EY has rebuilt its enterprise-focused Ethereum layer-2 blockchain Nightfall as a zero-knowledge rollup, eliminating waiting periods for transaction finality and simplifying the platform's architecture.

The update, released Wednesday, replaces Nightfall's previous optimistic rollup design with a cryptographic approach that verifies transactions before submission to Ethereum. This removes the need for challenge periods that could delay finality for days.

Now dubbed Nightfall_4, EY's technical transition offers several advantages beyond speed. 

Replacing a "cryptoeconomic approach with a cryptographic approach" simplifies Nightfall's architecture because, as a result, there would be "no need to accommodate challenging incorrect blocks," EY said in a statement.

The move provides "the same privacy and scaling that version 3 enabled, but now with near-instant finality and a simplified architecture," Paul Brody, global blockchain lead at EY, said in a statement.

Though EY said Nightfall_4 and supporting tools are publicly available, their GitHub repository does not reflect the change and opens a 404 error, which means it hasn't been updated.