Understanding Lumoz: The Rising Star of ZK Modularity

01Introduction

As modular blockchains rapidly infiltrate Layer 2 (L2), and as various Rollup as a Service (RaaS) tools mature alongside the implementation of the Cancun upgrade, the threshold for building L2 solutions has significantly decreased. Technology is no longer the primary barrier in constructing Rollups. Additionally, emerging Rollups like Base, Manta Pacific, and Blast have managed to rise quickly by utilizing existing tools to build Rollups at a low cost, shifting their focus towards ecosystems—setting a benchmark strategy for the market. The transformation of traditional applications to L2, along with the explosion of various lightweight L2s, seems to be an irreversible trend.

In the technical roadmap for Rollups, there has long been a debate between Optimistic Rollups (OP) and Zero-Knowledge Rollups (ZK). Vitalik Buterin has often expressed the view that “short-term OP, long-term ZK,” because ZK-Rollups still face many technical issues that need to be resolved. With technological progress, the infrastructure for ZK-Rollups is becoming increasingly mature, making ZK-based Rollups likely to occupy a significant market share in the future L2 boom. Lumoz, as a leading RaaS focused on ZK, has enormous potential for success soon.

02The Bottleneck of ZK-Rollups

2.1 Rollup from a modular perspective

The basic principles of OP-Rollups and ZK-Rollups may already be clear to readers, but let’s revisit Rollups from a modular perspective. Essentially, Rollups achieve optimal resource allocation through modular division of labor, allowing different participants to focus on specific tasks, thereby improving overall efficiency.

Ethereum’s modular composition can be simply broken down into: Data Availability Layer (DA), Consensus Layer, Settlement Layer, and Execution Layer.

Execution Layer

Provides an execution environment to compute transactions, transform old states into new ones, submit new states to the Settlement Layer, and generate fraud/validity proofs.

Internally, further division of labor is possible between the Sequencer and the Prover, with the Sequencer responsible for computing state transitions and the Prover for generating proofs (especially in ZK-Rollups, where the computation type and expense of generating proofs demand specific hardware).

Settlement Layer

Verifies the correctness of state transitions computed by the Execution Layer. Generally deployed on Layer 1 through smart contracts, it verifies the computations of the Execution Layer; the state hash of a verified Rollup block is recorded on the chain, achieving Finality.

For ZK-Rollups, the contract incorporates algorithms to verify the submitted ZK Proof from specific ZK-Rollups. Once execution is complete, the contract receives the state hash and ZKP, triggers a verification transaction, and upon successful verification, the state hash is proven valid and the block achieves Finality.

(Source: https://docs.theradius.xyz/overview/introduction-to-radius)

Consensus Layer

In most cases, the Consensus Layer is handled by Layer 1, and the verified state hashes are recorded on the chain, providing Layer 1 security for transactions on the Rollup.

Data Availability Layer (DA)

Stores transaction data within Rollup blocks and makes it available to anyone, enabling them to reconstruct the transactions of the Rollup. The DA layer can be Layer 1, specialized layers like Celestia or EigenDA, or more centralized Data Availability Committees, etc.

2.2 Challenges in Popularizing ZK-Rollups

Despite the many advantages of ZK-Rollups and being considered by Vitalik as a long-term Ethereum scalability solution, numerous technical challenges restrict their widespread adoption at this stage.

High Costs of Computing ZKPs

ZKP computation is intensive. Using the most popular ZK algorithm, zk-SNARKs, as an example, the production of a ZKP essentially involves transforming the execution process of a program into a verifiable proposition. This proposition is abstracted into a set of polynomial equations, and to prove the correctness of the program’s execution (the existence of a solution to the polynomials), pairing operations need to be performed on an elliptic curve.

The generation of polynomials and elliptic curve pairing are highly computation-intensive because they involve a significant amount of algebraic operations. In terms of hardware requirements and execution time, this computational complexity results in high hardware demands. Ordinary hardware might struggle to complete these calculations within a reasonable timeframe, especially when processing large volumes of transactions.

Creating a zk-SNARK proof takes significantly longer than running the original program (excluding the proof process), often hundreds to thousands of times longer depending on different implementations and the complexity of the transactions.

