The =nil; Foundation launched its v1 testnet for the =nil; protocol on Wednesday morning. The protocol is an Ethereum Layer 2 that uses zkSharding to address challenges of scalability and fragmentation within the Ethereum ecosystem.

In a sense, the project is keeping alive Ethereum’s original vision of using sharding, a computer science technique that involves splitting large databases into smaller components across multiple “shards.”

"Ethereum essentially said, we're not going to do sharding. We're going to do the L2 roadmap. What the market is realizing, maybe it was the right decision at the time, but it was just executed on really poorly,” Avi Zurlo, who transitioned from chief product officer to CEO of the =nil; Foundation on Monday, told The Block in an interview. “Engineering complexity is worth eating today to protect tomorrow."

The testnet launch marks a step forward for the project, which aims to merge the advantages of specialized appchains with the unified environment of a monolithic blockchain using zero-knowledge computation originally designed to scale Ethereum.

“You have this really functional, really highly scalable system that gives you the same scale that you would get with the roll-up-centric roadmap,  but you don't have this fragmentation, you don't have this massive social coordination issue,” Zurlo said, describing some of the issues currently being debated about scaling Ethereum. 

Following the devnet launch in July, which brought in 25,000 users within the first 24 hours, =nil;’s testnet introduces several upgrades aimed at enhancing developer experience. This includes integrating Uniswap’s V2 code to demonstrate how decentralized exchanges can operate in a sharded environment.

“The big lesson when we launched our devnet, we spent time thinking through this developer experience, and we're like, OK, we really want people to build applications that distribute logic across multiple shards,” Zurlo said.

Additionally, the team worked to re-engineer the protocol’s code to support extensive functionality in data fetching and transaction execution across a distributed system.

"Let's build the most scalable thing possible. Let's try to push the limits of how developers think about building applications,” he added. Doing that required figuring out how to handle things like cross-shard transaction ordering, which enables all local shards and execution shards to “synchronize at a global level.”

=nil; takes its name from the programming world, particularly from languages like Objective-C or Swift, which can “send a message to nil” to prevent crashes in certain scenarios. "Programmers really love the name," Zurlo said, adding that sharding itself as a term in crypto "has a lot of baggage around it."

"The irony is, if the Ethereum Foundation had gone with execution sharding, you would have had the same processing power and scaling laws as with today's L2s, but everything would have felt as one. It just would have been a much more complex engineering project," Zurlo said. "If you look behind the scenes of literally any globally-sized, data-intensive application, you have a sharded architecture."

Looking ahead, =nil; Foundation plans to roll out testnet v2 and v3 in the second and third quarters of next year, continuing to refine and expand the protocol’s capabilities. The =nil; Foundation is backed by investors including Polychain Capital, Blockchain Capital, IOSG Ventures and others.

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