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This past week, Eigen Layer officially launched the first phase of their testnet, finally giving us users a chance to test out this new ETH restaking primitive.
Eigen Layer will be launching its testnet in a series of three stages:
Stage 1: Stakers
Stage 2: Operators
Stage 3: Services
During this stage 1 launch, there will be two ways for users to restake their ETH on the Eigen Layer platform:
Liquid Staking: As of now, users can restake their stETH (Lidoâs liquid staking token), or rETH (Rocket Poolâs liquid staking token).
Native staking: those running their own home staking setup can set their withdraw credentials to Eigen Layer
This testnet will be launched with a set of guardrails to ensure everything runs smoothly. To be more specific, there are two different multisigs that control the Eigen Layer contracts, both of which will be initially controlled by the Eigenâs âearly buildersâ. Another thing to note is that this testnet will not be incentivized.
How to get started
Hereâs a quick guide to help you get started with the liquid staking option on Eigen Layer:
First, you need to make sure you have some gETH. To do so, simply head to the Alchemy faucet and request tokens to your wallet.
Then, youâll need to swap your gETH for either rETH (Rocket Pool) or stETH (Lido). Here weâll use Rocket Pool. Simply head to the Rocket Pool testnet platform and deposit your gETH in return for rETH.
Once you have your rETH, simply head to the Eigen layer platform, click on âRocket Pool Etherâ, enter the amount of rETH you wish to restake, and hit deposit. Thatâs it - now your ETH is restaked.
To learn all about this initial testnet launch, make sure to check out the complete article.
What is Eigen Layer
As many of you already know, anyone can stake their ETH in order to become a validator on Ethereum. These validators of course contribute to the security of the entire Ethereum protocol. Eigen Layer allows these validators to âopt-inâ and start validating other dapps and protocols, aside from just Ethereum.
Another way to put it is that Eigen Layer is introducing a marketplace of decentralized trust. On one end, we have the sellers (ETH restakers) who sell their security, and on the other end, we have the buyers who buy this ETH security for their own dapp or protocol. For example, if Iâm building an oracle, I can have the same people securing mainnet Ethereum also secure my oracle.
Ultimately, the buyers decide what theyâre willing to pay for this shared security, whether itâs through some sort of fee percentage or block rewards. If restakers like what youâre offering, theyâll sell you their security.
Eigen layer is an entirely new primitive in the space, which is why this launch has been highly anticipated for some time now. As of today, there are two well-known projects that will be leveraging Eigen Layer - the Espresso sequencer, and Mantleâs L2 network. Weâre looking forward to full mainnet launch (hopefully later this year), and are excited to see what people start building with Eigen Layer.
Astria replaces centralized sequencers, allowing many rollups to share a single decentralized network of sequencers thatâs simple and permissionless to join. This shared sequencer network provides...
Astria is building a shared sequencer network, adding yet another out-of-the-box component to the modular stack. Last week, the team finally shared some of the details about how this shared sequencer will work along with some of the benefits it will provide.
What even is a sequencer?
A lot of the modular teams today share a common goal - to make deploying a rollup as easy as deploying a smart contract. In order to achieve this goal, there need to be several decentralized, out-of-the-box components that need to be built. One of these components includes a decentralized sequencer, which is what Astria, among others, is working on.
In general, the task of a sequencer is to order our transactions before they actually get executed.
You can imagine the sort of power that comes from being able to choose the way in which transactions are ordered, such as being able to censor transactions or adjust the transaction order in a way that grants the sequencer with the highest amount of MEV possible. This is why one of the biggest milestones for any existing rollup today is to decentralize their sequencer.
Astria Shared Sequencer
Astria is building a proof of stake network whose main responsibility is to order transactions before they get executed. Any user will be able to participate in Astriaâs sequencing network, just as any rollup will be able to leverage these sequencer nodes.
There are several benefits that will come with Astriaâs decentralized shared sequencer, such as:
decentralization: this will allow rollups to benefit from censorship resistance, as well as liveness (if one sequencer goes down, there are still others who will get your transaction through). Of course, this also means MEV will be spread across a decentralized set of users, rather than just a single sequencer operator who takes all the MEV for his/herself.
Cross Rollup Composability: a shared sequencer will be able to provide you with the guarantee that two different transactions are included within the same block (a bundled block), which opens the door for new types of innovations. Specifically, âthis allows users to specify that a transaction on Rollup A can be included in a block if and only if a different transaction on Rollup B is also included in the same blockâ.