ZKP computation’s high hardware demands could lead to centralization

Due to the high computational cost and hardware requirements of ZKP, small-scale Rollup operators might struggle to afford the necessary investments to become provers.

In this scenario, only a few participants with high-performance computing resources can efficiently generate proofs, leading to a trend towards centralization in ZK-Rollups. This centralization could contradict the decentralization ethos of blockchain and might introduce risks of single points of failure and censorship.

zkEVM’s complexity

In terms of design compatibility, the EVM was not initially designed with zero-knowledge proof technology in mind. The EVM is a stack-based virtual machine that supports a range of opcodes for executing smart contracts.

To generate valid proofs through zk-SNARKs for any program run by the EVM, each opcode of the EVM needs a corresponding mathematical representation and proof logic. This requires complex cryptographic transformations and poses challenges for compatibility with existing smart contracts.

Implementing zkEVM involves extensive mathematical modeling of EVM opcodes, transforming program execution into a form that can be proven with zk-SNARKs.

This includes simulating state transitions, memory operations, and contract calls of the EVM. Considering the flexibility and complexity of the EVM, this task is extremely daunting. Moreover, maintaining the efficiency and security of zkEVM, ensuring it can generate small, verifiable proofs, is also a significant challenge.

03How Lumoz addresses the widespread adoption bottleneck of ZK-Rollup

Lumoz is a decentralized ZK-RaaS (ZK-Rollup as a Service) platform, as well as a PoW (Proof of Work) network, which supports ZKP mining.

To tackle a series of challenges faced by ZK-Rollup, Lumoz introduces the concept of ZK-RaaS. This service allows developers to launch their zkEVM chains within a minute, without needing a deep understanding of ZK or chain nodes.

Lumoz also introduces the concept of ZK-PoW, inviting miners to participate in maintaining zkEVM and computing ZKP. Lumoz aims to simplify the use of ZK-Rollup and promote its broader adoption, thus facilitating large-scale deployment of applications chains based on zkEVM.

Developers can deploy their ZK-Rollups (zkEVM) across multiple chains with a single click. For miners, Lumoz acts as a multi-chain PoW protocol, supporting ZK mining on various public chains and generating zero-knowledge proofs for ZK-Rollup.

ZK-PoW Cloud: Addressing ZK computational power and centralization issues

The issue of ZK computational power and centralization fundamentally stems from the high computational demands and hardware barriers of ZKP, which can lead to centralization.

Lumoz uses the ZK-PoW mechanism to incentivize miners to provide ZKP computational power, offering comprehensive hardware infrastructure for ZK-Rollup, which is one of Lumoz’s core ideas.

All participants, including users, developers, and miners, can benefit from Lumoz’s economic model, aiding the large-scale application of ZK-Rollup.

3.1 ZK-PoW Cloud: Solving ZK Computational Power and Centralization Issues

The fundamental issue with ZK computational power and centralization is that ZKP (Zero-Knowledge Proof) computations require significant processing power, which in turn leads to centralization issues due to high hardware barriers.

Lumoz utilizes the ZK-PoW mechanism to incentivize miners to provide ZKP computational power, offering a comprehensive hardware infrastructure for ZK-Rollups. This is one of the core concepts of Lumoz. All participants, including users, developers, and miners, can benefit from Lumoz’s economic model, facilitating the widespread application of ZK-Rollups.

Utilization of Existing Hardware Resources by Lumoz

After the transition from Ethereum’s Proof of Work (PoW) to Proof of Stake (PoS), many Ethereum mining rigs lost their application scenarios. These mining rigs, valued at approximately $12 billion in capital scale, are now largely idle. With the large-scale implementation of ZK-Rollups, generating ZKPs requires substantial hardware and mining rigs such as CPUs, GPUs, and FPGAs to provide computational power.

