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📣 News & Announcements

Obol Labs Launches Alpha Release

Last week, the Obol Labs team announced the launch of their Alpha release, meaning that for the first time, community members will get to deploy mainnet distributed validators (DVs).

Up until now, the protocol has only been used by people within the Obol team, but this alpha release starts the teams’ process of progressively integrating the Obol protocol into actual staking applications.

To make sure everything is running smoothly, DVs will initially only be launched with trusted partners, however, this will open up to others over time, as we approach Obol’s mainnet launch.

According to the team, they look to add 25 DV clusters in two types of configurations:

• Solo Clusters: one entity running all nodes within a cluster. initial solo staker partners include Anthony Sassano, Blockscape, Ankr, and more.

• Multi-org Clusters: two or more entities are running nodes within the cluster. Initial Multi-Org Cluster partners include EtherFi, DSRV, Cosmostation, and more.

What is DVT?

As you may already know, anyone from around the world is able to run a validator node and stake their $ETH in order to become an Ethereum validator. The reward for doing so of course, is a combination of network fees (gas fees) and block issuance (newly minted ETH).

That said, running an Ethereum validator comes with a huge risk - your stake. In order to make sure validators are doing their job correctly, they must put their ETH at stake. If a validator node was to start acting maliciously, or if the validator node was to go offline for a certain amount of time (even if it was through no fault of the validator themselves), then they could get slashed (your ETH stake deposit goes bye bye).

Today, we’re accustomed to having every validator run by a single node, but distributed validator technology (DVT) enables a validators to be run by 2-4 different nodes (not just one).

So for example, today, you may be running an Ethereum validator on your own computer. This means that your computer has to stay online 24/7 in order to make sure you’re doing your job to help verify the network. If your computer goes offline for a long period of time, or if it experiences some sort of bug, then you run the risk of losing your initial ETH deposit (stake).

DVT works by running validators within clusters of people (a cluster can be anywhere from 2-4 people). So rather than me running my own validator, I can pool my resources with up to three others in order to form a cluster and run our own validator as a team (“squadstaking” seems to be the winning term to use). The benefit of DVT is that if the validator node you’re running were to go offline, you won’t get slashed - all you need is 3/4 of members within the cluster to be online at any one time.

How does DVT benefit me?

Over time, we should start seeing liquid staking protocols like Lido and Rocket Pool integrate DVT into their platform. So not only will you not be required to hold the entire 32 ETH, but you also won’t have to run the entire setup yourself.

That’s for those of you who wish to run your own validator node, however, there’s also a huge benefit for those of you that wish to continue just delegating your ETH to someone else. Today on Lido, for example, we delegate our ETH to someone else who runs the validator node. The risk to depositors is that if the validator you delegate your stake to was to get slashed, then that means you potentially lose your deposit as well (your deposit adds to the validator’s stake). With DVT however, the validator is split between different nodes (could all be from different places around the world), meaning depositors are ultimately putting their deposit at the hands of 2-4 individuals, rather than just one, ultimately increasing security for the end-user deposits.

There’s of course a lot more that can be said about DVT, but we’ll leave that for another time.

What’s Next

As mentioned, this initial Alpha release is intended for only a limited amount of users, as the Obol team looks to make sure everything is running smoothly before opening up their protocol to the broader community. The purpose of this Alpha release is to learn from this initial release, and add any necessary changes before their v1 launch (hopefully later this year).

You can visit the Obol website to learn more about the protocol. If you have any specific questions for the team, you can head over to the project Discord and ask away there.

Introducing Magi & OP-Erigon

Last week, the Optimism community saw the launch of two new network clients, Magi and OP-Erigon.

What are clients?

Generally speaking, clients are the actual code implementation of network rules. Let’s use Ethereum as an example.

As most of you already know, Ethereum is like one giant supercomputer.

This giant supercomputer follows a set of rules, or “specifications” (specs), which dictate how the network functions. Every node that connects to the network has to follow these specs - this is where the “clients” come in. The clients are the actual code implementations of these specs.

In regards to Ethereum, there are two types of clients, execution clients, and consensus clients. execution clients listen to incoming transactions and execute them in the EVM, while consensus clients implement the PoS algorithm (Beacon chain). This means that in order to become a node, you must run both of these clients.

There can be several variations of clients, each offering certain tradeoffs. For example, in Ethereum there are four execution clients (Geth, Nethermind, Besu, and Erigon), and five consensus clients (Lighthouse, Lodestar, Nimbus, Prysm, and Teku). Each client can vary in the programming language (is the client code written in Rust or Python for example), or in the amount of hardware power that is required.

How does Optimism fit in

“With Bedrock, the OP Stack leans heavily into the technical separation of concerns specified by Ethereum by mirroring the separation between the Ethereum execution layer and consensus layer. Bedrock introduces separation of execution client and rollup node in this same way”.

Similar to Ethereum, in order to connect to the Optimism network, you need to run two types of clients, an execution client, and a rollup client.

According to the official Optimism docs, “an execution client is the system that sequencers and other kinds of node operators run to determine the state of the canonical L2 chain. It also performs other functions such as processing inbound transactions and communicating them peer-to-peer, and handling the state of the system to process queries against it”.

While a rollup client communicates to the execution client and more specifically, “the rollup node is a stateless component responsible for deriving the state of the system by reading data and deposits on the L1. In Bedrock, a rollup node can either be used to sequence incoming transactions from users or other rollup nodes or to verify confirmed transactions posted on the L1 by singularly relying on the L1”.

Up until last week, there was only one type of client each, and both were developed by the OP Labs team (the original team behind the development of Optimism).

On the execution client side, there was only op-geth, which was a fork of Ehereum’s geth client, which is a Go (programming language) implementation of the network, however, now we also have op-erigon, which is a fork of Ethereum’s erigon client.

On the rollup client side, there was only op-node, which again, was developed by the OP Labs team, and is written in Go. However, now we also have Magi.

Magi

On April 19th, the a16z team announced Magi, a new rollup client for the Optimism community. According to the a16z team, “Magi performs the same core functionality as the reference implementation (op-node) and works alongside an execution node (such as op-geth) to sync to any OP Stack chain, including Optimism and Base”.

Up until now we only had one rollup client for Optimism, op-node, which was written in Go. Magi is written in Rust, adding a whole new developer community to the Optimism client stack. Aside from language diversity, this also removes the centralization risk from only having one client to choose from.

Considering Magi is still so young, there will be several features added over time, such as alternative data availability layer support. “Magi is very new, and likely months of development away from being a feasible alternative to op-node.”

OP-Erigon

Just one day later, the “Test in Prod” team announced op-erigon, a new execution client for the Optimism community.

Just as with Magi, op-Erigon is still very new and only deployed on Goerli tetsnet. To learn how to start integrating these clients yourself, make sure to visit the links provided above.

What are the overall benefits of having different clients?

There are several benefits to having multiple clients run the network, such as:

• Security/Liveness: We don’t want 100% of nodes running the same client - what do you think will happen if this one client experiences a severe bug?

• Diversity of languages: expanding the types of languages used, means different ideas and approaches that can potentially be used, as well as just an overall bigger pool of developers that can potentially join the network.

Ultimately, it’s good for the network to have a wide set of clients. Over time, we should see other Optimism clients come being developed, and we’ll make sure to let you know when that happens! In the meantime, make sure to follow Optimism on Twitter to stay up to date with the network.

More News & Announcements

• The Radius team proposed a model that combines MEV Boost with their sequencing layer for rollup revenue generation.

• Learn about ZK-Proof of Exploit, which enables white hat hackers to report live vulnerabilities in smart contracts while maintaining the confidentiality of the exploit. This was one of the projects that were submitted during the recent ETHDenver hackathon, and won two awards.

• “Before changing withdrawal credentials or creating new validators, stakers interested in restaking on EigenLayer mainnet have a few considerations to make. Learn more in this post”.

• Last week, the EigenLayer team held its first community call, where they discussed the testnet, roadmap, AVS R&D, and held a community AMA. For those that weren’t able to attend, @0xASK wrote this great summary.

• The Nethermind team just deployed a new dashboard to start tracking EigenLayer testnet activity.

• EigenLayer’s first security audit passed with zero network vulnerabilities.

