Welcome to Modular Media, a weekly newsletter covering news, updates, educational content, and more within the modular ecosystem.
Subscribe to get issues sent directly to your email every Tuesday, and also, make sure to follow us on Twitter for modular-related updates!
You can check out our previous newsletter issue here.
Modular Summit is coming to Paris!
From July 21 - 22, you’ll be able to hear from and interact with some of the biggest modular enthusiasts in the space. We hope to see you there.
TUNE IN FOR THE LAUNCH OF zkEVM MAINNET BETA
Onboarding thousands of developers into the Ethereum ecosystem.
On March 27th, Polygon officially launched its much anticipated zkEVM, making this only the second time this feat has been achieved.
How We Got Here
Polygon’s journey into the world of zk-rollups started back in August 2021, when Polygon first announced its $1B pledge to shift its strategic focus to zk-based scaling solutions. As part of this pledge, Polygon adopted four new zk-scaling solutions: Hermez (now zkEVM), Miden, Nightfall, and Zero.
Polygon Hermez (zkEVM) was the team's first zk-scaling solution, following a $250M merger/acquisition. Of course, the full team stayed intact following the move to Polygon.
During this time, the Hermez team only had one product running, an L2 payments platform based on zk-technology. However, during the EthCC 4 conference, the Hermez team announced its plans to develop a zkEVM, which would allow developers to start deploying their own EVM smart contracts on top of a zk-rollup.
As a quick reminder, a zkEVM is a network that is compatible with both zk-proofs, and the Ethereum virtual machine (EVM). To be more specific, it’s a zk-rollup, which uses zero-knowledge proofs to batch many transactions off-chain and then submit a single proof to the Ethereum blockchain.
The use of ZKPs allows for the off-chain execution of smart contracts, which thereby reduces the amount of on-chain computation. This in turn, helps reduce the amount of gas required to execute transactions on the Ethereum network, ultimately helping improve scalability.
In just two years, the team was able to accomplish this mission of launching its own zkEVM.
zkEVM Launch
After months of internal testing, Polygon finally launched its zkEVM on public mainnet. This means that the network was now completely open and permissionless for both developers and users, meaning you can start bridging to the network yourself to test out some of the already deployed dapps. Or, if you’re a developer you can start deploying your Solidity contracts right away.
The official launch was broadcasted during a live event, where viewers were able to witness Vitalik Buterin make the first transaction on Polygon zkEVM. You can catch the complete recording here if you’re interested.
On the same day as the launch, the Polygon team also announced that they have open-sourced their zkEVM - “The testnet for Polygon zkEVM was open to anyone, and the source code has been available for everyone to view”.
How to Connect to zkEVM (include dapps already here + current stats so far)
The first thing you want to do is add the Polygon zkEVM network to your wallet. You can visit this Polygon website page to quickly have it added to your wallet, or enter the details yourself manually:
Once you add the network, you simply bridge funds over. You can either use the native Polygon bridge here, or use one of the bridges that have already added support for the network, including Multichain protocol, and Orbiter Finance. It’s important to note that ETH is used for gas on zkEVM, as opposed to MATIC, which is what users were accustomed to using on the Polygon PoS chain.
Now that you have some funds on the network, you can start experimenting with the different dapps that have already been deployed.
zkEVM Wars
If you recall from last week’s newsletter, zkSync launched its own zkEVM just one week before Polygon.
According to the zkSync team themselves, they went for optimizing for the future of the EVM, rather than focusing on extreme composability. That being said, this topic brought some interesting debate over the past few days.
If you’ve been around crypto Twitter over the past week, you may have noticed that the zkEVM wars have already begun. While things seemed to have cooled off, there was quite a heated exchange that went down between the Polygon and zkSync communities.
To keep it short, the main point of discussion was EVM equivalence.
Polygon is positioned as an EVM-equivalent chain. As a quick description, a network is EVM-equivalent if a developer can take his/her exact smart contract from Ethereum, and deploy it on the EVM-equivalent chain. This means that the contracts are executed the same way, and produce the same results.
In other words, if two different blockchains are EVM-equivalent, then a smart contract that executes successfully on one blockchain should also execute successfully on the other blockchain, with the same output and behavior.
