Dear Taiko community,

Welcome to our first community update. We would like to share with you Taiko’s progress during Q3, and will continue to do so every quarter. Of course, there will also be interim updates more frequently.

In July, Brecht Devos joined Taiko as our third co-founder. Brecht used to work for Loopring as the Chief Architect, but over the last 12 months or so, he had been working on PSE’s zkEVM with researchers and engineers from the Ethereum Foundation and other open-source projects. Brecht leads Taiko’s Zero-Knowledge R&D team with an objective to implement all remaining EVM opcodes and to customize the zkEVM to fit Taiko’s layer 2 protocol design.

We have hired four cryptographers from Turkey, Austria, Barbados, and Ukraine. The first three have already been onboarded and Aleksei will join on November 1st.

There is also a new backend engineer joined in Shanghai and two protocol & frontend engineer from India and Canada. Two more engineers are joining us from the US to work on bridges.

We have also started to activate our Discord and Twitter communities, thanks to the involvement of our new community managers. They have already brought onboard several dedicated moderators to help attract, engage and retain a broader community.

The Taiko team is now a twenty persons team across thirteen countries covering all continents with most people having an engineering/research background.

Most opcodes are fully implemented in the EVM circuit, with a small number still remaining to be done. Work has started on adding support for so-called precompiled contracts which can be called from smart contracts and need special handling.

A lot of progress has been made on the aggregation circuit, which is the circuit that allows the verification of proofs inside another proof. This is an important circuit for connecting the different ZK-EVM circuits together in a way that can be verified efficiently on Ethereum.

Because the goal is to build a type-1 (fully Ethereum-equivalent) ZK-EVM, we need to make sure there are no technical limitations that prevent us from building such a system. PLONKish circuits don't have any real limitations on what can be proven, but certain problems don't map very well to circuits, which results in high proving times. The hash functions used in Ethereum are a good example of this specifically for a type-1 ZK-EVM. Prover times can be improved by optimizations on the circuit level, optimizations on the prover level, and optimizations on the prover system level. Many such optimizations for the different ZK-EVM circuits have been done on the circuit level (e.g. keccak256/sha256) and on the prover level. We will be continuing these efforts, while the newly joined cryptography researchers will be able to help us to do optimizations on the prover system level as well.

We deprecated Taiko protocol V1 (https://taiko.xyz/design). V1 was built on top of Proof-of-Stake as we require that block proposers must prove their own blocks (which is no longer the case).

The new protocol (V2) has a different set of design objectives and assumptions on what a ZK-EVM can and cannot prove. As a type-1 zkRollup, Taiko protocol V2 is more secure, minimal, robust, decentralized, permissionless, Ethereum-Aligned, and Ethereum-Equivalent. We have also mitigated MEV challenges with a commit-then-propose scheme. But the most powerful feature for users is the immediate block finality - people only need to wait for a L1 confirmation to have their Taiko L2 transactions finalized.

The new protocol has been implemented, reviewed, and is being used by the Taiko node software. However, it demands comprehensive unit and integration testing.

Our whitepaper is ready for you to review.

We have also re-implemented our default cross-chain bridge. The new bridge only assumes the two chains are both EVM-based and that some block headers are synchronized between the two chains on a regular basis. Bridge design is not covered by our whitepaper but the bridge source code will be open-sourced soon together with our rollup protocol.

Our new node implementation for protocol V2 takes a difference approach from V1: the new architectures is built on top of Ethereum’s engine API design and split into multiple binaries.

With this new design, we are able to maintain the a maximal level of compatibility with the go-ethereum codebase.

The private alpha-1 testnet with only a few nodes has been up and running without actual ZKPs. Nodes in alpha-1 are interacting with each other in simple ways. We are working to simulate more complex scenarios to further test inter-node and cross-layer interactions. A private blockchain explorer is up and running for internal development and testing purpose only.

It’s too early to request testnet access, your patience will be appreciated.

Brecht was at Devcon Week in Bogota and gave a talk at Rollup Day on Taiko overview and Keccak-256/SHA-256 circuit optimizations. Brecht also joined a panel on the spectrum of ZK-VMs and applications.

We wrapped up our branding competition with hundreds of community participants and tens of high quality designs entered. The winning logo and slogan were announced here. We’d like to thank everyone who participated; we will be sending out participation NFTs in the coming weeks! Also, keep an eye on our Discord for more chances to participate in upcoming community events.

We updated our website, https://taiko.xyz, to reflect the new logo/branding, whitepaper, and related info. It is still a WIP.

Thanks very much for reading this first update. If you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to reach out.

If you’d like to join us on our journey in any capacity, we’d love to hear from you. You can apply to join our team by emailing [jobs@taiko.xyz](https://mailto: jobs@taiko.xyz), look around and contribute to our GitHub, or join the community via Discord, Twitter, or Reddit.