Astria EVM
On the same day, Astria announced the launch of Astria EVM, which is the first rollup to adopt Astriaâs sequencing network.Â
Astria EVM will leverage âthe shared sequencer network for fast, censorship-resistant transaction ordering, and Celestia for data availabilityâ. The goal is to help bootstrap Celestiaâs rollup ecosystem by bringing in the most popular virtual machine in the space, the EVM. At the same time, Astria EVM will provide us all with a first-hand look at âa test case for how to best integrate rollups with our shared sequencer networkâ.
It seems to us that Astria EVM will serve as a sort of settlement layer built on top of Celestia, allowing other EVM dapps to use it âas a hub for liquidity and bridgingâ.
Whatâs Next
Astria also announced a $5.5M raise, in a seed round that was led by Maven11, and featured other participants like Delphi Digital.Â
It looks like Astria is approaching its devnet launch soon, with more updates expected to be announced over the coming weeks.
It looks like a privacy-enabled rollup is coming to Scroll
Arbitrumâs first governance proposal, AIP-1, which involved sending $750M to the Arbitrum Foundation, failed to pass due to concerns from the DAO after they realized the Foundation had already taken the funds prior to the proposal. Following the failed proposal, the Arbitrum Foundation proposed two new AIPs, which were meant to incorporate community feedback. To learn all about how this unfolded, we left a link to a Twitter Space about this event down below.
â10M OP was awarded through RetroPGF Round 2 to the builders and educators whose impact is essential to growing the Optimism Ecosystemâ
â10M OP was awarded through RetroPGF Round 2 to the builders and educators whose impact is essential to growing the Optimism Ecosystemâ Eligible projects were placed into three categories: education, infrastructure, and tooling. Here are the top 10 recipients from the education category. Here are the top 10 recipients from the tooling and utilities category, & here are the top 10 from the infrastructure category
Speaking of Optimism, it looks like their proposal to upgrade mainnet to the Bedrock release has officially passed.Â
For anyone looking for a job in the modular field, Scroll is now looking to hire a protocol researcher
Here are the two winners from Fuel Labsâ recent hackathon event.
Hereâs a thread that details MicroChain, a trading platform native to Fuel
SwaySwap is now live on Fuelâs Beta-3 testnetÂ
Mantle published their Q1 journey report last week, outlining some of their recent milestone achievements, as well as their future outlook. Mantle is an L2 network built on top of Eigen DA.
It looks like âSpace Falconâ will be building a web3 gaming hub on Mantle.
Hereâs a âmega threadâ about the 33 hackathon winners from the recent zkHack event.
Taiko just published âzk-Roller-Coaster #2â, a thread that dives into the biggest updates from the world of zk over the past two weeks
Here are the winners from the recent ETHGlobal hackathon, that built on Taiko.
Hereâs an update on Taikoâs alpha-2 testnet. âIt covers highlights like 126 unique provers and counting, and issues like protocol economics design flawsâ.
âAnnouncing the first ever Injective Global Hackathon and Grant DAO Round 1â
Polymer, who are helping expand IBC across more than just the Cosmos ecosystem, just published an article introducing zkTree, âa structure to optimize recursive proofing of zk proofs.â
Users can now start joining the Eigen Layer Discord server!
Connext just published this thread highlighting their modular interoperability design.
Dovish AMM, DeBankâs portfolio tracking platform, and the Rhinofi bridge are now all live on Polygon zkEVM.
Aave on StarkNet reaches phase 2!
StarkNet Social announces their launch will take place on April 25th
Start contributing to Madara, the Rust-based sequencer built on StarkNet
Here are five new projects that have launched on zkSync Era, including Ramp Network, Omnisea, and more.
CT cannot seem to reach consensus on key terminology. We have simply shifted the battlefield from trustless to trust-minimized đ
Wat do?
Words are hard, but they should have meaning. Otherwise, debates get circular and no progress is made. For this exploration, we are going to use what we believe is the most useful framework for identifying trust-minimized designs. It is borrowed from Mustafa from Celestia, originally seen in his âclustersâ article.
Definition: âtrust-minimized bridging specifically means bridges that do not require an honest majority assumption for state validity.â
Letâs overlay this definition onto the weekâs discourse.
Takes deep breath
Anatoly from Solana suggests a design for L1-to-L1 bridging that is âpretty close to 1/N securityâ. This sounds similar to rollups, which have 1/N security AKA rely on an honest minority assumption.
According to Anatoly, this would work by having some period of time (T) where the local chain (receiving tokens) remains open to fraud proofs. If fraud is observed coming from the remote chain (chain sending tokens) and a proof is posted, then âthe right to update the remote chains state root on the local chain is auctioned off on the local chainâ.
So, should this design be considered trust-minimized bridging?
Weâd argue no. There is 1/N security for detecting fraud, which is great, but thereâs formal governance needed to decide where the coins should go. This introduces an honest majority assumption.