Whereas If two blockchains are EVM-compatible but not EVM-equivalent, it could result in unexpected behavior or inconsistencies when smart contracts are executed on different platforms. This is why some stuff is tweaked on the backend, to ensure contracts work as they’re supposed to.
Alex G, zkSync co-founder, along with members from the Scroll team, and others, made the claim that Polygon was not in fact EVM-equivalent, even though they were positioning themselves as such.
This caused Brendan Farmer, Polygon Zero co-founder, to respond by stating that technically there were still some precompiles that needed to be added before the network achieved full equivalence, but that this was something the team is currently working on (just a matter of “engineering time”). That said, he also stated that regardless of not having these last precompiles done yet, nearly all of today’s Ethereum contracts can still be fully migrated without any contract tweaks.
There’s too much to display here, but feel free to visit either of these founders’ Twitter pages to view some of their past discussions, and craft your own opinions on the matter.
As for us, we’re hopeful these zkEVM wars will soon end. At the end of the day, they share the same mission of Ethereum becoming the universal settlement layer for the blockchain space. If this was to truly play out, then I’m sure there will be more than just one execution environment settling on Ethereum in the future.
What’s Next
As the Polygon team has mentioned before, Polygon zkEVM will be launched in a series of stages. Stage one involved the launch of the initial zkEVM with “limited training wheels”, with the eventual goal of reaching phase stage two, which is “no training wheels”. These two stages are in reference to a previous post by Vitalik, but in short, Polygon zkEVM will look to decentralize over time, as the team makes sure everything runs securely and smoothly before handing control over to the community.
Speaking of security, although Polygon zkEVM has been through several code audits already, there is currently an ongoing bug bounty program, “ with as much as $1,000,000 for documenting critical vulnerabilities”.
To learn all about zkEVM, you can check out the complete docs here.
You may have heard of a new project that was announced last week, Conduit. But what exactly is this? Let’s find out.
What is Conduit?
Conduit is an infrastructure platform that enables developers to launch their own application-specific rollup using the OP Stack.
The goal is to enable developers to launch their own rollup in just a short amount of time, through one intuitive dashboard. So, rather than spending months/years trying to build the core rollup infrastructure, Conduit has you covered, leaving teams to only have to worry about building the best app possible.
Through this dashboard, developers will be able to add their own custom features, such as the use of their own native gas token, and more. Keep in mind that Conduit not only helps with launching your rollup, but also with managing it. This means they take care of core protocol upgrades.
Because every rollup is built using the OP Stack, they’ll all benefit from automatic compatibility with all the tools and resources within the Optimism ecosystem. Not only that, but every Conduit rollup will be secured by Ethereum, the most battle-tested smart contract chain.
In short, Conduit is helping achieve Optimism’s Superchain vision, as they’re making it easy for developers to launch their own rollup within the Superchain, in just a few clicks and a couple of minutes. As a reminder, Optimism Superchain will be a mesh network of rollups (L2s), all interoperable with one another.
Why App-Specific rollups instead of Shared L2?
Application-specific rollups have been a hot topic as of late. The idea is that “every team in crypto will need their own dedicated rollup in the same way that traditional tech companies have their own compute instances in the cloud”.
Rather than having to share a rollup with other dapps, each team can now seamlessly launch its own dedicated rollup.,which means you don’t have to share computational resources with other dapps.
So instead of Uniswap and Aave both being deployed on the same rollup, they can each have their own rollup in just a couple of minutes.
What’s Next
On the same day they announced Conduit, the team also announced a $7M in seed funding, in a round led by Paradigm, as they’ll use these funds to help achieve their mission over the foreseeable future. For anyone that shares a similar mission, Conduit is currently hiring for engineering roles.
Conduit is already live in production, meaning projects can start building and deploying their own rollup today. You can visit their website to learn how to get started.
We are excited to share that Caldera has officially opened two public testnets!
On Thursday, Caldera announced the public launch of two new Caldera testnet chains. These two new testnets are meant to provide the Ethereum developer ecosystem with a place to experiment with a Caldera chain themselves.
