestone: Locked Value Surpasses $500M

Matter Labs’ zkSync Era, a zero-knowledge (ZK) rollup designed to enhance the scalability of Ethereum, continues to attract significant investment.

According to data from L2Beat, the total value locked (TVL) on zkSync Era surpassed $500 million on Monday, reflecting a 12% increase within a week. TVL serves as a widely recognized metric for tracking the total value of digital assets locked or staked on decentralized finance platforms. Currently, zkSync Era stands as the third-largest rollup in terms of total value locked, following Arbitrum and Optimism.

zkSync breaches a notable milestone

As of now, more than 220,000 ether (ETH) worth approximately $378.3 million, around 121 million USDC (a dollar-pegged stablecoin), and 14.43 million MUTE valued at $7.53 million are locked on zkSync. MUTE represents the native cryptocurrency of Mute, a decentralized exchange built on a zkRollup-based infrastructure. Over the past four weeks, the daily active addresses on zkSync have exhibited a steady increase, averaging 175,000. The launch of zkSync took place in March 2023.

In recent developments, Rocketpool, a liquid staking solution, has gone live on zkSync Era, joining the growing list of decentralized applications migrating to layer 2 platforms. Increased adoption of rollups driven by Ethereum core developers’ emphasis on EIP-4844 implementation. According to Galaxy Digital, the introduction of EIP 4844 will introduce a new transaction type to Ethereum, allowing for more efficient data processing and reduced transaction fees on rollups.

Ethereum considers increasing the maximum validator balance to 2,048 ETH

Ethereum core developers are contemplating a potential adjustment to the maximum validator balance on the network, considering an increase from the current limit of 32 ether (ETH) to 2,048 ether per validator. Currently, Ethereum validators face a balance cap that restricts their effective stake to a minimum and maximum of 32 ETH.

This arrangement necessitates large-scale staking operations to deploy multiple validators in order to earn yield on amounts exceeding this threshold. As a result, the number of validators has witnessed a significant surge, with approximately 600,000 active validators and an additional 90,000 validators awaiting activation in the queue. This trend is not unexpected, given the limitations imposed by the existing balance cap.