Hermez is a decentralized zk-rollup focused on scaling payments and token transfers on top of Ethereum.
It can handle up to 2000 transactions per second, and is designed with high-frequency tokens like ETH, DAI, and wBTC in mind.
One of the most important things about Hermez is the way it decides who the next block creator should be.
In a sentence, block creators are selected via a burn auction, except rather than burning tokens, a 40% of the winning bid goes back to be reinvested in Ethereum public goods through Gitcoin quadratic funding grants.
We call this mechanism proof-of-donation.
Becoming a coordinator (rollup block creator) is entirely permissionless, and we will open source software to make it possible for anyone to participate.
The success of Layer 2 solutions depend on the success of Layer 1. Hermez is built on top of Ethereum and we are dedicated to giving back and supporting Ethereum public goods.
Security and censorship resistance are ensured by both Ethereum and battle-tested zk-SNARKs protocols as used in Zcash. Hermez has its own zk-SNARKs implementation which uses iden3's tooling (Circom and SnarkJS).
You can think of Hermez as a scalability extension of Ethereum. As such, you can use your Ethereum address to transact and maintain custodianship over your funds at all times.
With a throughput of up to 2000 transactions per second, transactions on Hermez will be fast and cheap, potentially reducing the transaction load on Ethereum network.
Thanks to atomic transactions, you can make sure that a series of transactions will execute together and at the same time without a need for a third party escrow.