Since our Mainnet launch, the Taiko team has been diligently working on optimizing our based rollup protocol. We're proud to announce that we've successfully reduced L1 gas costs by over 30% while maintaining contract upgradability. As we continue to refine our gas optimization strategies, we're now shifting our focus to exciting new features and improvements.

We've identified several key areas for development, which may be prioritized and organized into different releases or forks based on urgency and risk factors. Let's dive into our planned enhancements:

Our current implementation of EIP-1559 faces some challenges on the Taiko mainnet. We've identified incorrect configuration leading to overselling of L2 block space, resulting in the base fee often reaching the minimum of 0 wei. This forces proposers to rely on tips for income, similar to the pre-1559 Ethereum experience. To address this, we plan to conduct thorough data analysis and adjust fee settings over time. Our goal is to ensure proposers receive reasonable revenue primarily from base fees rather than tips.

We're also considering incorporating the L1 base fee into an L2 base fee calculations. However, this proves challenging due to protocol changes required to support preconfirmations. Depending on the severity of base fee manipulation by proposers, we may postpone this improvement to a future release.

We've begun work on transaction preconfirmation in collaboration with industry experts. Preconfirmation will provide users with sub-second confirmation of their transaction's execution status. Additionally, it will allow block proposers to operate more efficiently, proposing blocks only when necessary rather than at fixed intervals for chain liveness. This improvement will lead to more efficient utilization of blob space.

It's important to note that preconfirmation is a collaborative effort involving wallets, block explorers, restaking protocols, rollup protocols, and potentially even dApps. Taiko's role focuses on ensuring multiple blocks can be built deterministically off-chain and selecting a preconfer registry based on Ether restaking.

We aim to introduce a new type of transaction that allows a sponsor EOA to wrap any pending transaction in the mempool, paying the gas fee while maintaining the original sender as the msg.sender in EVM. This feature will enable stablecoin issuers and games to cover their users' transaction fees, eliminating the need for users to hold and pay with Ether.

Currently, Taiko's mainnet uses the Shanghai EVM. We plan to upgrade to support the new opcodes introduced in the Cancun version, excluding EIP-4844. Staying current with EVM releases is crucial for a type-1 rollup, ensuring compatibility with Ethereum's evolving ecosystem.

Our BCR protocol currently only supports EOAs as proposers when using calldata for data availability. With recent protocol upgrades unifying proposers and provers into one role, most proposers will be smart contracts. To facilitate Taiko BCR's use as a layer 3 protocol, we need to enable contracts to use calldata for L3 blocks, as blobs are not available on L2s.

The current BCR protocol assumes ZK proofs will remain expensive in the near future, allowing for gradual adoption. Our min-tier selection process, which determines the percentage of blocks proven by different tiers, currently uses a deterministic pseudo-random number manipulatable by L1 validators and eventually Taiko proposers. We acknowledge this as a design flaw during audits and plan to improve the randomness with a revised approach. The inclusion of this improvement will depend on its impact on client and prover software changes.

This upcoming release will incorporate several of the features and improvements outlined above.

Our roadmap for Ontake is both ambitious and carefully structured. We plan to begin testing it on our Hekla testnet before October, then aim for a mainnet upgrade in Q4 of this year.

As we continue to evolve the Taiko protocol, we remain committed to pushing the boundaries of scalability, efficiency, and user experience in the blockchain space. We appreciate the ongoing support from our community and look forward to sharing more updates as we progress through these exciting developments. Stay tuned for more detailed announcements on each feature as we move closer to their implementation.

Explore open positions on our job board.

Get the latest from Taiko:

• Website: https://taiko.xyz.

• Discord: https://discord.gg/taikoxyz.

• GitHub: https://github.com/taikoxyz.

• Twitter: https://twitter.com/taikoxyz.

• Community forum: https://community.taiko.xyz.

• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@taikoxyz.

• Warpcast: https://warpcast.com/taikoxyz.

Contribute to Taiko on GitHub and earn a GitPOAP! You will also be featured as a contributor on our README. Get started with the contributing manual.