• The Fuel Labs team just published the latest edition of “Inside Fuel”, a quarterly (Q1 in this case) report that goes over the latest news and updates across the Fuel ecosystem.

• Check out Mantle’s new ecosystem page, where you can view the different dapps deployed across the network. You can also check out this video recording from last week, where the team goes over their Q1 journey.

• Here is the recording from Demo Day during ETHTokyo, where the Mantle team went over the project roadmap and upcoming Q2 mainnet launch.

• Last month, Mantle held a hackathon event during ETHDubai. Here are the three winners from the event.

• For any web3 game developers, “announcing the first Saga Multiverse Hackathon”, featuring $50K in prizes.

• Taiko’s “Alpha-2” zkEVM testnet has now been deprecated (as scheduled). During its launch, the tetsnet reached 194 unique provers, 1.5M+ transactions, and 144K+ unique wallets.

• Taiko just published its latest bi-weekly update thread, featuring EIP-1559 and more.

• Here are the 11 winners that submitted projects for the Taiko bounty during EthTokyo Hackathon.

• Caldera announces Stateful Precompiles, which “will enable developers to customize their rollups without writing a single line of Solidity, saving hours of work”.

• The Wynd network team launches its first product, Grass, which enables users to “monetize their network resources with ease”, while also getting rewarded for it.

• AltLayer is 1/12 projects chosen for Binance’s MVB Season 6 cohort, out of a total of over 1500 applicants.

• Radius, who are building a zk-based shared sequencing layer, announce the “Alliance Partner” program. Anyone building a modular solution while leveraging Radius’ shared sequencer can apply for access to resources and support. Looks like they’re also looking to hire engineers!

• Stride becomes the second team to submit a Consumer Chain draft proposal in order to join the ATOM Economic Zone and adopt replicated security from the Cosmos Hub.

• Mintscan, the interchain block explorer, just dropped its v2. Check out the thread to learn about the new features that have been added.

• The voting period is now open for proposal #790: “Liquid staking module: Regulated and efficient liquid staking”.

• Hyperlane announces the “Hyperlane Pilot Academy”. Community members and developers who are interested in helping grow the Hyperlane ecosystem can start applying today.

• Polygon announces the Dev Global Tour Hackathon, which will run from May 1 - 21st and feature $125K in prizes.

• D8X is now live on Polygon zkEVM testnet. D8X is an institutional grade perpetual futures DEX. Any financial institution can fork, brand, and host their own derivatives product.

• Polygon just announced a “bounty program for PIP submissions with $40K in rewards”. Submit Polygon improvement proposals on the community forum for a chance to win some fund rewards.

• InsurAce & Lifi protocol announce Bridge cover. “this innovative product compensates users for their claimable loss during a specified bridge transaction”.

• “StarkEx v5 for spot trading has arrived”. StarkEx is an L2 scaling engine that is home to projects like Immutable, DYDX, SoRare, and more. This new StarkEx version introduces new features like Multi Asse Trading, and ERC-1155 & ERC-20 Token Minting.

• ANVU, previously known as Alpha Road, launched its “exclusive” testnet on April 19th. There were only 1K open slots at launch, with more to be added over the coming weeks. For those unaware, ANVU is a multi-tasking DeFi platform and aggregator that is building on Starknet. You can learn all about the platform through this detailed thread.

• 1inch, the leading DEX aggregator, is now live on zkSync Era

• Maverick protocol launches on zkSync Era. Check out the thread to learn how you can win an early adopter NFT.

• Spearmint, an allowlist platform that was developed by the Alchemy team, is now live on Arbitrum.

• Pimplico is now live on Arbitrum. Pimlico is building an entire stack of account abstraction tools that developers are able to integrate into their dapps, such as subsidizing gas payments for users, and more.

• Here are the top three teams who submitted hacks for Arbitrum bounties during LionHack 2023.

• For any Optimism developers and node operators, this new “Optimism Status” Twitter page was made just for you.

• The final audit from the Sherlock team found a few bugs in the Bedrock contract, pushing the Bedrock upgrade to a later date. “We plan to scope & execute the changes, announce a new consensus and feature freeze, and demonstrate two weeks of code stability before announcing the Bedrock upgrade date for OP Mainnet”.

• During the recent ETHTokyo hackathon, Scroll saw 72 project submissions. Here is a thread they wrote that goes over some of their favorites.

• Introducing Spark, a new central limit order book built on the Fuel network.

• Attention Fuel community, the team needs your help to decide what the new documentation portal should look like, “including links, information, and structure”.

📚 Discourse & Education

Should sequencer confirmations count as finality?

Logan Jastremski from Frictionless Capital asks if users should count L2 sequencer confirmations as finality. Before going further, we’ll tweak the question from L2s —> rollups to address a larger solution space.

First off, are sequencer confirmations technically final?

No, they are not. Rollup transactions technically reach finality when a batch of them land on L1. Note that rollups do not have to wait for validity proofs to be posted to the settlement layer or for fraud challenge periods to end, but the transactions themselves must be posted and finalized on the DA / consensus layer. This is because before the transaction batch is finalized, transactions can be excluded or re-ordered, resulting in a different state transition. As I’m sure you know, this means bad things can happen. Once the batch is finalized, every transaction and its order is set in stone. If you run a rollup node, you have a deterministic way to compute the state transition, and you know it will not change.

Does this mean users should never count sequencer confirmations as final?

Practically speaking, there are scenarios where it makes sense to do so.

If there’s low user value at risk, you might be willing to roll the dice. In a coffee purchase example, the coffee seller and buyer might both be fine temporarily trusting the sequencer and risking $2. This is a common example where the speedy customer experience likely outweighs the risk.

If there’s high user value at risk, it becomes a harder argument to make. This is, of course, is a big reason why sequencers are being decentralized. With a decentralized sequencer design it’s very possible to implement some leader election mechanism. For example, a rollup might use Proof-of-Stake to increase economic guarantees and make users more comfortable accepting sequencer confirmations as final.

That said, it will depend on the user.

Are blockchain “layers” real?

Christopher Goes from Anoma challenges the idea of “layers” and claims there’s no such thing as L1s, L2s or L3s. In fact, he thinks it’s better if we invert the terminology. Alex Beckett from Celestia disagrees, arguing there is in fact an explicit hierarchy with Ethereum L2s, where the L1 smart contracts determine the canonical L2 chain. Yes, it’s quite confusing 🫠 And if the debate sounds familiar, that’s because we've seen it before.

So, who is right? How should we think about this?

As always, in crypto, there’s technical and social elements.

Christopher emphasizes the technical elements. Technically, it’s all just data posted to new types of databases called blockchains. Can you post the same data to two different databases? Yes. Can one person base their actions off of database A and another person base their actions off of database B? Of course they can. Can two communities / chains look at the same data in the same database, but compute over it in two different ways? Absolutely. This is a dramatic oversimplification, but captures the spirit of how L1-focused ecosystems like Cosmos see things.

The counter argument to Christopher’s POV is that focusing too much on the technical elements can be counterproductive. In one of his replies, Alex mentions the “root of trust” - this is the key social element that Ethereum / modular / rollup communities emphasize. Social consensus on using L1 as the root of trust makes blockchains system easier to understand and build on. For example, even though chains can technically post proofs in multiple places and change their root of trust, there are reasons that they don’t.

