Scroll: The Bytecode-Equivalent zkEVM Pursuing Type-1 Equivalence
Scroll is an Ethereum Layer-2 zkEVM rollup that pursues bytecode-level equivalence with the EVM, meaning Solidity contracts compile and execute identically on Scroll as they do on Ethereum L1. Following the February 2025 Euclid upgrade, it migrated its proving stack from the original Halo2 circuits to OpenVM, the open-source zkVM developed in collaboration with Axiom. Scroll holds $10.79M TVL today — a fraction of Base ($3.84B) or Arbitrum ($1.24B) — but its credibly-neutral, research-driven posture continues to attract developers prioritizing exact L1 parity over headline throughput.
Scroll occupies a deliberate niche in Ethereum's L2 landscape: it is one of two production zkEVMs (alongside Taiko) targeting Type-1 equivalence — full bytecode and state-tree parity with Ethereum L1 — rather than the looser Type-2 / Type-3 designs that dominate the zkEVM space. The non-custodial L2 inherits Ethereum's PoS finality through validity proofs posted to mainnet, settles blocks every 3 seconds, and reaches verified finality in approximately 1 hour once proofs land on L1. Theoretical throughput peaks at 1,000 TPS, with 30 TPS typical under current proving constraints. Gas is paid in ETH; the SCR token, launched in October 2024, governs treasury allocation and protocol parameters. Scroll is well-suited to teams that need verifiable L1-equivalent execution for security-critical contracts (yield aggregators, lending markets, identity primitives), and to users who value cryptographic finality over the seven-day optimistic challenge window of Arbitrum or Optimism. The smaller TVL — $10.79M against Base's billions — is the trade-off: lower liquidity depth, but a cleaner technical surface for cross-chain swap routing and verifiable settlement.
About Scroll
Scroll launched its mainnet on October 17, 2023, after roughly two years of public testnet iteration that began as one of the most academically credentialed zkEVM efforts in the space. Co-founded by Sandy Peng, Ye Zhang, and Haichen Shen, the project published its initial proving design in collaboration with the Ethereum Foundation's Privacy and Scaling Explorations (PSE) group, which gave it early credibility among researchers working on Halo2 and recursive SNARKs. Unlike OP-stack forks that ship a templated rollup, Scroll built its execution layer, proving system, and rollup contracts in-house — a slower path that explains both the late mainnet date and the relatively measured TVL trajectory.
Consensus on Scroll inherits from Ethereum Layer-1 directly: the L2 itself runs a single sequencer that orders transactions, and validity proofs generated by Scroll's prover are posted to Ethereum mainnet where the rollup contract verifies them. There is no separate BFT committee or PoS set on Scroll — security reduces, by construction, to Ethereum's PoS plus the soundness of the proof system. Following the February 26, 2025 Euclid upgrade, the proving stack shifted from the original Halo2-based circuits to OpenVM, an open-source modular zkVM that Scroll co-developed with Axiom and that is also adopted by several other zk projects. The transition was significant: it moves Scroll from custom-circuit zkEVM territory toward a zkVM model where the prover operates over a RISC-V-like ISA.
Scroll's defining technical anchor is its pursuit of bytecode-equivalent — and eventually Type-1 — zkEVM status. In Vitalik's well-known taxonomy, Type-1 means the zk-prover handles the same execution traces that Ethereum L1 produces, with no modifications to opcodes, gas accounting, or storage layout. Scroll today is generally classified as Type-3, with documented differences mostly in pre-compiles and certain edge-case gas costs, and has stated a public roadmap toward full Type-1 parity. That positioning matters for developers porting audited L1 contracts: on Type-4 zkEVMs (StarkNet, zkSync's compiled mode), Solidity must be transpiled; on Scroll, the same bytecode runs and the same audits apply.
Economically, Scroll uses ETH as the gas token, which avoids the bridge-and-swap friction of L2s that require a separate native asset for fees. The SCR governance token, distributed via airdrop in October 2024, is used for governance signaling and ecosystem allocation rather than fee abstraction or staking. The fee model follows the standard rollup pattern: users pay an L2 execution fee plus an amortized share of the L1 data-availability cost (settled via EIP-4844 blobs since the Dencun-era upgrade). Block production is currently centralized in the Scroll sequencer, with a publicly stated roadmap toward decentralized sequencing — a stance shared with most production L2s today.
