How Does the New-And-Improved Ethereum ACTUALLY Work?

TL;DR

• Dencun does for data on the Ethereum network, what the pre-check program does for travelers going through TSA (speeds any required processing WAY up).

Full Story

As we covered in our first article:

Layer 2’s are about to pop off following Ethereum's Dencun upgrade — and by ‘pop off’ we mean ‘get way cheaper.’

…but how?

We’re glad we asked!

A big contributing factor to this fee reduction is the optimization of data via zk-proofs, which…how do we explain this?

Let’s say you had 100 movies on a hard drive, and you asked two separate people to rank them from best to worst…

If Person #1 had already seen each movie, while Person #2 hadn’t seen any of them — who do you think is handing their list in first?

Def Person #1.

Zk-proofs work in a similar way…

They process the information once (aka ‘watch the movie’) then can answer basic yes/no questions based off of those learnings, indefinitely.

In a crypto context, the question would be more like:

“Is this group of 1000 transactions legit, verified, and good to be processed?”

Old answer: “idk, let’s go through them one at a time and find out.”
New answer: “yep.”

Ok, now you know!