More Discourse & Education

• @musalbas explains how he thinks about “comparing levels of security for data availability verification for light nodes” 💬

• @nickwh8te summarizes the above post on security for different DA schemes 💬👆

• 0xResearch releases an episode discussing shared sequencers with Josh from Astria and Ben from Espresso 🎙️🔥

• @nickwh8te breaks down different aspects of security (immutability vs. verifiability) using Ethereum and Celestia as examples 💬💎

• Bell Curve releases an episode on “MEV in a modular world” with Robert from Flashbots and Jon Charb from DBA 🎙️🧠

• @HaymanLiron explains the arguments behind posting L2 full transaction data vs. state diffs onto L1, objectively assessing both sides 💬

• @likebeckett writes an article discussing “why everyone is converging on the same path to scaling blockchains” ✍️💎

• 0xResearch releases an episode exploring Account Abstraction and why “Crypto UX sucks, but it won’t” with Alex from zkSync and Julien from Argent 🎙️

• Messari (@sunnydece) depicts the business and licensing models of several L2s / L3s 🖼️

• @ProbablyNoam explains Account Abstraction in simple terms, using playful illustrations 💬😆

• Espresso Systems explains several ways that shared sequencers facilitate cross-rollup bridging 💬

• @jillrgunter writes an article and explains how shared sequencers deal with rollup interoperability, including helpful examples and illustrations ✍️

• @musalbas breaks down how transactions flow between rollups and Celestia in a whiteboard session 🎥

• Empire releases an episode exploring the bear case for L2s and why “they won’t scale Ethereum” with Kyle and Tushar from Multicoin Capital 🎙️

• AltLayer releases an episode discussing the evolving blockchain landscape with Nick from Celestia 🎙️

• For anyone looking to get started building with StarkWare’s Cairo1.0 programming language, @odin_free has compiled all the links and resources you need in one thread 💬

• Taiko explains what makes their rollup decentralized, Type-1 and Ethereum equivalent, including a recording and slides from their recent ETHGlobal presentation 💬

• @jon_charb explains how a rollups can retain final say over transaction ordering while also outsourcing block building to a shared sequencer, offering rollups shared security, fast finality and flexible sovereignty 💬💎

• DSRV writes an article walking through how to run a distributed validator with Obol Network ✍️

• @colludingnode explains how L2 transactions can settle as fast as L1 transactions 💬

• Caldera writes an article explaining how they enable rollups to subsidize user gas fees ✍️

• Eclipse writes an article explaining “Why Eclipse’s Innovative Modular Rollup Solution Beats Traditional L2s” ✍️

• a16z crypto highlights metrics showing momentum in the ZK field, including daily transactions verifying ZK proofs and GitHub stars for ZK repositories 📊

• Hyperlane hosts a Twitter Space discussing their collaboration with Caldera

• Hyperlane writes an article discussing permissionless interoperability across modular blockchains ✍️

• @evansforbes highlights possible designs for shared sequencers 💬🤔

• @emo_eth explains how app-specific rollups can control the degree of permissionlessness 💬

That's all for this week! Thanks for reading 🧱🎬

If you found this useful, please like and retweet this tweet so more people can see it 🙏

Modular Media 🧱🎬

@modularmedia_

Excited to share another week of updates from the modular blockchain ecosystem!

@ObolNetwork Alpha, @a16zcrypto Magi & OP-Erigon, & more!

Sequencer confirmations as finality? Are blockchain “layers” real? & more!

Check out Weekly Rollup #11

modularmedia.substack.com

Weekly Rollup #10

For the week ending April 21st

15

12:08 PM • Apr 25, 2023

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.

📣 News & Announcements

Ethereum Upgrades to Shapella

Ethereum’s highly anticipated Shapella hard fork officially took place on April 12th at around 6:30 PM PST. This was the first hardfork since Ethereum’s merge to proof of stake. While there were several changes that came along with this new upgrade, the main focus was on $ETH withdrawals. 

As you may already know, anyone can run their own Ethereum validator node and start contributing to the network's security. The incentive for providing your ETH stake is the ETH rewards that come from both transaction fees (user gas fees) and block rewards (newly minted ETH). 

In order to run a validator however, the user needs to stake his/her own ETH into the Beacon chain (Ethereum’s PoS network) smart contract. Each validator node requires a stake of 32 ETH. 

Those of us who were not able to meet this 32 ETH requirement have simply headed over to a liquid staking solution, such as Lido or Rocket Pool, and taken part in contributing towards Ethereum’s security this way. What these solutions do is pool together user funds until the 32 ETH requirement is met. For every pool of 32 ETH they create, they spin up a new validator node for the Ethereum network. 

Whenever users deposit their ETH into these liquid staking solutions, they receive a corresponding token in return (stETH, rETH, etc.) that represents the original user deposit. So for example, if I deposit 10 ETH into Lido, I get 10 stETH in return. Holding this token allows me to accrue validator rewards while giving me the opportunity to exit at any time by simply swapping the stETH (or rETH, etc.) back for regular unstaked ETH. 

This is why the Shapella upgrade was a much bigger deal for solo stakers (those who run their own home validator node). 

That being said, there are some interesting questions that come to mind when it comes to liquid staking solutions, such as:

• Will we see more users withdraw their assets from liquid staking solutions in order to run their own solo setup, now that they can rest assured knowing they can withdraw at any time

• We may soon see these solutions develop a mechanism for the automatic staking of issuance rewards. Will most users opt in for this? 

Numbers so far

As we can see from the chart above, total staked ETH is down since withdrawals were activated, coming down about 1M ETH, now settling at 17,401,375. 

Total staked ETH was of course expected to come down following the hard fork, considering the pent-up demand spanning two years now. What was not as expected was for deposits to immediately come back up and outweigh withdrawals so soon, as we can see below:

You can check out the stats for yourself here. 

In regards to the price of ETH, many expected this to fall dramatically, however, this was not the case at all. In fact, ETH has been up only ever since:

What’s next for Ethereum?

Now that Shapella is out of the way, the focus for the Ethereum Foundation is now set on Cancun-Deneb, which is the next hard fork and will introduce EIP-4844, or proto-danksharding. Of course, this topic is for future discussion.

It’s amazing to see Ethereum reach all these milestones. Congrats to the entire team of people who helped bring this upgrade to life!

Introducing the Stackr SDK

Last week, Stackr Labs officially introduced the Stackr SDK, which is a framework that enables developers to launch their own application-specific “micro-rollups” using traditional general-purpose programming languages such as Python and JavaScript, Go, C, Rust, and more. 

As a reminder, rollups are a type of off-chain scaling solution that takes a bunch of user transactions, bundles them up (rolls them up), computes them off-chain, and then the results of the computations and data are stored on-chain (on the base layer the rollups is built on top of). 

Most rollups we’re accustomed to today are general-purpose rollups, such as Arbitrum and Optimism. The problem with general-purpose blockchains however is that dapps are sharing computational resources and blockspace with one another. Aside from this, dapps under a general-specific rollup have to abide by the rules of that rollup, for example, having to use the EVM within Arbitrum. That being said, there has been a big pivot towards favoring application-specific rollups now. With app-specific rollups, each dapp is its own rollup, meaning it gets its own blockspace, it can set its own rules, and much more, rather than being tied to the rules of a general purpose rollup. 

The problem however is having to build your own rollup from the ground up. This is where rollup framework solutions like Stackr come into play. 

What is Stackr

Stackr provides developers with different modular components that can be put together to build a rollup that suits the specific needs of each individual team. In other words, each team can build its own customized, dedicated rollup (execution environment) in minutes, rather than in months or years. This means you only focus on your dapp, not on how the underlying cryptography works. 

Over time, the Stackr team will add more and more modules for developers to choose between, such as, do you want to use fraud proofs or zk-proofs, or do you want a sovereign rollup or a settled rollup, etc. 

Each rollup within the Stackr ecosystem will be able to have seamless interoperability with each other thanks to the use of a “shared aggregator”. You can think of the aggregator as a bundler. In short, this shared aggregator receives a bunch of data from different apps (rollups), bundles that data, and submits it on-chain. So, a dapp written in Python for example, will be able to communicate with a JavaScript written dapp, or with a C written dapp, etc. You can see a visual example of how this will look down below:

How are they different than others?

If you’ve been following Modular Media for a while now, you’ll know that there are several teams working on making rollups accessible to all.

That said, there are generally two different approaches teams are taking. There are teams like Caldera and AltLayer who are working on rollups-as-a-service. This approach compares to a hosting company - you just deploy your contract in a single click (usually) and they take care of managing your rollup and everything. On the other hand, there are teams like Rollkit and Stackr who are building Rollup SDKs. These are not 1-click solutions that take care of managing your rollup or hosting, but rather, they provide developers with a set of modules that developers can choose between (a fraud proof module or zk-proof module for example). This does require a bit more developer experience, however, the reward is more control over your rollup. 

However, Stackr separates itself from the rest of the pack even further by being the only solution focused on bringing traditional web2 programming languages to web3, such as Python and JavaScript. 

As we can see from the images below, there’s a big discrepancy between the number of web2 developers vs web3. Rather than continuing to try and bring web2 to web3, Stackr is taking the approach of taking web3 to web2, by using the tools most developers are already familiar with.

