How Zora Leveraged Conduit's Rollup Platform to Launch on Mainnet in 4 Weeks

Zora is a destination for creators and artists to put their works onchain and for collectors to mint. Zora is backed by Paradigm and recently raised a $50M round from Haun Ventures.

Zora recently released a new network, which utilizes Conduit's Rollups-as-a-Service (RaaS) platform to operate and manage its OP Chain rollup built on top of the Optimism Collective's OP Stack and settling to Ethereum.

The Challenges of Running your own Rollup

Zora has gone all-in on creating the premiere platform for creatives and artists to showcase their work and engage with fans. In pursuit of providing the best possible user experience, Zora envisioned running their own rollup to provide the cheapest fees and dedicated capacity, while still being secured by Ethereum.

Zora started by running an OP Chain internally. It was relatively easy to spin up, however it was clear that securing and maintaining the network would not be a simple task.

While this allowed them to validate their hypotheses around cheaper fees, as well as integrating with their existing stack, they quickly realized that they didn’t have bandwidth to dedicate to hosting, operating, and maintaining their rollup in a production environment, let alone for a dedicated testnet.

Why Zora Chose Conduit to Host their OP Chain

Infrastructure is challenging, especially with blockchains that require additional services around them, like block explorers and transaction tracers.

With Conduit, Zora was able to spin up their own OP Chain testnet on Goerli through Conduit’s self-serve RaaS platform. It took less than 5 minutes, and came with a ready-made Blockscout block explorer and samczsun’s transaction tracer. There was no need to schedule a demo, or a long laborious sales call to go through to get started.

This full development suite allowed them to quickly integrate, debug, and monitor their Conduit testnet.

Furthermore, Conduit handles scaling, upgrades, reliability, and security automatically. We also handle all the additional operational work around running a rollup in production on mainnet, like accounting and compliance.

“Working with Conduit to maintain our OP Chain allowed us to focus on building the best product experience possible, allowing us to integrate with our own network as if we were building support for any other chain.”
– Tyson, CTO of Zora

Sprinting to Mainnet

Soon the day came to deploy their OP Chain to mainnet. The same infrastructure and automation that allows Conduit to host self-serve testnets, also allows it to deploy to mainnet in less than 10 minutes.

Moreover, because Conduit’s RaaS platform has been built for automation from the start, adding additional features and upgrades to Zora’s mainnet was effortless.

“Conduit was able to quickly iterate and tailor to our requirements, helping us launch on our ambitious timeline with very little friction.”
– Tyson, CTO of Zora

Launching to the World

When Zora was ready to go public, less than a month after spinning up their testnet, Conduit was on hand to provide support and monitor Zora’s mainnet infrastructure. The launch went smoothly which allowed everyone to focus on Zora Network and their vision, instead of battling infrastructure issues. Importantly, Conduit was able to get Zora to market quickly, saving them months of critical engineering time.

“We’re excited to continue to work with Conduit on decentralizing our network and building an ecosystem around scalable blockchains.”
– Tyson, CTO of Zora