Ethereum News
The people shaping Scroll’s September 2026 zkEVM roadmap
The shift to AI-centric infrastructure
Scroll plans to shift from a public general-purpose network to a private, application-specific infrastructure built around a connected AI product stack. A September 8, 2026, update on the Scroll Governance Forum outlines a nine-month transition toward a model where the Scroll Network acts as a trust and coordination layer for all AI agents. The product stack includes Compass, an iOS app, and the Compass API, which provides routing infrastructure for over 30 LLM models. CENO provides the ZK trust layer for credentials and privacy-preserving compute, while USX supports payments. The team expects this shift to address the needs of AI agents interacting with credentials and private data. This development follows a 2025 roadmap that focused on security, performance, and user experience. To reach the performance target, the team aims for 10,000 transactions per second and sub-cent fees. The 2025 targets include becoming the first stage-1 zk Rollup in April and targeting stage-2 maturity by the end of the year. This pivot follows months of internal experimentation applying AI across operations and product development. Will the transition to a specialized network alienate existing DeFi users?
Technical foundations and the founding team
Sandy Peng, Ye Zhang, and Haichen Shen lead the development of this bytecode-compatible Layer 2. The project, founded in 2021, has raised $83 million across multiple funding rounds and achieved a $1.8 billion valuation in early 2023. Ye Zhang researched zero-knowledge proofs starting in 2018 with a focus on hardware acceleration. The network targets 10,000 transactions per second and sub-cent transaction fees.
| Metric | Scroll Specification |
|---|---|
| EVM Compatibility | Type 2 (bytecode compatible) |
| Proof System | Halo2 |
| Target Throughput | >10,000 TPS |
| Target Fees | Sub-cent |
| Transition Duration | Nine months |
Technical development focuses on improving prover performance through the Ceno zkVM and the OpenVM framework. This shift aims to bring block proving times below 30 seconds. The team also incorporates EIP-7702 and RIP-7212 to improve user experience. You should know that the network maintains Ethereum-level security through its bytecode-level compatibility. By migrating from Geth to Reth, the team leverages Rust’s performance benefits to improve scalability. Developers plan to optimize state trie structures to improve storage and I/O efficiency. They intend to parallelize execution and delay state root updates to boost throughput. The company aims to grow its team from 60 to nearly 100 people to support these goals.
Security measures and market position
The Scroll Security Council oversees all protocol-level changes to ensure decentralization. This mechanism replaces the reliance on a multi-sig controlled solely by the founding team. In February 2026, the council deployed an emergency upgrade to fix a bug in the zkVM-prover repository. This bug involved a missing check in the ecPairing precompile implementation, which allowed for diverging execution results between the sequencer and the prover when reading bytes for the G2 point on the BN254 curve. The fix applied to the GalileoV2 version and the OpenVM team reviewed the patch. A whitehat disclosed the vulnerability via Immunefi, and the patch was moved to the public repository after the upgrade.
The competitive landscape changed when Polygon zkEVM shut down on July 1, 2026. Scroll remains a secondary player compared to established ZK leaders. Linea holds $3.4 billion in TVL, while zkSync Era holds $4.1 billion according to April 2026 data. Scroll recorded $2.1 billion in TVL during that same period. Regarding transaction speed, Scroll recorded 14 transactions per second, which falls below the 28 TPS of zkSync Era and the 22 TPS of Linea. Median USDC transfers on Scroll cost $0.06, compared to $0.05 for zkSync Era and $0.04 for Linea in April 2026.