What’s next

According to the team, “the SDK will also be as flexible as possible regarding proofs (fraud and validity), rollup types (classic and sovereign), ordering (centralized and decentralized), and base layers”. Of course, not all these modules will be rolled out from day one, as these things take time to build. 

Stackr is a relatively new project. If you want to stay up to date with everything going on within this ecosystem, make sure to give them a follow on Twitter, and keep up with their Mirror page. Of course, we’ll make sure to keep you updated on all of Stackr’s latest milestones along the way.

They are also hiring! Join Stackr

Intmax raises $5M to build a stateless zk-rollup

On April 13th, Intmax announced a $5 million seed round in order to build a stateless zk-rollup. This round included several capital fund investors, such as HashKey Capital, Bitscale Capital, and others, as well as angel investors like Justin Drake from the Ethereum Foundation, and Scott Moore, founder of Gitcoin. 

Intmax is a relatively new project that is being developed by a company located in Switzerland called Ryodan Systems. 

Over the past year, CEO Leona Hioki has been publishing posts on the Ethereum Research forum where he shares details on some of the mechanisms behind what is now Intmax, including:

• A post about a zk-rollup with no transaction history data

• A post about the pre-consensus mechanism

• & several others, which you can find here (of course, keep in mind that not all of them may be related to Intmax specifically). 

Intmax intends to bring hyper-scaling and privacy to the Ethereum community. What makes Intmax such an exciting project to many prominent people in the space, such as Justin Drake, is the fact that Intmax is one of, if not the only, team working on a hybrid zk-rollup/plasma solution. 

Intmax is a stateless rollup

While in general, zk-rollups do provide us with increased scalability for Ethereum, there still lies a bottleneck with data costs. In fact, over 90% of Ethereum rollup costs come from posting data to the L1. 

Intmax uses a new architecture, where the end-users and node operators communicate with each other under the hood. This is what makes them stateless. 

Essentially, when a user submits a transaction on Intmax, a node operator returns a “Merkle proof” of their asset. In short, a Merkle proof is a way to prove that a particular transaction is included in a block without having to provide the entire block. Using a Merkle proof, a user could calculate a “Merkle root” for a specific block and confirm that it matches the one in the block header provided by the node operator. 

“Thanks to this online communication, no transaction history is required to be stored on-chain for contract execution, thus the gas cost on Intmax is reduced massively (95% cost savings over typical zkRollups!).”

Privacy by default

Because the system doesn’t have to post data on-chain, users are able to have privacy by default. We should note that while zero-knowledge proofs do provide privacy-enabling features, not all zk-rollups employ this privacy feature. Most still use zk-rollups strictly for increased scalability. 

This means features like customized privacy for NFTs, potentially introducing new forms of private authentication for Ethereum users. 

What’s next

Intmax is expected to launch its alpha version on Ethereum mainnet in Q2 this year, with a full mainnet launch expected to happen sometime in Q4 2023. 

One thing to note is that the team mentioned their sequencer will be decentralized from day 1 of the full mainnet launch. Specifically, the team mentioned that anyone will be able to participate and get rewarded for block mining as soon as this becomes available. Of course, benefits that come with a decentralized sequencer include censorship resistance, increased interoperability between dapps, MEV decentralization, and more. 

Intmax is still a very young project. If you wish to stay updated with everything they are building, make sure to follow them on Twitter or on their Medium account, where they seem to post most of their attest updates. Of course, we’ll make sure to keep you updated with any big updates that come from Intmax as well.

More News & Announcements

• The AltLayer Launchpad is now open to all for a free trial

• Phase 3 of Celestia’s Blockspace Race officially begins

• Uniswap wallet is now available for download on Apple store in most countries 

• StarkWare announces their investment in Unstoppable Games, a web3 game studio, just officially announced that “Influence”, a space-themed MMO game that is already quite popular within the StarkNet community. The game’s first NFT sale took place on April 11th, and the game is expected to launch this summer. 

• StarkWare announces investment in “Influence”, a space-themed MMO game that is already quite popular within the StarkNet community.

• Speaking of StarkNet games, the Realms team just announced Realms Autonomous Worlds, something they have been working on for 18 months now. Learn all about these digital worlds in the thread linked above. 

• “Expectium Protocol is the first decentralized information market project on Starknet”. This dapp essentially allows users to vote on real-world outcomes (a predictions market).

• Last week, Vitalik joined members of the StarkWare team to discuss “Why Cairo” (StarkWare’s native programming language”). Here’s an article that goes over key points from that conversation. 

• StarkTokyo conference was held this past weekend. For those that couldn’t attend, @Nurstar wrote this thread that summarizes everything 

• DIA has integrated its oracle solutions with zkSync Era testnet 

• Cielo Finance, an analytics platform for EVM chains, is now live on zkSync Era 

• Symbiosis has integrated zkSync Era into its platform, allowing users to start swapping and farming on the network directly from the Symbiosis app. 

• Lodestar, Arbtitrum’s native money market is now live, with initial support for $MAGIC, $plvGLP, & $DPX.

• Rebase is expanding its AR/NFT technology to the Arbitrum network, as it looks to start its multi-chain journey. Rebase describes itself as a web3 “Pokemon Go” like application. 

• Pocket Buff announces that the upcoming launch of their MMORPG Sword & Magic World web3 game will take place on the Arbitrum network 

• Fuel, a modular execution network, just launched its dApp template, “a toolkit to build decentralized apps on Fuel” using built-in components and configurations, while also allowing developers to integrate different out-of-the-box features, like a “Fuel browser wallet connection”.

• A couple of members from the Fuel community just launched this community-led ecosystem directory, allowing you to check out the 30+ projects live on the network so far. 

• The Scroll team launched a new Twitter account that is entirely dedicated to all project and ecosystem activity (project launches, etc.). The Scroll team also added a new ecosystem page on its website, allowing you to check out some of the dapps that have been deployed on the network so far. 

• Biconomy helped bring the first Account Abstraction application to Mantle’s L2 network. “Devs can now leverage Biconomy’s full Web3 UX stack to unlock the full power of AA for their end users”.

• Saga announces a partnership with Ava Labs, for the automated deployment of Subnets. Saga focuses on making blockspace easily available to teams across different networks.

• Last week we mentioned Saga’s launch of the Cassio testnet, Saga’s first Chainlet deployment. Cassio has already managed to achieve great success - you can check out the numbers here.

• Users can now bridge between Caldera rollups, and other connected L1s, following a partnership with Hyperlane’s interoperability protocol. Teams can start reaching out to Caldera to integrate a bridge into their Caldera chain. 

• Caldera announces a partnership with Giant Leap, a web3 gaming studio, to bring the launch of their “Underverse” game to its own application-specific rollup. 

• For anyone interested in all the latest developments across the Caldera ecosystem, check out this Q1 report the team just published. 

• @Colludingnode and Rollkit introduce “lazy sequencing”

• Members of the Rollkit team introduced lazy sequencing. Here’s an eight-minute video that details the mechanism. 

• Celestia’s first “Modular Fellows Cohort program” has just concluded. There were ten fellows total in this three-month program, and each had to build their own application on a modular chain. Here’s a recap of what they built. 

• The Informal Systems team just published this March update for the Cosmos Hub. 

• The Stride team published a proposal on whether or not the protocol should adopt interchain security. The proposal has been published on both the Stride and Cosmos Hub governance forums, for community members to start voting on. 

• The Interchain Foundation published its Annual report for 2022. Learn about everything that has transpired across the Cosmos ecosystem this past year.

📚 Discourse & Education

Rollup fees vs. Solana fees

Logan Jastremski from Frictionless Capital suggests that Ethereum and rollup communities are delusional in thinking EIP-4844 and Danksharding will drop rollup fees below Solana fees.

Why is he claiming this, and is he correct?

His argument focuses on two suboptimal aspects of Ethereum relative to Solana:

• Lower data availability (AKA data throughput)

• Lack of parallelization (AKA compute throughput)

Data throughput, in a rollup context, refers to how much data can be posted to the base layer. If rollups can process a lot of data but the base layer can only handle a little data, there’s a bottleneck and fees will spike. A similar dynamic applies to compute throughput.