Scroll technical parameters
Scroll's technical identity sits at the intersection of two design choices: bytecode-equivalent zkEVM (closest possible parity with Ethereum L1 execution) and a modular OpenVM proving stack (zkVM-style rather than custom-circuit). Together they define both what Scroll does well and where its throughput ceiling lives.
| Consensus | zkEVM rollup (Halo2 → OpenVM proof system) inheriting Ethereum PoS |
|---|---|
| VM | zkEVM (bytecode-equivalent) |
| Block time | 3 s |
| Finality | 1 h |
| TPS | 30 typical / 1k max |
| Gas token | ETH (gas) / SCR (governance) |
| Launched | 2023-10-17 |
| Token standard | ERC-20 / ERC-721 / ERC-1155 |
| Address | hex (0x-prefixed, EVM) |
Consensus mechanism
Scroll is not a chain with its own consensus in the classical sense — there is no validator set voting on blocks. Instead, it is a validity rollup whose security model collapses onto Ethereum's. Transactions are ordered by Scroll's sequencer, executed on a zkEVM that mirrors Ethereum's bytecode semantics, and bundled into batches. A separate prover service then generates a zero-knowledge proof attesting that the state transition from the previous batch to the current one is valid under EVM rules. That proof is posted to a smart contract on Ethereum mainnet; once the contract verifies it, the batch is considered final at the L1 level. After the February 2025 Euclid upgrade, the prover runs on OpenVM — a RISC-V-based zkVM jointly developed with Axiom — rather than the original Halo2 circuit suite. The practical consequence is twofold: there is no challenge window like the seven days on Arbitrum and Optimism, and there is no possibility of a fork from divergent block proposals — once a proof verifies on L1, the batch is mathematically final. The trade-off is proving cost and proving time, which is why end-to-end finality lands around 3,600 seconds (one hour) rather than the sub-second figures advertised by high-throughput L1s.
Performance context
Scroll runs 3-second L2 blocks with 30 TPS typical and a stated theoretical ceiling near 1,000 TPS. Those numbers should be read against peers: Base hits roughly 1,500 TPS typical on the same OP Stack template, Arbitrum lands around 40 TPS in normal load, and Starknet — the other major validity rollup — runs about 3 TPS typical with a 5,400-second finality window. Scroll's 1-hour finality, while slower than Base's ~13 minutes or Polygon's 5 seconds, is still meaningfully faster than the seven-day optimistic challenge windows on Arbitrum and Optimism. For most application traffic (DEX trades, lending interactions, NFT mints) the practical throughput is sufficient; for high-frequency perp venues or order-book DEXs, Scroll is not the right venue today.
Scroll ecosystem map
Scroll's ecosystem is small in absolute dollar terms — $10.79M TVL spread across roughly a dozen meaningful protocols — and the composition reflects an early-stage L2 still building category leaders in DEX, lending, and CDP. The leaderboard is fragmented: no single protocol dominates, and the largest tenant holds roughly 12% of total chain TVL.
DEX
Honeypop DEX ($1.25M TVL) is the largest AMM by TVL on Scroll and currently the chain's leading liquidity venue. Nuri CL ($84K) provides concentrated-liquidity pools in the Uniswap V3 style, and Skydrome ($46K) and Zebra V2 ($48K) round out the long tail. None of the deployments approach Base- or Arbitrum-scale liquidity, which materially constrains routing depth for large cross-chain swap orders.
Stablecoin Infrastructure
USX.Capital ($985K TVL) operates as a stablecoin wrapper on Scroll and is the second-largest protocol on the chain. The Scroll data shows zero native stablecoin float ($0 stablecoins_usd in the TVL breakdown), meaning USDC/USDT liquidity must be bridged in — a notable gap compared to Base or Arbitrum where canonical USDC issuance is native.
Lending
Cog ($134K TVL) is Scroll's primary on-chain money market, and Quill Finance ($85K) operates a CDP-style stablecoin issuance protocol. Both are early-stage in dollar terms but represent the canonical DeFi primitives every L2 needs before institutional liquidity considers deployment.
Derivatives
10KDex ($75K TVL) is the only meaningful derivatives venue on the leaderboard. Perp DEX activity on Scroll is thin compared to Base or Arbitrum, reflecting both the smaller liquidity base and Scroll's longer finality window, which is less attractive for high-frequency strategies.
Wallet
Scroll uses standard EVM hex addresses (0x-prefixed) and is supported out-of-the-box by MetaMask, WalletConnect, Rabby, Coinbase Wallet, and Ledger. Users can add Scroll either by accepting a chain-add prompt from a dApp or by manually pointing their wallet at https://rpc.scroll.io. No custom wallet build is required, which is one of the practical advantages of bytecode-equivalent zkEVM positioning.