Lumoz’s Optimized ZKP Algorithm Reduces Entry Barriers for Miners and Enhances Scalability

Lumoz introduces a two-step submission mechanism for ZKP verification to lower the barriers for miner participation:

• Submit proofhash: Within a certain timeframe, multiple miners can participate in the computation of ZKP, not just the miner who computes the ZKP first. This design allows broader participation, not limited to miners with the strongest computational capabilities. After completing the ZKP computation, miners do not immediately submit their original proofs. Instead, they hash the proof along with their address (proof/address) to create a hash value called proofhash. They then submit this proofhash to a specific contract on the blockchain. This step does not require disclosing the details of the proof, ensuring the security and efficiency of the submission process and allowing more miners to participate.
• Submit ZKP: After the timeframe ends, miners submit their original proofs and compare them with the previously submitted proofhash for verification. This step ensures that the proof submitted is the one declared in the first step, preventing cheating. Miners who pass this verification receive PoW rewards, distributed according to their stakes, not just to the miner who first computed the ZKP.

(Source: https://docs.lumoz.org/v/zhong-wen-jian-ti/lumoz-bai-pi-shu-v2)

Optimization of ZKP Generation Algorithm to Improve Proof Efficiency

When a Rollup smart contract verifies a ZKP, submitting the original proof might trigger on-chain attacks. To prevent such attacks, ZK-Rollups often perform additional operations to obscure the original proof data. Lumoz’s innovative two-step submission algorithm for ZKP adopts a “submit first, verify later” approach, avoiding unnecessary aggregation calculations for proofs and addresses.

In some open-source zkEVMs, the computation and submission of ZKP are sequential. When ZK-Rollups submit a large number of sequences, this can become a bottleneck, as miners cannot compute multiple ZKPs in parallel. Lumoz’s two-step submission algorithm enables parallel computation and sequential submission of ZKP, allowing miners to perform multiple ZKP generation tasks simultaneously, significantly enhancing ZKP generation efficiency.

The Lumoz team has also improved the ZKP recursive aggregation algorithm, significantly enhancing the utilization of machine resources in the cluster and further speeding up ZKP computation. Stress tests conducted in real environments show that using a cluster of 20 machines (each equipped with a 128-core CPU and 1TB of memory), a transaction rate of 27.8 transactions per second can be maintained in about 40 minutes. Under similar conditions, Lumoz successfully reduced the average transaction confirmation time from about 5-6 minutes to approximately 3 minutes, improving the ZKP generation efficiency by about 80%.

As more ZK-Rollups and miners participate, the demand and supply scale of the ZKP computational power market will continue to expand, making the efficiency improvements provided by Lumoz’s PoW algorithm increasingly significant.

3.2 ZK-RaaS: Lowering Development Barriers

One-Click ZK-Rollup Generation

Lumoz offers ZK-RaaS (ZK-Rollup as a Service), providing a one-click service for generating ZK-Rollups to all users. Lumoz has developed a universal ZK-Rollup launchpad, enabling developers to easily deploy various types of ZK-Rollups onto different foundational blockchains. These foundational chains include Ethereum, Lumoz Chain, BNB Chain, Polygon PoS, and other public chains.

The types of ZK-Rollup (zkEVM) include zkSync, Polygon zkEVM, Scroll, StarkNet, and other zkEVMs, as well as various other ZK-Rollups.

Convenient ZK-Rollup Management

Lumoz has deployed a Rollup System Contract (RSC) on each foundational chain to manage the lifecycle of Rollups on that chain, including registration, suspension, and revocation. By leasing a Rollup slot with a certain amount of MOZ (Lumoz’s native token), developers can possess their own ZK-Rollup.

The concept of Rollup slots is similar to slots in Polkadot or application chains in Cosmos. However, application chains in Cosmos need to maintain their own consensus layer and cross-chain bridges, posing significant security risks. In contrast, ZK-Rollup uses ZK technology to mathematically ensure shared consensus and data availability layers between the Rollup and the foundational chain. This method is more secure, more decentralized, and has lower maintenance costs.

After leasing a Rollup slot, developers gain an independent execution environment and can own a unique ZK-Rollup chain. Developers can fully control the ZK-Rollup and customize its economic model, including choosing GAS tokens. They can freely adjust GAS fees, even setting them to zero, thus allowing users to use it for free.