So how does Ethereum handle compute and data throughput to keep fees down in a rollup world? Is it possible?

As we know, Ethereum tackles compute throughput by offloading the work to rollups. You can run a highly parallelized rollup on Ethereum, with local fee markets to solve the compute throughput problem just as Solana does. In fact, you can even run a Solana rollup on Ethereum that has less overhead than L1 Solana. The extra overhead comes from L1 Solana having to pass around a bunch of messages for consensus, as L1s do. A Solana rollup, even a decentralized one, likely wouldn’t need to pass around as many messages.

Of course, this only scratches the surface of what’s possible with rollups. You can innovate on the Solana rollup, for example enhancing the local fee market mechanism or trying new mechanisms to address state contention. Or you can experiment with different approaches to rollup leader election / consensus. Better yet, multiple developers can try multiple experiments in parallel.

Ok, what about data throughput? This is the other piece of the puzzle, and a separate problem to solve.

Dankrad points to the answer in his response, but we’ve also covered the topic in previous issues:

• How much can DA throughput scale?

• How will base layers differentiate?

The bottom line is that Ethereum and other modular base layers like Celestia will treat data throughput as a governable parameter and increase hardware requirements as needed, while retaining trust-minimization and security properties.

How do we reconcile Logan and Ethereum community POVs?

Like many Solana ecosystem discussions, Logan’s post assumes Ethereum’s very near-term data throughput - that is Ethereum’s data throughput within the next few months. His post also assumes the execution layer being used to address compute throughput is the EVM. There are ways to parallelize the EVM, but it’s almost besides the point. There are countless ways to innovate with different execution environments and state contention mechanisms. The beauty of rollups, open innovation and a massive design space.

More Discourse & Education

1. 0xResearch releases an episode “Why Crypto’s Future is Modular”, covering modular interoperability, light clients, settlement assurances and more with Nick from Celestia 🔥

2. @barnabemonnot writes an article exploring how to engineer protocol credibility

3. @0xJim writes an article explaining how bridging changes from the monolithic to modular world, soft confirmations, shared security and more 💎

4. Bell Curve releases an episode discussing MEV economics and relayer monetization with Matt from Blocknative

5. @chainyoda hosts a Twitter Space discussing what zkIBC is and why it matters for zkEVMs with Garvit from Electron Labs and Jack from Strangelove

6. @_bfarmer explains why optimistic rollups don’t work well for L3s and how 3rd party bridges don’t work well during periods of volatility 🧠

7. @analyticalali creates an MEV market map, segmenting the space into three main categories (infrastructure, solutions, applications) and many helpful subcategories - read the full article here 💎

8. @bkiepuszewski explains the difference between two rollup roles: Sequencers and Validators

9. Blockworks Research breaks down different approaches to MEV, including Skip Protocol’s Skip Select / Skip Secure as well as @EffortCapital’s sovereign MEV vision

10. @Data_Always writes an article exploring how successful staking protocols could negatively impact Ethereum’s monetary policy

11. @ezwillstarr writes an article exploring the math behind ETH staking and potential consequences

12. @BecauseBitcoin hosts a Twitter Space discussing liquid staking derivatives, data availability and restaker privacy with Sreeram from EigenLayer and @SnoringPokemon

13. Ether.fi hosts a Twitter Space discussing the Ethereum Sheppella upgrade and liquid staking with Sreeram from EigenLayer

14. @ShivanshuMadan explains sovereign rollups and how Sovereign Labs unlocks cross-rollup composability

15. @0xShivani explains the speed and efficiency benefits of sovereign rollups, referencing the recent 0xResearch episode with Sovereign Labs

16. Celestia writes an article on “How modular blockchains create a world of abundance”, creating a flywheel between apps, blockspace and light nodes

17. @0xRainandCoffee summarizes their recent article on “Modular MEV”, covering where the input for MEV comes from

18. @doganeth_en explains the differences between Account Abstraction and MPC wallets, including helpful examples and comparisons

19. @AlexGuuu breaks down the benefits of rollup-as-a-service solutions and Caldera

20. @expctchaos highlights user and adoption stats after two weeks of Polygon zkEVM

21. @odin_free creates an updated map of the Starknet ecosystem

22. @0xidanlevin explains how culture can be a strategic differentiator, even for zkEVMs

23. @JoshCStein walks through the ideas behind “lazy sequencing”

24. @0xjaypeg explains EIP-4844 in simple terms

25. @zarboq walks through the basic building blocks of Cairo programming

26. @nickwh8te proposes the idea for a modular blockchain wallet 💡

27. Eclipse breaks down rollups for beginners

28. CryptoSapiens hosts a Twitter Space discussing the basics and state of L2s with Bartek from L2Beat, @ddwchen from Rehash and Isaac from Token Engineering Commons

29. @seunlanlege writes an article explaining polynomial commitments as the foundation for ZK-SNARKS (not for beginners lol)

30. Taiko writes an article explaining PLONK, SNARKS and more

31. @SalomonCrypto explains how EigenLayer enables a new category of services

32. @adietrichs suggests that “danksharding” might be a misleading name (due to using the word sharding), rather than something like “data availability scaling” 🤔

That's all for this week! Thanks for reading 🧱🎬

If you found this useful, please like and retweet this tweet so more people can see it!

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.

📣 News & Announcements

Eigen Layer Launches 1st Testnet Stage

EigenLayer

@eigenlayer

We are excited to announce the release of the testnet for the first stage of the EigenLayer protocol, which supports liquid and native restaking.

Please read the full details here: blog.eigenlayer.xyz/stage-1-testne…

1/8

1,729

10:30 PM • Apr 6, 2023

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 (Lido’s liquid staking token), or rETH (Rocket Pool’s 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 Eigen’s “early builders”. Another thing to note is that this testnet will not be incentivized.

How to get started

Here’s 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, you’ll need to swap your gETH for either rETH (Rocket Pool) or stETH (Lido). Here we’ll 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 “Rocket Pool Ether”, enter the amount of rETH you wish to restake, and hit deposit. That’s 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 “opt-in” 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 I’m building an oracle, I can have the same people securing mainnet Ethereum also secure my oracle.

Ultimately, the buyers decide what they’re willing to pay for this shared security, whether it’s through some sort of fee percentage or block rewards. If restakers like what you’re offering, they’ll 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 Mantle’s L2 network. We’re looking forward to full mainnet launch (hopefully later this year), and are excited to see what people start building with Eigen Layer.

Astria Shares Details on its Shared Sequencer Network

Astria

@AstriaOrg

We can now replace centralized sequencers.

Introducing Astria’s shared sequencer network.

blog.astria.org

Introducing Astria: The Shared Sequencer Network

Astria replaces centralized sequencers, allowing many rollups to share a single decentralized network of sequencers that’s simple and permissionless to join. This shared sequencer network provides...

438

6:34 PM • Apr 4, 2023

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 Astria’s sequencing network, just as any rollup will be able to leverage these sequencer nodes.

There are several benefits that will come with Astria’s 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, “this 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 block”.

Astria EVM

On the same day, Astria announced the launch of Astria EVM, which is the first rollup to adopt Astria’s sequencing network. 

Astria EVM will leverage “the shared sequencer network for fast, censorship-resistant transaction ordering, and Celestia for data availability”. The goal is to help bootstrap Celestia’s 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 “a test case for how to best integrate rollups with our shared sequencer network”.

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 “as a hub for liquidity and bridging”.

What’s Next

Astria also announced a $5.5M raise, in a seed round that was led by Maven11, and featured other participants like Delphi Digital. 

It looks like Astria is approaching its devnet launch soon, with more updates expected to be announced over the coming weeks.

More News & Announcements

• It looks like a privacy-enabled rollup is coming to Scroll

• Arbitrum’s 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.

• “10M OP was awarded through RetroPGF Round 2 to the builders and educators whose impact is essential to growing the Optimism Ecosystem”

• “10M OP was awarded through RetroPGF Round 2 to the builders and educators whose impact is essential to growing the Optimism Ecosystem” 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. 

• 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 Labs’ recent hackathon event.

• Here’s a thread that details MicroChain, a trading platform native to Fuel

• SwaySwap is now live on Fuel’s Beta-3 testnet 

• 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 “Space Falcon” will be building a web3 gaming hub on Mantle.