Henry from Penumbra suggests that weâve had trust-minimized bridging in the form of IBC for two years. The logic is as follows:
As a refresher, IBC works by running light clients of the remote chain(s) on your local chain. In their current state, IBC clients are consensus verifiers, which as the name suggests, verify consensus of remote chains. They make sure ordering and state transitions are what the remote chainâs validator set agrees on.
So, should IBC be considered trust-minimized bridging?
Weâd argue no. In the IBC design, you are still relying on an honest majority assumption of the chain where your assets are bridged to. IBC does not validate state transitions, and the remote chainâs validators can steal your funds - even if you run nodes for both chains.
Zaki from Sommelier Finance suggests that IBC, once turbocharged with fraud and validity proofs for state transition correctness (being developed) closes the above gap.
So, should turbocharged IBC be considered trust-minimized bridging?
Unfortunately, weâd still argue no. This gets to the core of both Mustafaâs and Vitalikâs articles on cross-chain bridging. There are fundamental challenges when dealing with multiple validator sets. Toghrul from Scroll explains it well:
Even if state transitions are SNARKed, you still need an honest majority assumption to decide on the canonical state. Sigh.
C-node from Celestia suggests that there is hope for trust-minimized IBC. If the fundamental challenge is regarding multiple validator sets, what if we apply turbocharged IBC to sovereign rollups sharing a DA layer, where thereâs one validator set?
Another deep breath Can turbocharged IBC between sovereign rollups be considered trust-minimized bridging?
Weâd argue yes! The problem with multiple validator sets is that they can each rewrite history independently from one another. Shared data layer = shared history = shared security!
Of course, itâs not QUITE that simple. There are still challenges that make this hard in practice, but weâll save that for another day.
@karsenthil walks through a âMiddleware Thesisâ, covering why middleware will the unexpected star of the modular design
0xResearch releases an episode âThe Cosmos SDK of Rollupsâ discussing sovereign rollups, decentralized sequencers, composable DA layers and more with Preston from Sovereign Labs
@donnoh_eth writes an article explaining different types of data rollups can post to the DA layer (transaction data vs. state diffs)
@VirtualElena writes an article on machine learning and ZK proofs đ„
Espresso Systems writes an article explaining âSequencing Decentralization and Livenessâ
@sunnydece frames the OP Stack and Superchain architecture in useful ways, including core concepts and tradeoffs, as part of a deep dive article
@divine_economy explains why shared sequencers are great business opportunities, covering their network effects and key players đ€
@_bfarmer explains why âPolygon zkEVM is the closest thing to Ethereum blockspaceâ
Injective hosts a Twitter Space discussing Cascade, the first interchain Solana SVM rollup
Bell Curve releases an episode âShining A Light on MEVâ with Tarun from Gauntlet and Justin Drake from the Ethereum Foundation
Mantle writes an article explaining how fraud proofs and verifiers secure L2 rollups
Finality Capital Partners illustrates the value of EigenLayer using assumptions from web2 SaaS - hereâs their full report
@Louround_ and @expctchaos host a Twitter Space discussing the launch of Polygon zkEVM with the Polygon team
@LoganJastremski releases an episode discussing how to measure decentralization, light clients in depth and Celestia with Mustafa from Celestia
@johnrising_ breaks down EIP-4337 components and relevant solutions
Maven11 explains the basics of shared sequencers and their investment in Astria
Dymension writes an article breaking down their views on âRollApp Economics and Governanceâ
@hudsonjameson explains hashing in simple terms
Chainstack hosts a Twitter Space discussing Cartesiâs Linux OS with the Cartesi team
The Defiant releases an episode âKZG Duo Summons the Ethereum Roadmapâ with Trent and Carl from the Ethereum Foundation
Chris Blec hosts a Twitter Space debating Arbitrum decentralization - letâs play devilâs advocate
Empire releases an episode âETH L2s Have The Same Flaws as Alt L1sâÂ
@ArtCatDAO summarizes a recent article by @dlubarov titled âA comparison of zkEVMsâ
@colludingnode offers a simple definition for ânodeâ
@jon_charb, @colludingnode, @CantelopePeel and others explore the implications of many enshrined vs. independent rollups
Saga hosts a Twitter Spacing discussing âThe ultimate blockchain toolkitâ with Jim from Saga and Kevin from Uniblock
Starknet hosts a Twitter Space discussing âThe rise of web3 gamingâ
@colludingnode highlights how rollups without sequencers work
@expctchaos breaks down account abstraction, covering example functionality and associated transaction flows
That's all for this week! Thanks for reading đ§±đŹ
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Excited to share another week of updates from the modular blockchain ecosystem! 
For the week ending April 7th
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