iden3.io

Identities of the future run on iden3

@identhree

Welcome to the light Hermez!

Published by Pol Lanski the 6th of August 2020

Today we’re unveiling the zk-rollup we have been working on for the past year

We hinted at it. We teased with it. We let out a couple of iterations on the goerli testnet (zkrollup.io). And now, we’re pulling back the curtain. After about a year of work in stealth mode, we’re happy to introduce Hermez, the zk-rollup born out of Iden3’s labs.

Iden3’s mission is to create a decentralized, privacy-preserving, and censorship resistant identity system that is accessible to all. We’ve spoken loud and wide about the benefits of Self Sovereign Identities, and we’ve pioneered the use of zero-knowledge proofs in the space to ensure the privacy of the actors.

During our research and development, we’ve realized that in order to make the use of identities based on blockchain accessible to anyone, we needed to find an extremely cheap solution to create claims (see this blog post for more details). And this brought us to investigate ways to create a layer 2 scaling solution: to provide an alternative means of making claims that was cheaper than transacting on-chain.

This was the beginning of Hermez. We used our zero knowledge expertise to create open source libraries that could be the base for such a rollup, like circom and SnarkJS that are being used by Tornado Cash, Semaphore, Zkopru and countless other smaller projects.

Hermez is still in active development, and we expect to launch on mainnet this year.

Hermez Highlights

  • A zk-rollup using SNARKs for validity proofs and on-chain data availability
  • Able to scale Ethereum to 2000 transactions per second
  • It’s being built by the team who built the Circom and SnarkJS libraries that power Tornado Cash, Semaphore and Zkopru.
  • It’s being built after a couple of iterations in the Goerli testnet.

During the following weeks we will be releasing more information, as we keep building, testing and iterating in order to bring Hermez to light. Keep an eye on Jordi Baylina’s presentation at Edcon2020, on Monday the 10th of August at 14:00 CEST!

The cat’s out of the bag! Head over to Hermez.io and follow our progress towards layer 2 scaling and cheap transactions at @Hermez_network on twitter!