The runner-up chain won: how I chose Scroll for Week 2

Linea scored 51 out of 60 on my rubric . Scroll scored 50. Scroll got the build week. That one-point gap wasn't post-rationalized. The pick came down to two things the rubric doesn't score directly: faucet auth requirements and timing. I'll get to both. Two chains that didn't make the shortlist Five candidates went through the blocker check. Two were eliminated. Polygon zkEVM was announced as sunset in June 2025. PancakeSwap pulled support the following month and developer momentum has been draining out since. Building on it now would produce an article about a chain in hospice care. Kakarot was simpler: the GitHub repo was archived January 9, 2025, the team was acquired by Zama, and they pivoted to FHE. No deployable mainnet. Both gone before we talk scores. The remaining four zkSync Era made the cut but scored the lowest at 40.5 out of 60. The foundry-zksync fork is still alpha, tests run roughly 17× slower than mainline Foundry, and the native account abstraction model means msg.sen