Infrastructure
The official explorer is scrollscan.com (a Blockscan-family deployment by Etherscan), the documentation hub is docs.scroll.io, and the canonical RPC endpoint is https://rpc.scroll.io. For production workloads, teams typically front the public RPC with a provider tier from Alchemy, Infura, QuickNode, or Ankr, all of which support Scroll as a first-class network.
| # | Protocol | Category | TVL |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Honeypop DEX | Dexs | $1.25M |
| 2 | USX.Capital | Stablecoin Wrapper | $985.32K |
| 3 | Cog | Lending | $134.28K |
| 4 | Quill Finance | CDP | $85.53K |
| 5 | Nuri CL | Dexs | $84.49K |
| 6 | 10KDex | Derivatives | $75.60K |
| 7 | Zebra V2 | Dexs | $48.26K |
| 8 | Skydrome | Dexs | $46.16K |
Scroll vs peers
Inside the EVM L2 category, Scroll competes with both optimistic rollups (Arbitrum, Optimism, Base) and validity rollups (Starknet, X Layer, Abstract). The comparison sharpens when you separate finality model from raw TVL.
| Chain | Block | Finality | TPS | TVL |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Arbitrum | 250 ms | 168 h | 40 | $1.24B |
| Optimism | 2 s | 168 h | 30 | $0.00 |
| Base | 2 s | 13 min | 1.5k | $3.84B |
| Polygon | 2 s | 5 s | 60 | $1.05B |
| Starknet | 2.5 s | 1.5 h | 3 | $184.41M |
| X Layer | 2 s | — | 100 | $73.95M |
| Scrollcurrent | 3 s | 1 h | 30 | $10.79M |
| Abstract | 1 s | — | — | $11.13M |
Comparison insights
- Against Base ($3.84B TVL, ~1,500 TPS typical, ~13-minute finality), Scroll is two orders of magnitude smaller in liquidity and roughly 50x slower in headline throughput. Base's advantage is OP Stack templating, Coinbase distribution, and a 7-day optimistic challenge model that is widely tolerated; Scroll's advantage is sub-hour cryptographic finality and Type-1-trajectory zkEVM equivalence — meaningful for security-sensitive contracts but not for retail DEX volume.
- Against Arbitrum ($1.24B TVL, 40 TPS typical, 604,800-second / 7-day finality), Scroll is much smaller but reaches verified finality 168x faster. Arbitrum's BoLD challenge protocol and Nitro execution layer give it a mature optimistic-rollup posture; Scroll's validity proofs eliminate the challenge window entirely, at the cost of proving latency.
- Against Starknet ($184M TVL, 3 TPS typical, 5,400-second finality, Cairo VM), Scroll is significantly smaller on TVL but materially faster on throughput (30 TPS vs 3 TPS) and finality (3,600s vs 5,400s). The deeper difference is the VM: Starknet's Cairo requires a separate language and toolchain, while Scroll runs unmodified Solidity bytecode — a major porting-cost difference for teams with existing L1 contracts.
- Against X Layer ($74M TVL, 100 TPS typical, Polygon CDK validium), Scroll has lower TVL but uses true rollup data availability (Ethereum blobs via EIP-4844) rather than the off-chain DA used by validiums. That makes Scroll's security guarantees strictly stronger at the cost of higher data-publication fees per transaction.
- Against Abstract ($11.1M TVL, ZKsync ZK Stack, EigenDA), Scroll is comparable in size and both are validity rollups, but Abstract delegates data availability to EigenDA and inherits the ZKsync Era stack. Scroll's choice to publish data to Ethereum L1 directly is the more conservative path; Abstract's stack is newer (launched January 2025) and aimed more squarely at consumer apps.
Scroll timeline
Scroll was incubated starting in 2021 by Sandy Peng, Ye Zhang, and Haichen Shen, with early proving research conducted alongside the Ethereum Foundation's Privacy and Scaling Explorations group. Multiple public testnets — including Pre-Alpha (2022), Alpha (early 2023), and Sepolia — preceded mainnet, with each iteration progressively enabling more EVM opcodes and pre-compiles inside the zk-circuits. Mainnet went live on October 17, 2023, making Scroll one of the first production zkEVMs alongside Polygon zkEVM and zkSync Era; unlike those two, Scroll prioritized bytecode equivalence from day one rather than retrofitting it. Throughout 2024 the team focused on prover optimization, EIP-4844 blob-DA integration after Dencun, and ecosystem development; the SCR governance token was distributed via airdrop in October 2024. The most consequential post-launch event was the Euclid upgrade on February 26, 2025, which transitioned Scroll's prover from the original Halo2 custom-circuit zkEVM to OpenVM — a modular open-source zkVM co-developed with Axiom. The migration is technically aggressive: OpenVM uses a RISC-V-style instruction set abstraction rather than directly proving EVM opcodes, which simplifies the prover surface and opens a path to faster proving and easier auditing, at the cost of an additional translation layer in the trusted code path. Scroll has not, to its credit, suffered the high-profile bridge exploits or extended sequencer outages that have affected several L2 peers; the absence of negative incidents in the public record is itself a noteworthy data point for an L2 at its stage.
