Transaction Lifecycle


Transaction Lifecycle

Overview

As stated in the introduction, the ZK Stack can be used to launch rollups. These rollups have some operators that are needed to run it, these are the sequencer and the prover, they create blocks and proofs, and submit them to the L1 contract.

Info

Transactions are cryptographically signed instructions from accounts. An account will initiate a transaction to update the state of the Ethereum network. The simplest transaction is transferring ETH from one account to another. Ethereum.orgopen in new window

A user submits their transaction to the sequencer. The job of the sequencer is to collect transactions and execute them using the zkEVM, and to provide a soft confirmation to the user that their transaction was executed. If the user chooses they can force the sequencer to include their transaction by submitting it via L1. After the sequencer executes the block, it sends it over to the prover, who creates a cryptographic proof of the block's execution. This proof is then sent to the L1 contract alongside the necessary data. On the L1 a smart contract verifies that the proof is valid and all the data has been submitted, and the rollup's state is also updated in the contract.

Components

The core of this mechanism was the execution of transactions. The ZK Stack uses the zkEVM for this, which is similar to the EVM, but its role is different than the EVM's role in Ethereum.

Transactions can also be submitted via L1. This happens via the same process that allows L1<>L2 communication. This method provides the rollup with censorship resistance, and allows trustless bridges to the L1.

The sequencer collects transactions into blocks, similarly to Ethereum. To provide the best UX the protocol has small blocks with quick soft confirmations for the users. Unlike Ethereum, the zkEVM does not just have blocks, but also batches, which are just a collection of blocks. A batch is the unit that the prover processes.

Before we submit a proof we send the data to L1. Instead of submitting the data of each transaction, we submit how the state of the blockchain changes, this change is called the state diff. This approach allows the transactions that change the same storage slots to be very cheap, since these transactions don't incur additional data costs.

Finally at the end of the process, we create the proofs and send them to L1. Our Boojum proof system provides excellent performance, and can be run on just 16Gb of GPU RAM. This will enable the proof generation to be truly decentralized.

Up to this point we have only talked about a single chain. We will connect these chains into a single ecosystem, called the hyperchain.

Transaction data

Transactions on zkSync Era are similar to Ethereum transactionsopen in new window so you can use the same wallet as you use on Ethereum. There are some minor differences, mostly with regards to setting the fees.

For more information on fees in zkSync Era, read the fee model documentation.

The following values are returned by any RPC call which outputs transaction details:

  • is_l1_originated: bool
  • status: TransactionStatus, one of Pending, Included, Verified, or Failed. See Transaction statuses section below.
  • fee: U256. See the fee mechanism documentation for more information.
  • initiator_address: Address
  • received_at: DateTime<Utc>
  • eth_commit_tx_hash: Option<H256>
  • eth_prove_tx_hash: Option<H256>
  • eth_execute_tx_hash: Option<H256>

Contract deployment transactions

Contract deployment transactions are different on zkSync as they involve interacting with the ContractDeployer system contract. Learn more about contract deployment transactions here.

Transaction statuses

Transactions are always in one of the following statuses:

  • Pending: In the mempool but not yet included in a block.
  • Included: Included in a block but the batch containing the block has not yet been committed.
  • Verified: Included in a block and verified. Verified means the transaction has been committed, proven, and executed on the Ethereum L1 network.
  • Failed: Unverified/failed transaction.

Info

For more information on when a transaction is considered complete and unalterable, read the documentation on finality.

Transaction types

For compatibility, the majority of zkSync Era transaction types are similar to those on Ethereum.

Tips

The transaction type hex value is output by any RPC method call which returns a transaction type, such as eth_getTransactionByHashopen in new window for example.

Legacy: 0x0

The Ethereum transaction format used before the introduction of typed-transactions.

EIP-2930: 0x1

The Ethereum Improvement Proposal EIP-2930: Optional access listsopen in new window addressed contract breakage risks introduced by EIP-2929.

EIP-2930 transaction types contain everything from legacy transactions plus an accessList parameter containing an array of addresses and storage keys.

EIP-1559: 0x2

The Ethereum Improvement Proposal EIP-1559: Fee market change for ETH 1.0 chainopen in new window is an updated transaction type introduced in Ethereum's London fork. It addressed network congestion and excessive fees coming from bids. EIP-1559 transactions don't specify gasPrice and instead use a base fee which is adjusted by each block.

EIP-1559 transaction types contain everything from EIP-2930 and legacy transactions (apart from removing the gasPrice).

Additional parameters added are the maxPriorityFeePerGas and maxFeePerGas where users can specify maximum fees they're willing to pay to prioritize their transactions.

  • maxPriorityFeePerGas: Is the maximum fee users are willing to give to miners as an incentive.
  • maxFeePerGas: Is the maximum fee users are willing to pay in total. This includes the maxPriorityFeePerGas and network-determined base fee per gas.

Important

zkSync Era supports the EIP-1559 transaction-type format but does nothing with the max fee parameters.

EIP-712: 0x71

The Ethereum Improvement Proposal EIP-712: Typed structured data hashing and signingopen in new window introduced hashing and signing of typed-structured data as well as bytestrings.

EIP-712 transactions access zkSync-specific features such as account abstraction and paymasters. Furthermore, smart contracts must be deployed with the EIP-712 transaction type.

You can specify the additional fields, such as the custom signature for custom accounts or to choose the paymaster with EIP-712 transactions. These transactions have the same fields as standard Ethereum transactions, plus fields containing additional L2-specific data (paymaster, etc).

"gasPerPubdata": "1212",
"customSignature": "0x...",
"paymasterParams": {
  "paymaster": "0x...",
  "paymasterInput": "0x..."
},
"factoryDeps": ["0x..."]
  • gasPerPubdata: A field denoting the maximum amount of gas the user is willing to pay for a single byte of pubdata.
  • customSignature: A field with a custom signature for the cases in which the signer's account is not an EOA.
  • paymasterParams: A field with parameters for configuring the custom paymaster for the transaction. Parameters include the address of the paymaster and the encoded input.
  • factory_deps: A non-empty array of bytes. For deployment transactions, it should contain the bytecode of the contract being deployed. If the contract is a factory contract, i.e. it can deploy other contracts, the array should also contain the bytecodes of the contracts which it can deploy.

To ensure the server recognizes EIP-712 transactions, the transaction_type field is equal to 113. The number 712 cannot be used as it has to be one byte long.

Instead of signing the RLP-encoded transaction, the user signs the following typed EIP-712 structure:

Field nameType
txTypeuint256
fromuint256
touint256
gasLimituint256
gasPerPubdataByteLimituint256
maxFeePerGasuint256
maxPriorityFeePerGasuint256
paymasteruint256
nonceuint256
valueuint256
databytes
factoryDepsbytes32[]
paymasterInputbytes

These fields are handled by our SDKs.

Priority: 0xff

Since Ethereum L1 has no concept of interacting with other layers, this is a zkSync Era specific transaction type related to L1 -> L2 transactions.