What Is Caldera
Caldera enables developers to launch their own custom, dedicated rollup (Caldera Chain) “in just one click”.
You can view Caldera similarly to a hosting service. The developer uses their interface to build and customize their rollup (their own blockchain essentially), Upload their contract, and click deploy.
Aside from the different customizations developers are able to make to their own rollup, each Caldera chain also comes with a set of tools, such as a faucet, bridging interface, and block explorer. Below you can see the list of features that either come with, or can be added to each Caldera chain:
Given that Caldera chains support multiple settlement layers, as shown in the image above, Caldera decided to launch two different Caldera testnet chains.
Ethereum Goerli Testnet
Just like any other network you’re connecting to for the first time, you need to first add the network to your wallet. To add the Caldera testnet chain that is deployed on Goerli, simply head to this website here, and click on “Add Chain to Metamask”.
This is what you want to see:
The next step is to access funds on the network. There are two ways to do this. You can either bridge funds over, or you can request funds directly to your wallet using a faucet (literally takes like ten seconds when using the faucet). On the same website, you’ll see 1-click options to access either of these methods, as shown below.
And once you access funds to your wallet, you can mint your own Calderamon!
It’s only been a couple of days since launch, but so far this Caldera testnet on Goerli has managed to achieve 33K total transactions, and over 7,169 total user addresses
Polygon Mainnet Testnet
The steps for connecting to Caldera’s testnet chain on Polygon are quite similar. We won’t go over it here, but simply head to the same website as before, and use the 1-click options to get yourself quickly set up with your own wallet on this network.
This is the network name you should see in your wallet when you connect here:
Caldera testnet chains are completely pemissionless for both developers and users. That being said, it’s important to remember that these are testnets, meaning you shouldn’t be using too much capital. These will not be incentivized anyway, so there’s not much point in bridging an insane amount of funds.
SPARK Is No More
Something else to note is that these two new testnet network will replace the previously launched “SPARK platform, a proof-of-concept dashboard that enabled developers to permissionlessly launch their own rollups with a single click”. This enabled developers to start experimenting with Caldera chains for the first time. Altogether, SPARK was able to reach over 8,500 sign-ups, and over 5,000 rollups deployed. You can dive into the details here.
Again, SPARK will no longer continue to operate, as this was replaced by the Ethereum and Polygon Caldera testnets.
Get Involved
Any developers interested in deploying their own Caldera chain on mainnet, can get in touch with the team today. To learn more about Caldera you can visit their website, and make sure to follow them on Twitter to stay up to date with everything Caldera.
March 29th officially marked the start of Phase 2 of the Blockspace Race, Celestia’s first incentivized testnet program.
What is the Blockspace Race
The Blockspace Race is Celestia’s first incentivized testnet program, launched in five different phases spanning nine weeks total.
The program saw over 20K applicants, however, only 1,000 were chosen to participate in the event. That being said, 1,000 total participants still makes this the largest-ever testament to support DA sampling.
During this event, each participant will run their own node (one node per participant). So which types of nodes can participants run on Celestia?
As many of you may recall, Celestia is the first modular blockchain. They specialize in consensus and data availability, while leaving the execution to other third parties. Because Celestia takes care of two different blockchain duties (consensus & DA), they operate two different networks - a consensus network, and a DA network.
The consensus network consists of two types of nodes:
Validator nodes
Consensus full-nodes
While the DA network consists of three types of nodes:
Bridge Nodes
Light Nodes
Full-Storage Nodes
Phase 2 Details
Phase 1 of the Blockspace Race, which ran from March 7 - 21, kick-started the consensus network of Celestia, as it introduced the validator nodes. Phase 2, which just started on the 28th, kick-starts the DA network of Celestia, as it introduced the bridge nodes, light nodes, and full-storage nodes.
As was the case with the first phase (and all the other phases moving forward), there are different tasks that the nodes can accomplish during this phase. Each task corresponds with a certain node type (validator node, bridge node, etc.), and the node participants receive points for completing these tasks. As of now, these tasks include things like kick-starting your node and keeping high uptime. Any tasks not labeled with a corresponding node type are “bonus tasks”, and are open to any node type. Completing these tasks rewards the participant with “bonus points”. Bonus tasks as of now include things like writing a paper, building Celestia tooling, launching a rollup, and more.