• Here’s a “mega thread” about the 33 hackathon winners from the recent zkHack event.

• Taiko just published “zk-Roller-Coaster #2”, 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.

• Here’s an update on Taiko’s alpha-2 testnet. “It covers highlights like 126 unique provers and counting, and issues like protocol economics design flaws”.

• “Announcing the first ever Injective Global Hackathon and Grant DAO Round 1”

• Polymer, who are helping expand IBC across more than just the Cosmos ecosystem, just published an article introducing zkTree, “a structure to optimize recursive proofing of zk proofs.”

• Users can now start joining the Eigen Layer Discord server!

• Connext just published this thread highlighting their modular interoperability design.

• Dovish AMM, DeBank’s 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.

📚 Discourse & Education

Are trust-minimized bridges real?

Jon Charbonneau

@jon_charb

15

6:41 AM • Apr 6, 2023

CT cannot seem to reach consensus on key terminology. We have simply shifted the battlefield from trustless to trust-minimized 😅

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 “clusters” article.

Definition: “trust-minimized bridging specifically means bridges that do not require an honest majority assumption for state validity.”

Let’s overlay this definition onto the week’s discourse.

Takes deep breath

Bridging between L1s

Anatoly from Solana suggests a design for L1-to-L1 bridging that is “pretty close to 1/N security”. 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 “the right to update the remote chains state root on the local chain is auctioned off on the local chain”.

So, should this design be considered trust-minimized bridging?

We’d argue no. There is 1/N security for detecting fraud, which is great, but there’s formal governance needed to decide where the coins should go. This introduces an honest majority assumption.

toly 🇺🇸

@aeyakovenko

Yep, no way to avoid adding some majority assumptions.

34

3:14 PM • May 31, 2022

IBC bridging

Henry from Penumbra suggests that we’ve had trust-minimized bridging in the form of IBC for two years. The logic is as follows:

hdevalence.bsky.social 🌘

@hdevalence

it’s definitionally trust-minimized: if you trust your ability to transact on chain A, and your ability to transact on chain B, you can transact between A and B without any additional trust assumptions

3

6:02 AM • Apr 6, 2023

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 chain’s validator set agrees on.

So, should IBC be considered trust-minimized bridging?

We’d 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 chain’s validators can steal your funds - even if you run nodes for both chains.

Turbocharged IBC bridging

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, we’d still argue no. This gets to the core of both Mustafa’s and Vitalik’s articles on cross-chain bridging. There are fundamental challenges when dealing with multiple validator sets. Toghrul from Scroll explains it well:

Toghrul Maharramov📜 🇺🇦

@toghrulmaharram

Also, even if you prove the correctness of the state of the chain B when bridging back to chain A, you still have to make an honesty assumption to accept that the proved state belongs to a canonical chain.

4

8:57 AM • Apr 6, 2023

Even if state transitions are SNARKed, you still need an honest majority assumption to decide on the canonical state. Sigh.

Turbocharged IBC bridging between sovereign rollups

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 there’s one validator set?

Another deep breath Can turbocharged IBC between sovereign rollups be considered trust-minimized bridging?

We’d 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, it’s not QUITE that simple. There are still challenges that make this hard in practice, but we’ll save that for another day.

More Discourse & Education

• @karsenthil walks through a “Middleware Thesis”, covering why middleware will the unexpected star of the modular design

• 0xResearch releases an episode “The Cosmos SDK of Rollups” 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 🔥

• Espresso Systems writes an article explaining “Sequencing Decentralization and Liveness”

• @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 🤔

• @_bfarmer explains why “Polygon zkEVM is the closest thing to Ethereum blockspace”

• Injective hosts a Twitter Space discussing Cascade, the first interchain Solana SVM rollup

• Bell Curve releases an episode “Shining A Light on MEV” 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 - here’s 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 “RollApp Economics and Governance”

• @hudsonjameson explains hashing in simple terms

• Chainstack hosts a Twitter Space discussing Cartesi’s Linux OS with the Cartesi team

• The Defiant releases an episode “KZG Duo Summons the Ethereum Roadmap” with Trent and Carl from the Ethereum Foundation

• Chris Blec hosts a Twitter Space debating Arbitrum decentralization - let’s play devil’s advocate

• Empire releases an episode “ETH L2s Have The Same Flaws as Alt L1s” 

• @ArtCatDAO summarizes a recent article by @dlubarov titled “A comparison of zkEVMs”

• @colludingnode offers a simple definition for “node”

• @jon_charb, @colludingnode, @CantelopePeel and others explore the implications of many enshrined vs. independent rollups

• Saga hosts a Twitter Spacing discussing “The ultimate blockchain toolkit” with Jim from Saga and Kevin from Uniblock

• Starknet hosts a Twitter Space discussing “The rise of web3 gaming”

• @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 🧱🎬

If you found this useful, please like and retweet this post on Twitter so more people can see it:

Modular Media 🧱🎬

@modularmedia_

Excited to share another week of updates from the modular blockchain ecosystem!

Check out Weekly Rollup #9

modularmedia.substack.com

Weekly Rollup #9

For the week ending April 7th

60

7:05 PM • Apr 11, 2023

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.

📣 News & Announcements

Modular Summit

Modular Summit

@modular_summit

Mark your calendars

230

12:11 PM • Mar 28, 2023

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.

Polygon Launches zkEVM

Polygon (Labs)

@0xPolygonLabs

TODAY’S THE DAY TUNE IN FOR THE LAUNCH OF zkEVM MAINNET BETA

Join Polygon Labs and @ETHGlobal for this momentous occasion and witness Ethereum co-creator, @VitalikButerin perform the symbolic FIRST transaction.

ethglobal.com

ETHGlobal | Polygon ZK Day 2.0

Onboarding thousands of developers into the Ethereum ecosystem.

1,068

9:15 AM • Mar 27, 2023

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.

Announcing Conduit: Deploy on the Optimism Superchain in Just a Few Minutes

Conduit

@conduitxyz

1/ Announcing Conduit, a crypto native infrastructure platform. Launch a rollup in just a few clicks (built on the OP Stack and powered by Optimism)

We’re live on mainnet. DM us to get set up today, it takes less than 5 minutes to get up and running.

527

11:03 AM • Mar 28, 2023

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.

Caldera Deploys Two New Testnets

Caldera

@Calderaxyz

Caldera Testnets are live!

We're thrilled to share we've opened two public testnets to showcase the power of Caldera chains!

mirror.xyz

Unveiling Caldera's Public Testnets

We are excited to share that Caldera has officially opened two public testnets!

211

2:33 PM • Mar 30, 2023

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.

Phase 2 of Celestia’s Blockspace Race Has Begun

Celestia

@CelestiaOrg

Phase 2 of the Blockspace Race has begun

Now marks the start of participation for bridge nodes, full storage nodes, and light nodes.

The bonus phase is also now in play. Participants can complete bonus tasks for extra points!

388

12:09 PM • Mar 29, 2023

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.

Solana, Meet IBC

Eclipse

@EclipseFND

Eclipse and @Injective_ launch Cascade: the first interchain Solana SVM!

Solana dApps can now be built and utilized on Injective, bringing @solana and @cosmos interoperability to new heights

Dive deeper on our blog: eclipse.builders/blog/cascade-d…

415

9:15 AM • Mar 30, 2023

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.

More News & Announcements

• 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.

📚 Discourse & Education

Distinguishing rollup SDKs from RaaS

Mustafa Al-Bassam

@musalbas

I think we should define clearly the difference between rollup frameworks and rollups as a service:

Rollup frameworks: software used to build rollups, eg OP stack, Rollkit, Sov SDK.

Rollups as a service: hosting provider for deploying and running a rollup, eg Caldera, Eclipse.

80

5:23 AM • Mar 25, 2023

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:

Scott Sunarto @ NYC 🗽

@smsunarto

At the last @RollkitDev call, I used the GNU/Linux ecosystem as a metaphor to explain the modular blockchain building blocks.

Here's a tl;dr. A thread

1/n

Mustafa Al-Bassam

@musalbas

I think we should define clearly the difference between rollup frameworks and rollups as a service:

Rollup frameworks: software used to build rollups, eg OP stack, Rollkit, Sov SDK.

