Scroll Processes 15 Million Transactions with a Secure, Scalable Layer 2 Blockchain Solution on AWS

Hong Kong–based Scroll is driving the adoption of blockchain across industries, including healthcare, gaming, and finance. The emerging market for blockchain-based financial technology, known as decentralized finance (DeFi), is rapidly growing. A recent Statista report shows an annual growth rate of 15.86 percent, with a projected total value of $37 billion by 2028. To build applications for the DeFi market, developers use blockchain platforms like Ethereum to securely verify and execute transactions.

Scroll aimed to provide developers with improved transaction times across the Ethereum platform, addressing latency issues arising from Ethereum's focus on security and decentralization. To achieve this, the company integrates zero-knowledge technology with Ethereum virtual machines on the Layer 2 networking system—calling the resulting solution zkevm L2.

To run zkevm L2 on Ethereum’s testnet and mainnet networks, Scroll needed a highly scalable and secure infrastructure. Haichen Shen, co-founder of Scroll, explains, “We sought a flexible infrastructure that offered a range of high-end GPUs to develop and launch our technology for the blockchain developer community to use.”

Scroll assessed multiple cloud solutions before choosing Amazon Web Services (AWS). “We appreciated the variety of CPU- and GPU-based options available on AWS, which gave us the right balance of price and performance,” says Shen.

Working closely with their local AWS team, Shen and his colleagues experimented with Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances, scaling them across multiple AWS Regions.

The AWS team proposed deploying AWS Organizations to save time by managing AWS environments centrally. Scroll also opted to implement AWS Security Hub, which automates security best-practice checks and aggregate security alerts, plus AWS Identity and Access Management to control access to AWS services.

In one instance, Scroll wanted to increase performance of the application’s Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) for PostgreSQL. The AWS team shared information on Amazon RDS Performance Insights, which Scroll used to fine-tune the database’s performance. “Our data engineers didn’t lose time thinking how to resolve performance challenges and could focus on other tasks,” states Shen. 

To test zkevm L2’s performance ahead of its launch in September 2023, Scroll’s engineers ran 10 million test transactions across more than 2,000 Amazon EC2 instances, powered by 3rd Gen Intel Xeon Scalable processors. “The range of computing resources available on AWS saved a couple of weeks of testing, which helped us go to market that much quicker,” comments Shen.

By using AWS instead of an on-premises infrastructure for zkevm L2, Scroll has saved significant resources. Shen says, “We’re reducing our operational costs and passing on savings to our customers. Furthermore, we don’t need to maintain an infrastructure management resource, because we can launch servers easily ourselves.”