Following our announcement in October last year, rhino.fi has now launched on the zkSync Era mainnet – Era is the first EVM compatible zk-rollup on Ethereum.
What exactly has been launched?
As our first step we have launched a super-fast bridge between zkSync Era and rhino.fi (StarkEx).
The rhino.fi <> Era bridge will allow you to quickly & cheaply transfer USDC, USDT and ETH at the click of a button, as well as being completely gas free to transfer from rhino.fi to zkSync Era.
zkSync Era explorers will be able to utilise the same frictionless bridging experience between Era, Arbitrum, Polygon, BNB Chain and rhino.fi that has processed over 30,000 transfers since we launched our first bridge between rhino.fi and Polygon in 2022.
When can I use the bridge?
Currently the zkSync Era is on-boarding projects (Fair onboarding Alpha) ahead of the full public launch of the network.
The rhino.fi bridge smart contracts have been deployed on the Era mainnet using a whitelist for partners that enables us to test that everything is working correctly.
The bridge smart contract can be seen here.
Keep a look out for the public launch date on the zkSync social channels.
Why is zkSync Era exciting?
We think that zk-based rollups are the end-state for Ethereum. Rollups offer the potential for a dazzling amount of customisability and ultra-high throughput, without compromising on the core values of Ethereum security and decentralisation.
As one of the first teams to launch a zk-rollup in 2020 (StarkEx by Starkware), we have always believed in a rollup-centric roadmap for Ethereum and want to make sure that we are supporting the ecosystem in any way that we can.
zkSync Era particularly excites us for a number of reasons:
- Community is baked into its core, and a huge ecosystem of top projects have announced they will build on Era.
- Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) compatibility means that, for the first time ever, it is now incredibly simple for projects to launch on Era with minimal (if any) code changes. Any project can benefit from the power of zk-rollups to help scale to more users.
- Lastly, account abstraction. This is something that will become more important in the future as crypto scales. Account abstraction allows (amongst other things) Externally Owned Accounts (EOAs) to function like EOAs, whilst behaving like a smart contract. For example, wallets can now have additional functionality such as private key recovery, but whilst still behaving like an EOA. Previously this was not possible, as EOAs on Ethereum can only initiate transfers, and cannot have any more advanced logic built into them.
You can read more about why we are excited about zkSync Era in our previous blog post.
What is next for rhino.fi on zkSync Era?
Shortly after the zkSync Era full public launch, we plan to launch rhino.fi frictionless one-click swapping for Era tokens, and integrate yield opportunities from across the new ecosystem.
How can you get involved?
If you would like to be notified the moment that the rhino.fi <> Era bridge goes live, have suggestions for Era projects that we should partner with, or are helping support the launch of a new token on the Era network then we would love to hear from you.
Join our friendly discord server to speak directly with the team and other community members.
What is rhino.fi?
rhino.fi is on a mission to create the world’s best DeFi aggregator and allows you to access the best opportunities across DeFi from one platform, with total self-custody.
Swap the latest tokens across different chains, access yield-earning opportunities without having to use complex bridging or multiple wallets, and access deep aggregated order book liquidity, all whilst enjoying total control of your assets, with casual privacy, and no gas.