Rollups as a service: hosting provider for deploying and running a rollup, eg Caldera, Eclipse.

55

12:57 AM • Mar 27, 2023

RWAs on sovereign rollups

VelvetMilkman🥛

@VelvetMilkman

RWAs should be issued on sovereign rollups or sovereign rollapps.

At least today, RWAs should require some amount of control (& censorship) capabilities by the issuing party.

Regulations likely insist on federated chains and centralized sequencing for the foreseeable future.

22

8:43 AM • Mar 25, 2023

Elijah 🎏

@PossibltyResult

Great point by @VelvetMilkman

Tldr- Sovereign rollups are better for enterprise applications (than smart contract rollups) bc the "fork choice rule" will be whichever instance the company is maintaining (via withdrawals, code updates...)

VelvetMilkman🥛

@VelvetMilkman

RWAs should be issued on sovereign rollups or sovereign rollapps.

At least today, RWAs should require some amount of control (& censorship) capabilities by the issuing party.

Regulations likely insist on federated chains and centralized sequencing for the foreseeable future.

17

5:28 PM • Mar 25, 2023

@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:

VelvetMilkman🥛

@VelvetMilkman

There are tons of reasons for this: greater access, diversification, improved transparency, 24/7 settlement… the fact that something is KYC and permissioned isn’t my favorite. But if everything is onchain, than it can’t all be unregulated synthetics in the short/medium term

1

8:27 AM • Mar 26, 2023

Elijah 🎏

@PossibltyResult

verifiability

Elijah 🎏

@PossibltyResult

Re-org resistance, liveness

2

9:14 PM • Mar 25, 2023

How much can DA throughput scale?

DinoEggs 🧱🎬

@0xDinoEggs

Is Ethereum’s DA end goal actually 1.3 MB/s? If not, how might throughput evolve over time?

@dankrad @sreeramkannan @jon_charb @apolynya @toghrulmaharram

Logan Jastremski

@LoganJastremski

Great podcast!

What are your thought on Ethereum end goal of DA at 1.3MB/s? Do you think it will be a problem?

17

6:14 PM • Mar 28, 2023

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:

polynya

@apolynya

There's no "end goal", data throughput is up-only as bandwidth becomes cheaper and there are more sampling nodes + distributed builders

1.3 MB/s was just an early target spec

The endgame bottleneck is actually history

polynya.mirror.xyz/EpFL1V1amxa8ma…

24

10:28 PM • Mar 28, 2023

Jon Charbonneau

@jon_charb

the spec can be changed as demand requires/tech permits to remain as decentralized as desired given improvements over time

as of rn 1.3 mb/s is far more than is needed unless you want it to be spam (would be 10s of thousands of TPS)

Jon Charbonneau

@jon_charb

This is a detailed functional Ethereum model including long-term roadmap items

Flexible to easily run any scenarios/timing (eg, when 4844, danksharding, rollup data compression rates, staking rates, fees, MEV burn, issuance, etc)

docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d…

6

6:26 PM • Mar 28, 2023

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.

Jon Charbonneau

@jon_charb

eth could optimize for jacking up the 4844 spec if it wanted to from the start to many mb/s, or do 4488 and jack that up too instead, but itd be entirely unnecessary and detrimental to decentralization

1

6:33 PM • Mar 28, 2023

More Discourse & Education

• 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:

Modular Media 🧱🎬

@modularmedia_

Excited to share another week of updates from the modular blockchain ecosystem!

Check out Weekly Rollup #8

modularmedia.substack.com

Weekly Rollup #8

For the week ending March 31st

25

12:01 PM • Apr 4, 2023

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 below:

https://modularmedia.substack.com

Weekly Rollup #6

Welcome to Modular Media, a weekly newsletter covering news, updates, educational content, and more within the modular ecosystem. You can check out our previous newsletter issue below: This week's newsletter was made possible by Celestia, the first modular blockchain network. Celestia is a data availability solution that is in charge of receiving, ordering, and storing transaction data.

📣 News & Announcements

zkSync brings the first zkEVM to mainnet

zkSync ∎

@zksync

gm zkEVM!

zkSync Era Mainnet Alpha is now open to all users.
Developers, projects, and users can now experience the power of zkEVM.

Read more: blog.matter-labs.io/gm-zkevm-171b1…

1/11

16.3K

9:01 AM • Mar 24, 2023

This past Friday, zkSync announced the official launch of their zkEVM on mainnet. zkEVM’s have been viewed as the holy grail for Ethereum scaling for quite some time now, and although we have several projects working on their own version of a zkEVM today (Polygon, Scroll, Taiko, etc.), it wasn’t until zkSync that we finally see one hit mainnet. 

How we got here

You may have heard of two different versions of zkSync - Lite and Era. 

zkSync Lite was the first zk-rollup that was launched by the team back in December 2020, but was only meant for simple payments. Two years later they announced their plan to launch their own zkEVM, in what was eventually dubbed as zkSync Era.

The existing mainnet smart contract for this zkEVM (Era), was first deployed about six months ago (we should note Era was launched on testnet for about a year prior to this first mainnet contract launch). This was an internal launch (team only) that was meant to stress test the network while audits for the code base were also being done. Then, on February 16th 2022, zkSync launched the first onboarding phase for Era, where registered projects had the chance to start building and deploying on the network. This means that up until today, Era was completely closed off from users and unregistered projects, however, starting today Era will be completely permissionless and open to anyone, whether you’re a team looking to deploy your project, or a regular user that just wants to start interacting with the dapps on the ecosystem.

What is a zkEVM why should I care?

A zkEVM is essentially a zk-rollup that supports “zero knowledge” proofs while also being compatible with the Ethereum virtual machine (EVM). 

Up until this launch, we’ve only been accustomed to seeing EVM-based “optimistic rollups” (Arbitrum, Optimism, etc.), which use “fraud proofs” as opposed to “zk-proofs”. While optimistic rollups bring us sufficient scalability for today’s landscape, they have one main drawback - finality times.

When you submit your transaction on an optimistic rollup, that transaction is considered, well, optimistic. This means that your transaction is considered valid unless another user proves otherwise (via a fraud-proof) within a seven-day “challenge period”. Only after your transaction goes through this challenge period is it considered final. While third-party solutions can be built to reduce this finality time, at the end of the day it’ll require the addition of an extra trusted party. 

zk-rollups on the other hand don’t have this long finality time drawback. Transactions under a zk-rollup can only be considered valid if they are accompanied by a zk-proof. What this all means is that we don’t have to wait seven days to withdraw our funds from the rollup (without introducing a third-party). Because there is no challenge period for zk-rollups, there is also no need to post all transaction data on-chain, which is another advantage of zk-rollups. 

That being said, the initial launch of zkSync Era has a 24-hour withdrawal period, as they look to make sure everything runs smoothly before ultimately getting rid of this withdrawal period altogether.

What’s the difference between Era & other zkEVM’s?

According to the team, other zkEVMs focused on maximum Ethereum compatibility, whereas zkSync focused more on optimal performance. Some of the features this allowed zkSync to add include:

• Native Account Abstraction: zkSync began developing their zkEVM with native account abstraction in mind, rather than other zkEVM solutions today that will be implementing this feature through EIP-4337. 

• Data Compression, & more 

You can learn more about these differences here if you’re interested.

How to get started using Era

To start playing around with the network as a user, simply:

• add the zkSync Era network to your wallet 

• bridge funds from Ethereum mainnet to zkSync Era

• start interacting with zkSync’s ecosystem of dapps

Of course, keep in mind that this is an alpha version still, so use with caution and do not bridge your entire funds yet.

For any developers looking to get started with building on the network, feel free to check out the docs.

If you want to learn more about zkSync Era and what it has to offer, you can check out the complete article here, or listen to the Twitter Space the team held following the launch. 

Polygon x Immutable

Immutable - $IMX

@Immutable

Immutable @0xPolygon

We are joining forces in an industry-defining partnership to accelerate the development and adoption of web3 gaming. The future of gaming begins today with the announcement of the Immutable zkEVM, powered by Polygon.

immutable.com/?referral=&utm…

2,713

2:04 PM • Mar 20, 2023

As you may have already heard, this year's Game Developers Conference took place this past week, from the 20th - 24th. On the first day of the event, two of the biggest crypto gaming powerhouses in the space, Immutable & Polygon, announced a joint partnership to launch Immutable zkEVM.

