(Considering the example of zksync.io) (Also, don't believe me on any of this.)
- They are sidechains.
- You move tokens to the sidechain by depositing it on an Ethereum contract. Then your account is credited in the sidechain balance.
- Then you can make payments inside the sidechain by signing transactions and sending them to a central operator.
- The central operator takes transactions from a bunch of people, computes the new sidechain balances state and publishes a hash of that state to the Ethereum contract.
- The idea is that a single transaction in the blockchain contains a bunch of sidechain transactions.
- The operator also sends to the contract an abbreviated list of the sidechain transactions. The trick is making all signatures condensed in a single zero-knowledge proof which is enough for the contract to verify that the transition from the previous state to the new is good.
- Apparently they can fit 500 sidechain transactions in one mainchain transaction (each is 12 bytes). So I believe it's fair to say all this zk-rollup fancyness could be translated into "a system for aggregating transactions".
- I don't understand how the zero-knowledge proof works, but in this case it is a SNARK and requires a trusted setup, which I imagine is similar to this one.