Celestia will be allocating 15M TIA tokens as rewards for participants for their service. After the Blockspace Race completes (all five phases are done), then all participant points are tallied up and a victor is crowned. Only when Celestia reaches mainnet can these testnet participants use their points to claim their token rewards.
You can learn all about the Blockspace Race and about all the new features that have been added to this new testnet, including IBC support, here.
It’s only been a week since the start of second phase began, but already, Celestia has managed to reach over 1,000 light nodes already!
We’re excited to see how the testnet supports the addition of 1000+ light nodes.
After phase 2 ends, there will be a seven-day rest period in between. Following this rest period will be the launch of phase 3 of the program. Once phase 3 goes live, you’ll be able to see all the details for the phase, including tasks and rewards, here.
Another week, another announcement for Eclipse.
This past Thursday, Eclipse and the Injective protocol announced their joint partnership to launch Cascade, a sovereign, optimistic rollup built for the Injective ecosystem. This is the first interchain SVM rollup, as all the other previous Eclipse rollups have been built using the EVM.
Because Cascade will ultimately be a sovereign rollup, meaning that they won’t be using the Eclipse settlement layer, but rather the Injective team itself will take care of this service.
Cascade will utilize the Solana Sealevel virtual machine, allowing existing Solana teams to easily deploy their dapps on Cascade, while also allowing Injective native dapps to achieve an extra kick in throughput.
Not only that, but this also introduces the Solana VM into the Cosmos ecosystem, bringing the two worlds together.
As a reminder, Eclipse enables developers to launch their own custom, dedicated execution environment (rollup) “in just a few clicks”. As mentioned, each Eclipse-powered rollup can be customized to fit the specific needs of each specific team, meaning they can add their own specified features.
The Cascade rollup will utilize the “interchain security” mechanism, which was introduced by the Cosmos Hub. They’ll be able to take advantage of this because one of Eclipse’s earliest goals was to bring IBC to the SVM. Now that they’ve achieved this, Eclipse rollups are able to take advantage of this interchain security mechanism.
The initial launch of Cascade (V1) will be as a testnet beta, before ultimately releasing their final mainnet deployment.
On V1, it looks like the sequencer will be run by the Eclipse team, meaning they’ll be in charge of producing the blocks. Because they’re in charge of producing the blocks, they’re in charge of making sure our transactions go through, which means they also have the power to withhold our transactions, or act in any other malicious way (double spending).
As far as data availability goes, Cascade will be posting its blocks to Celestia.
The team also announced that plans for its future version launch may involve permissionless sequencing, that is, when they determine the rollup is self-sufficient enough.
What is Injective
Injective is a PoS L1 blockchain that specializes in offering “lighting fast” transaction speeds. Using the Injective SDK, developers can leverage pre-built modules to build their own “lightning fast” dapp.
Eigen Labs Raises $50M, in a series A round led by Blockchain Capital. The team also announced on the same ay that they will be launching the initial version of their protocol “in phases throughout the rest of 2023”. As a reminder, Eigen Layer is a re-staking protocol, allowing other teams to leverage the existing set of Ethereum validators in order to achieve security.
StarkNet’s recent proposal to upgrade the network to v0.11.0 passed with flying colors. If you recall, StarkNet recently launched this upgrade on testnet, which introduced Cairo1.0. Now, we should be expecting Cairo1.0 to hit mainnet (maybe even by the time you read this).
zkSync just increased its bug bounty reward to $1.1M.
Speaking of zkSync, Era (zkSync’s zkEVM) went down for a couple of hours this past weekend, but thankfully it seems like no real damage was done, and the network is back and running again.
Looks like Scroll network stats are coming to L2Beat soon.
Fuel Art beta is now live on Fuel testnet, allowing users to start trading their Fuel NFTs on the platform.
The Hash Case team just deployed a new faucet for the Mantle L2 network, allowing users to seamlessly get access to $BIT tokens to start experimenting with the network.
