Seeing the news that ZKsync Lite is to be retired, many people are anxious - but there's actually no need to panic about this. To put it simply, Lite was originally just a technical testing ground used to verify whether ZK-Rollup could operate on Ethereum. Now Era has already been launched in 2023 to take over, so this exit is completely within the plan. As for fund security, users can withdraw as usual and that’s all there is to it.

Back in 2020, when ZKsync Lite was just launched, it was indeed the talk of the town — the first project to implement ZK-Rollup on the Ethereum mainnet. By using zero-knowledge proofs to compress and package transactions, and sending them back to the mainnet for verification, it truly achieved speed and low cost. However, the technical limitation was evident: it did not support smart contracts. This was quite awkward, as it could only be used for payments and NFT minting, and complex DeFi applications were completely out of reach.

Data doesn't lie. Just compare and you can see the gap: Lite currently has only a little over 300 transactions per day, while Era's daily transaction volume has already soared to 22,000. It's like how feature phones were eliminated by smartphones—it's the fate of technological iteration. The retirement of Lite precisely indicates one point: ZK technology has matured, and now a more powerful platform is needed to harness its potential.

As a successor, Era does face quite a few challenges behind the glory...