Gemholic, a multi-product platform that recently deployed its token contract and conducted a pre-sale launch on the layer 2 protocol zkSync Era, encountered an issue with its smart contract, causing its fund to get trapped on zkSync.
Significantly, zkSync responded to the situation on Twitter explaining that the issue occurred due to the usage of the .transfer() function in the contracts, which caused the funds to be trapped in the smart contract on zkSync. The compatibility issue resulted from Era’s non-EVM equivalence design, which offers specific trade-offs and upsides.
Notably, zkSync stated:
“zkSync Era is not EVM equivalent. This is a deliberate design choice. Era has a diverging, dynamic gas metering, which allows some transaction types to be 10x to 1000x cheaper.”
Moreover, the contract was deployed on the Era mainnet without testing it on the testnet or local node, which would have immediately caught the problem, said zkSync. Any smart contract that uses transfer() or send() is taking a hard dependency on gas costs because these functions forward a hardcoded amount of 2300 gas, which is not guaranteed to work on Ethereum.
Developers were warned about the same three years ago, and zkSync Era was designed not to be EVM equivalent, but the GemholicECO situation has demonstrated that developers are not following the warning. This prompted zkSync to identify an elegant solution that can solve a broader class of gas-related problems, requiring minimal changes in the gas metering of the protocol, but allowing for full recovery of the funds.
zkSync further explained that although zkSync Era is still in Alpha, the platform has seen a tremendous spike in activity, making it the 4th highest TVL and 3rd highest usage of all L2s in just two weeks since its launch.