Low Costs

Developers bear no hardware costs. All hardware resources, such as data availability, serialization, and ZKP computing power, are provided and decentralized by Lumoz ZK-PoW Cloud.

Interoperability

Different ZK-Rollups on different foundational chains can achieve native cross-Rollup communication. This messaging communication mechanism allows an address on one Rollup to directly interact with a contract on another Rollup. This feature significantly solves the problem of user asset fragmentation and enhances interoperability between applications.

3.3 Lumoz Chain: Further Optimization of ZK-Rollup Built on Lumoz

he Lumoz Chain is one of the foundational chains supported by Lumoz, utilizing a hybrid consensus model of PoS (Proof of Stake) and PoW (Proof of Work). It not only supports the Lumoz ZK-PoW cloud but also provides further optimizations for ZK-Rollup.

Optimizations for ZK-Rollup Performance

These enhancements include the use of pre-compiled contracts to accelerate ZKP (Zero-Knowledge Proof) verification, support for data sharding, and PoS consensus based on ETH 2.0. Future expansions will include support for EIP-4844, DankSharding, and other full sharding solutions, potentially reducing the GAS costs of Rollups to near zero.

A Decentralized Sequencer Solution

The Lumoz Chain allows block proposers to also propose blocks for the Rollup layer, effectively separating the roles of builders and proposers. Builders are supported through a permissionless P2P network, while proposers rely on the block proposers of the Lumoz Chain. This method eliminates the risk of availability from a single node, while maintaining resistance to Miner Extractable Value (MEV) and censorship regimes.

The Lumoz Chain offers a standardized decentralization sequencing mechanism, where block proposers also propose blocks for the Rollup. Through this approach, the ZK-Rollup not only inherits security from the higher layers but also its decentralized nature.

Roles within the Lumoz Chain:

Anyone holding Lumoz tokens can become a validator, earning block rewards and gas fees from the Lumoz Chain.

In the Rollup Layer:

PoS (Sequencer): Validators propose blocks both in the Lumoz Chain and in the Rollup layer (i.e., data batches), where they also act as sorters in the Rollup layer, earning GAS fees from transactions.

PoW (Prover): Any individual with sufficient computational power to perform ZKP calculations can become a prover in the Rollup layer. Under PoW rules, provers generate zk-proofs from blocks submitted by the sequencer in the Rollup layer.

The ZK-Rollup is analogous to a computer where the hard disk, represented by PoS, provides data availability, and the CPU reflects the computational power granted by PoW.

Mission of the Lumoz Chain:

The task of the Lumoz Chain is to balance PoS and PoW to maximize contributions and benefits from all participants, thereby enhancing the performance and user experience of large-scale ZK-Rollup networks.

04Market Landscape and Lumoz’s Unique Entry Point

Looking into the RaaS (Rollup as a Service) and modular race tracks, the current market competition has already reached a feverish level. The settlement layer has become a game for major players such as ETH, Optimism, and Arbitrum;

In terms of interoperability, there are asset cross-chain bridges like Mini Bridge, Orbiter, and Connext, as well as cross-chain communication projects like Layzero and Chainlink CCIP;

The DA (Data Availability) layer is already dominated by projects such as Celestia and EigenDA, holding a decisive market position; on the Rollup stack level, most Rollup projects, including RaaS providers, heavily rely on development kits provided by L2 solutions like Optimism, Arbitrum, Polygon, and zkSync, leading to a homogenization of pure development tool RaaS projects;

In the decentralized sequencer layer, emerging projects like Altlayer and Espresso have gained a first-mover advantage.

Homogenization and oligopolization are fairly pronounced characteristics in the RaaS and modular tracks. For new projects to break through, a unique entry point and forward-thinking layout are necessary.

Lumoz has launched a combination of computational modules and RaaS that can address a series of pain points in ZK-Rollup, boosting the rapid popularization of ZK-Rollup.

Currently, in the niche area of ZK-Rollup RaaS, Lumoz has already emerged as a leading “integrated” platform. With the increasing penetration rate of ZK-Rollup, Lumoz has tremendous potential to grow into the most prominent player in the ZK-Rollup niche track.

