Taiko scales Ethereum in a manner that emulates Ethereum as closely as possible - both technically and non-technically. More specifically, Taiko is an Ethereum-equivalent ZK-Rollup, scaling Ethereum by supporting all EVM opcodes in a layer-2 architecture that is decentralized, permissionless, and secure.
Ethereum represents an enormous leap forward in the mechanisms available for human coordination and personal freedom.
As a global, credibly neutral settlement layer, Ethereum provides strong digital ownership rights, and offers anyone the ability to move value where and when they want. It is the protocol underpinning an internet of value, and not since the internet itself have we witnessed a network where movement is so fluid.
More than movement, creation of value is equally fluid and unbounded. The creative power of developers deploying their smart contracts and applications to an always-on, always-accessible, borderless computer is remarkable.
To achieve the above, Ethereum has had to (rightfully) prioritize certain blockchain attributes over others - namely, decentralization and security over scalability. If a public blockchain is not decentralized and secure, then it is not credibly neutral, and thus not attractive to house highly-valuable, highly-critical functions. However, if a public blockchain is not scalable, then large portions of developers, users, and use cases cannot leverage the network, due to prohibitively high transaction fees and low throughput.
To fully achieve the impact of which it is capable, Ethereum must necessarily support anyone who wants to participate. Ethereum must be scalable to the human population. This is where Ethereum looks towards rollups as the most promising scaling solution, and the most promising type of rollup is an Ethereum-equivalent ZK-Rollup.
Taiko aims to be a fully Ethereum-equivalent ZK-Rollup. We aim to scale Ethereum in a manner that emulates Ethereum itself at a technical level, and a principles level.
Taiko Technical Overview
ZK-Rollups scale computation by executing, aggregating, and proving transactions off-chain, and relying on Ethereum for data availability and validity proof verification. The biggest drawback of the currently in-production ZK-Rollups are that they cannot support the generalized computation of the EVM exactly, but instead are mostly application-specific. This breaks compatibility with existing Ethereum L1 smart contracts and dapps, and further, makes it difficult to build new ones that offer the same type of composable, expressive experiences.
Ethereum-equivalent ZK-Rollups, sometimes called ZK-EVMs, are the holy grail of layer-2 scaling solutions in that they do not compromise on security or compatibility. In recent parlance, Taiko aims to be a type-1 ZK-EVM, which prioritizes perfect EVM/Ethereum-equivalence over ZK-proof generation speed.
Taiko consists of three main parts: the ZK-EVM circuits (for proof generation), the L2 rollup node (for managing the rollup chain), and the protocol on L1 (for connecting these two parts together for rollup protocol verification).