Noble is partnering with Circle to bring native USDC to its L1 app-chain, which is part of the Cosmos ecosystem.
“Introducing the Risk Rosette on L2BEAT”. This new tool allows crypto users to better understand the different risks involved with the networks they’re interacting with.
Introducing Starkcet, a new StarkNet faucet developed by the Kasar Labs team.
For all you Cosmonauts, Cosmoverse 2023 was just announced this past week. The event will be taking place in Istanbul Turkey, from October 2-4.
“Introducing Linea, a developer-ready zk-rollup powered by Consensys”.
“Announcing Madara, a Rust-powered StarkNet sequencer using substrate”
The Optimism Foundation just published its results for the second round of their Retroactive Public Goods Funding round two.
Last week, Saga launched their first testnet, Cassiopeia. The team also announced their latest cohort for their innovator program “Cohort 3 builders”
Here’s Taiko’s latest bi-weekly update thread - several zkEVM updates included.
Poseiswap announced a $1.5M raise, with articipants including Eclipse and Notifi Network. Poseiswap is the first DEX to deploy on Nautilus chain, which if we recall from last week’s newsletter, is building their own rollup powered by Eclipse.
Covalent just posted this thread, showing how Arbtitrum and Optimism differ in certain stats, including transactions and gas fees.
Timeswap goes live on Arbitrum Timeswap is a oracle-less lending protocol that was first launched on Polygon.
Here are the winners from Scroll’s ETHGlobal Scaling Ethereum Hackathon, which featured $20K in prizes
New Noir docs published
Aztec Network just posted a new set of docs.
“Introducing The 4626 Alliance, an ecosystem led initiative to advance the development of the ERC-4626 standard”
StarkNet’s latest community call involved a look at the network’s 2023 roadmap.
Mustafa from Celestia suggests that we should further segment the rollup landscape. He highlights that:
Rollup frameworks (AKA SDKs) = software used to build rollups
Rollup-as-a-service (AKA RaaS) = hosting provider for deploying and running rollups
He also lists examples. OP Stack, Rollkit and Sovereign SDKs are just pieces of software. You can download them, modify them to your needs and run them on any infrastructure you want.
Whose infrastructure the rollup software runs on determines whether or not the rollup is deployed “as-a-service”. This is no different than the interplay between regular open-source software and cloud SaaS today. If someone else runs the software for you, it’s SaaS (RaaS in this case). Examples of RaaS vendors are Eclipse and Caldera.
Why would you have someone else run your rollup?
This is also no different than SaaS. Think about how long it has taken rollups to mature (e.g. how sequencers are still centralized) - these are complex pieces of software! It’s hard enough for crypto infrastructure teams to manage, and will be that much harder for app teams or businesses that want to leverage crypto. Businesses will likely follow Coinbase’s lead in deploying rollups, but that doesn’t necessarily mean they’ll want to operate the software themselves.
But what about decentralization?
This will depend on the use case. Some apps might be ok with centralized sequencers and want to host them. Some might be ok with centralized sequencers but lack the DevOps skills and prefer RaaS. Some might need more customization than offered by RaaS vendors. Some might run parts of the rollup (the literal rollup state machines themselves) and outsource other parts (e.g. sequencing or aggregation). You probably hate hearing this, but it’s still early :)
Also - here’s another good web2 analogy:
@VelvetMilkman from Figment Capital and Elijah from Duality make the case for real world assets (RWAs) being issued on sovereign rollups, rather than on classic rollups. Examples of RWAs include debt, securities, fiat currency and physical commodities.
One counter argument is that this makes composability harder, since sovereign rollups (as the name suggests) maintain sovereignty at the expense of automatic composability. However, the company gets to decide on the canonical chain anyway - the fork choice rule will be whichever instance the company is maintaining (as a refresher, we covered this tradeoff and fork choice rules in this issue from two weeks ago). There are more interesting configurations, but it’s unlikely that regulators and legislators keep pace.
So why bother issuing RWAs on chain then? What’s the point?