- 2023-10-17launchMainnet launch
- 2025-02-26upgradeEuclid upgrade — OpenVM zkVM transition
Developer reference
Scroll is a vanilla EVM target from a developer's perspective. The official RPC endpoint is https://rpc.scroll.io and the canonical block explorer is scrollscan.com; production teams typically use Alchemy, Infura, QuickNode, or Ankr for higher-tier RPC. The chain ID is 534352 (mainnet) and 534351 (Sepolia testnet). Address format is the standard 0x-prefixed hex EVM address — no custom format, no Bech32, no separate keypair scheme. Solidity (any version Ethereum L1 supports), Vyper, and the Hardhat / Foundry tooling stacks work without modification because Scroll is bytecode-equivalent; the same applies to ethers.js, viem, web3.py, and other JSON-RPC clients. Gas is paid in ETH bridged from L1 via the canonical Scroll bridge. Documentation hub is docs.scroll.io, with deployment guides, prover internals, and bridge architecture all openly published. For wallet integration, the chain is supported in MetaMask, WalletConnect, Rabby, Coinbase Wallet, and Ledger by default. Compared to Cairo (Starknet) or Move (Aptos / Sui), porting an existing L1 contract to Scroll is effectively a redeploy, not a rewrite.
Assets swappable on Scroll
Grouped by category. Click any asset to open its swap page for a live quote.
Stablecoins
1 assets
Majors
1 assets
Scroll settle-time comparison
Shorter bars mean faster confirmations. Real settle time also depends on network congestion — figures are indicative.
Scroll asset coverage comparison
Longer bars mean more assets are swappable on that chain.
Popular swap routes involving Scroll
Routes below reflect actual user preference. Click to jump straight to the swap page.
Scroll FAQ
01Is Scroll decentralized?
Partially. Block ordering is currently centralized in the Scroll sequencer — a posture shared with virtually every production L2 today, including Arbitrum, Optimism, Base, and Starknet. Decentralized sequencing is on the Scroll roadmap but not yet shipped. Security, however, is inherited from Ethereum L1 via validity proofs: once a proof is verified on mainnet, the sequencer cannot reorg or censor finalized state. So Scroll is centralized at liveness but decentralized at safety, which is the standard L2 trust model.
02What is Scroll's finality time?
Approximately 3,600 seconds (one hour) for verified L1 finality — the time between a transaction being included in an L2 block and the corresponding validity proof being verified on Ethereum mainnet. L2-level confirmation is much faster (3-second blocks), but only L1 verification gives full cryptographic finality. This is roughly 168x faster than the 7-day challenge window on Arbitrum and Optimism, and faster than Starknet's ~5,400-second window.
03Is Scroll a Type-1 zkEVM?
Not yet. Scroll is generally classified as Type-3 in Vitalik's zkEVM taxonomy — bytecode-equivalent for the vast majority of opcodes, with documented differences in some pre-compiles and edge-case gas accounting. The publicly stated roadmap targets full Type-1 equivalence, meaning the prover would handle Ethereum L1's exact execution traces with no modifications. Among production L2s, only Taiko and Scroll are actively pursuing Type-1; most others (Polygon zkEVM, Linea, zkSync) operate at Type-2 / Type-3 / Type-4 equivalence levels.
04What is the SCR token used for?
SCR is Scroll's governance token, distributed via airdrop in October 2024. It is used for governance signaling and ecosystem allocation, not for paying transaction fees — gas on Scroll is paid in ETH, the same as on Ethereum L1. SCR is also not currently used for sequencer staking or proof verification; those roles may be added when decentralized sequencing ships, but the current scope is governance-only.
05How does Scroll's TVL compare to other L2s?
Scroll holds $10.79M TVL, which is materially smaller than Base ($3.84B), Arbitrum ($1.24B), Polygon ($1.05B), and Starknet ($184M), and roughly comparable to Abstract ($11.1M). The gap reflects both the chain's later mainnet date (October 2023 vs Arbitrum's August 2021) and a deliberate developer-research posture rather than aggressive incentive programs. Liquidity depth on Scroll is therefore meaningfully thinner than on the top three L2s, which is the primary practical trade-off when routing large cross-chain swap orders through Scroll.