On a comparable project level, likening Lumoz to the ZK track’s AltLayer is reasonable. AltLayer, similar to Lumoz, is not merely a RaaS project but powers RaaS by leveraging a specific feature, providing customers with more comprehensive services, thereby securing a competitive market position.

(Source: Binance Research)

AltLayer empowers RaaS by using a high-stake sequencer based on EigenLayer, achieving a certain market position. Lumoz, on the other hand, supports ZK-Rollup projects by sharing ZK computational power, helping solve computational challenges post-launch.

（https://docs.altlayer.io/altlayer-documentation）

AltLayer’s current MC (Market Capitalization) has reached 670 million USD, and its FDV (Fully Diluted Valuation) has exceeded 5.3 billion USD. AltLayer’s market performance demonstrates the high value capture of the RaaS track. Similarly, as a current leader in the ZK RaaS track, Lumoz, by integrating ZK computational power and RaaS services, will also be able to achieve remarkable market performance when ZK-Rollup fully erupts.

05Project Background

Originally known as Opside, Lumoz has been active in the ZK-RaaS (Zero-Knowledge Rollup as a Service) platform. On April 8 of this year, Lumoz announced a new funding round at a valuation of $120 million, with investments from OKX Ventures, HashKey Capital, KuCoin Ventures, and others. To date, Lumoz has raised a total of $10 million. The third round of funding is currently underway, with participation confirmed from several institutions.

(Source: https://www.rootdata.com/Projects/detail/Lumoz?k=NTkxMQ%3D%3D)

Lumoz has quickly gained a leading edge in ZK computation modules, supported by its extensive experience in ZK technology and Proof of Work (PoW) mining resources. Before launching Lumoz, the team was involved in two ZK mining projects, 6block and zk.Work, showcasing its pioneering position in ZK mining.

(Source: https://6block.com/)

(Source: https://zkp.6block.com/)

06Progress and Planning

Backed by superior technology and resources, Lumoz has facilitated the emergence of several innovative ETH Layer 2 and BTC Layer 2 projects, such as ZKFair and Merlin Chain.

ZKFair：https://zkfair.io/

Merlin Chain：https://merlinchain.io/

The rapid rise of these projects indicates that Lumoz’s solid technological capabilities have been recognized by the market.

Currently, the core component, Lumoz Chain, is in the Alpha Testnet stage, with plans to launch the mainnet in July this year and token generation expected in August. Lumoz places great importance on ecosystem development and early user feedback. Since August of last year, Lumoz launched a four-month incentive testnet event called the Gala Event, which achieved excellent results. The event attracted nearly 700,000 community users and involved 25,000 PoS nodes in network validation, with 145 miners contributing hash power. Additionally, 15 zkEVM projects are running stably on the Lumoz Chain.

(Source: https://twitter.com/LumozOrg/status/1740925588003840194)

Lumoz is also continuously collaborating with ZKFair and Glaxe on the Dragon Slayer event to incentivize user participation. The event is now in its third phase, which will distribute 25 million Lumoz points and over 8,000 USDC in rewards. Within 24 hours of the third phase going live, over 147,000 users had participated, highlighting the event’s popularity and user confidence in Lumoz. Lumoz is expected to launch its mainnet in Q3, and users can participate early through the Dragon Slayer event.

Event link:

https://dragon-slayer.zkfair.io/

(Source: https://twitter.com/ZKFCommunity/status/1775014125263003766)

07Conclusion and Outlook

As Zero-Knowledge (ZK) technologies mature, ZK-Rollups are poised to capture a significant market share in the future Ethereum scaling market. Lumoz’s foresight in addressing the pain points and needs associated with ZK-Rollups has already established it as a pioneer and leader in this field. The enthusiasm surrounding various activities clearly indicates that users have recognized and appreciated Lumoz.

With Lumoz’s team’s market foresight and extensive related resources, we believe that Lumoz can become the leader in the ZK-RaaS (Zero-Knowledge Rollup as a Service) sector, propelling the widespread adoption of ZK-Rollups. Let us look forward to Lumoz’s continued performance.

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