There are actually many reasons to still put these assets on sovereign rollups:
DinoEggs here 👋 I’ve been seeing people suggest that Ethereum has an “end goal” of 1.3MB/s of data availability (DA) throughput, and wanted to see if this was true. This leads to a broader discussion, similar to last week, where we touched on how Celestia will scale DA throughput and general blockchain endgames.
The first question is whether 1.3 MB/s is actually the Ethereum endgame. The answer is clearly no:
So why doesn’t Ethereum jump to “max” DA throughput?
Jon Charb describes the reason well, framing Ethereum’s objective as “how can we create a horizontally scalable infrastructure that can be increased over time as tech improves/decentralization permits”. The goal is to make sure decentralization keeps pace with scale and avoid crashing on the road to the endgame.
Delphi Digital releases an episode discussing EigenLayer vs. Cosmos, how EigenDA addresses ETH bandwidth constraints and more with Sreeram from EigenLayer
@0xRainandCoffee summarizes their recent article “Modular MEV Part 2”
Polymer Labs writes an article explaining how they adapt IBC for the modular paradigm
@eshita breaks down the messaging bridge trilemma and explains how Polymer enabling Ethereum-Cosmos communication
@curiouscatwang writes an article on business models in MEV, covering why Flashbots is a bad business today but could be a good business tomorrow
@sanjaypshah creates a spreadsheet breaking down the tradeoffs between sovereign and classic rollups, aimed to help protocol teams make informed decisions - here’s the spreadsheet
@sreeramkannan and @dubbel06 discuss why EigenDA and danksharded Ethereum will leverage KZG commitments (vs. other techniques) - to build a system where no one has to download all the data
@toghrulmaharram explains how the term “rollup” defines the protocol’s data availability mode
Bell Curve releases an episode called “A Journey Into The Dark Forest” discussing MEV with Hasu from Flashbots
@swmartin19 highlights that recent launches (zkSync, Arbitrum, Polygon) have spiked L2 gas usage to 18% of total gas consumed on Ethereum
@expctchaos explains how Electron Labs brings IBC to Ethereum using ZK-snarks
Bankless releases an episode discussing the Polygon zkEVM launch with Mihailo and Jordi from Polygon
@ArsalanSartaj curates the best Polygon zkEVM resources from last week
@0xAsharib breaks down EigenLayer-related terminology on the EigenLayer forum
@bkiepuszewski explains the the mechanics behind Polygon zkEVM’s current implementation
@musalbas emphasizes that rollup-as-a-service vendors should support full nodes (trust-minimized light nodes are optional) and how the “aaS” part refers to a hosted sequencer
@expctchaos explains the prover outsourcing mechanism proposed by Scoll and how centralized provers introduce single points of failure
@jon_charb highlights reasons why apps might want their own chains, even IF one chain could technically handle all workloads
zkSync explains how account abstraction is different from EIP-4337
@toghrulmaharram and @aeyakovenko discuss nuances around rollups “inheriting” L1 security
@100y_eth writes an article breaking down all things Eclipse
@eclecticcapital breaks down order flow as part of an MEV series focused on Ethereum, Cosmos and Solana blockspace markets
@christine_dkim breaks down the zkEVM landscape, comparing solutions by network usage, transaction costs and other metrics
@jiayaoqi creates SolidityGPT, a GPT-based chatbot that answers developer questions around Solidity and Ethereum
@brockjelmore and @aeyakovenko discuss how L2s will address use cases that need fast finality, such as with fault provers + fast finality market makers
@odin_free explains how Ethereum (Shanghai upgrade) withdrawals will work in simple terms
Unchained releases an episode discussing “Why ZKPs Are Critical to Ethereum’s Future” with Ali from a16z
@felipeargento highlights accomplishments in the Cartesi ecosystem
@omw_to_the_moon explains the mechanics behind Aztec Network, such as how the sequencer works
@Madhav_goyal_ writes an article exploring rollups on Solana
@PratyushRT compares different types of ZK proofs in a concise way
@ralexstokes explores ways to implement trust-minimized consensus layer access from the EVM
That's all for this week! Thanks for reading 🧱🎬
If you found this useful, please like and retweet this post on Twitter so more people can see it:
Excited to share another week of updates from the modular blockchain ecosystem!
For the week ending March 31st
230