What is Immutable zkEVM

Immutable zkEVM is “a new EVM-compatible ZK-rollup powered by Polygon technology”.

As you may have heard, Polygon will be launching its official zkEVM mainnet on the 27th. Immutable will essentially have its own zkEVM for its own ecosystem, dedicated solely to its gaming ecosystem. This zkEVM will be MATIC staked, with the validators on Polygon earning gas fees as a reward for their service. This gas fee on the Immutable zkEVM by the way, will be paid with the IMX token, adding an extra source of utility for Immutable’s token. We should also mention that they’ll be announcing three new additional token utility functions over the next couple of weeks, so keep an eye out for that. 

The really cool thing about all of this however, is the fact that other games won’t be deploying directly on Immutable’s zkEVM itself, but rather, each game will be able to deploy its own, entirely separate zkEVM (their own L3 under the Immutable zkEVM). So for example, rather than Activision, Yuga, and Gods Unchained deploying beside one another on the same rollup, each one will instead have its own dedicated zk-rollup. This provides extreme scalability, which is ultimately what games need.

We can refer to these specific game zkEVMs as L3s, which are connected to the Immutable zkEVM. Projects that deploy their own zkEVM on top of Immutable are interoperable with one another and can be custom-built for each specific game, such as using your own network’s gas token.

Ultimately, Immutable zkEVM settles back to Ethereum L1, not Polygon PoS, while the other projects that deploy on top of Immutable zkEVM (the L3s) settle on Immutable’s zkEVM.

Two web3 gaming powerhouses join forces

Immutable and Polygon are probably the biggest crypto-gaming companies in the space. In the case of Polygon, the network is home to the most amount of gaming companies (Atari, Sandbox, etc.), while Immutable is the biggest game-centered company in the space, as shown by their top-tier crypto games (Illuvium) and strong IP partnerships (Tik-Tok, GameStop, etc.). In fact, you may have seen this chart circulating around, showing how both of these companies combined form the majority of all web3 gaming funding:

As we can see from the chart, Polygon and Immutable are by far, investing the most amount of funds in the space.

How is Immutable zkEVM different than Immutable X?

As you may already know, Immutable currently has its own chain, Immutable X, on top of StarkEx (built by StarkWare). 

The main difference between the two is that Immutable X is built on an “app-specific” rollup, meaning it is bound to the certain set of features StarkEx provides. Specifically, this StarkEx chain is specialized for NFT minting, so although users get massive scale with zero fees, the dapps themselves lack smart contract flexibility. 

With Immutable zkEVM, Immutable games will now be able to add their own unique smart contact functions, beyond what was originally available.

What is Immutable?

Immutable is a platform for building web3 games on Ethereum. Although they were originally deployed on StarkEx, this new partnership with Polygon now introduces the platform to an entirely new ecosystem of web3 games.

Immutable can be viewed as a middleware service for web3 games. They provide a wide set of features and services for developers, including:

To learn more about this new partnership, you can check out the complete article here.

Eclipse partners with Nautilus Chain & Hyperlane Protocol

Eclipse

@EclipseFND

Eclipse and @nautilus_chain are partnering to launch a high-throughput zk-EVM chain, featuring @RiscZero, @CelestiaOrg, and @neonlabsorg

The Nautilus chain will power a variety of applications with its modular design, from consumer to DeFi, unlocking new possibilities.

133

3:59 PM • Mar 20, 2023

Eclipse

@EclipseFND

Eclipse and @Hyperlane_xyz are excited to announce their collaboration to bring Hyperlane's Permissionless Interoperability solution to Solana Virtual Machine (SVM) based blockchains

60

2:09 PM • Mar 23, 2023

It’s been a busy couple of weeks for the Eclipse community, as they just announced their partnership with both Nautilus Chain and the Hyperlane Protocol. 

As a reminder, Eclipse is a rollup service provider, enabling developers to build and deploy their own customized, dedicated rollup (execution environment). Nautilus chain will be its own rollup deployed within the Eclipse ecosystem, while the Hyperlane Protocol will be used to enable interoperability for this rollup ecosystem.

Eclipse x Nautilus Chain

On Monday, the Nautilus team announced that they were going to leverage Eclipse’s technology in order to build their own dedicated EVM rollup to power its entire ecosystem moving forward. 

The Nautilus rollup will initially be deployed as an optimistic rollup, however, in the future, it will transition to a zk-rollup thanks to the help of RISC Zero. 

Because it’s EVM-based, developers will be able to deploy their existing Solidity contract (dapp) on top of the Nautilus rollup with relative ease. Plus, users and developers alike will be able to benefit from using the existing Ethereum tools and resources they’re used to today. That being said, although the Nautilus rollup will be EVM-based, it will still get to benefit from the high throughput capabilities provided by Solana’s virtual machine (Sealevel), as is the case with all Eclipse-powered rollups. 

Overall, the Nautilus rollup will be built to support a variety of dapps, “from consumer to defi”. Dapps that have already confirmed their future launch on the network include names like: Zebec (payments streaming platform), Poseidon Swap (DEX), Questbook (decentralized University), and 80+ more, according to the team. 

Aside from the increased throughput capabilities provided by the Solana virtual machine, Eclipse also allows the Nautilus team to add their own set of unique blockchain features. One of these added customizations included the addition of ZBC (Zebec’s native token) as the native gas token for the rollup. 

As far as data availability goes, Nautilus rollup will be using Celestia. Of course, the beauty behind the modular design is that each execution environment can switch features, including its DA layer solution, over time. 

Here’s how you can connect to the network today, but keep in mind that the Nautilus rollup is currently in testnet mode. To learn more about this partnership you can check out the official article. 

Eclipse x Hyperlane

On Thursday, Eclipse announced its integration of the Hyperlane protocol, enabling permissionless interoperability between rollups and other ecosystems. 

This has been a continuous endeavor for the past several months now, as this partnership also marked the first time we see the Hyperlane Protocol extend to Solana’s virtual machine. 

According to the team, there are several benefits that come from this partnership, including:

• Enabling Eclipse rollups to communicate with other rollups and ecosystems

• “Providing a fast finality interoperability protocol for Eclipse rollups”. Finality will ultimately depend on the finality of the individual rollups involved in the communication. 

• “Establishing a mechanism for a token bridge”. Meaning tokens can be bridged to other environments to be used across different dapps. 

Prior to this partnership, Eclipse only offered interoperability with other IBC-enabled blockchains, but now Hyperlane introduces Eclipse’s rollups to the world extending beyond the IBC ecosystem. Hyperlane’s integration will allow Eclipse rollups to extend their interoperability beyond just IBC-enabled blockchains, which as of today, is centered around the Cosmos ecosystem. 

Something else Hyperlane introduces is the idea of “modular security”. Essentially, each rollup will be able to set its own security standards when it comes to interoperability with other networks. For example, rollups can add additional message validators to add extra assurances that messages are not being compromised. 

For anyone interested, you can dive into the details of the partnership here.

Taiko zk-EVM alpha 2 testnet is live

Taiko 🥁

@taikoxyz

Taiko ZK-EVM alpha-2 testnet is live! Askja

As was the case with alpha-1, it's permissonless for anyone to transact and deploy on.

The big change: it's now permissionless for provers to generate proofs!

Read the blog for full info or thread below

mirror.xyz

Taiko Alpha-2 Testnet is Live

In alpha-2 testnet, validity proofs are partially integrated and provers can join permissionlessly for real rewards.

1,353

12:53 PM • Mar 22, 2023

It was a week full of zkEVM updates, as we also had Taiko announce the launch of its second zkEVM testnet, dubbed as Askja (named after Icelandic volcano).  

This second testnet iteration introduced several new updates compared to its previous version (Alpha-1 Testnet), as we can see from Taiko’s roadmap image below.

Above, we can see the different features that are included with each specific roadmap phase (each column). 

As we can see, Taiko’s first zkEVM testnet launched in December 2022 (“Alpha-1 Testnet”). Alpha-2 Tetsnet introduced a couple of new changes, including:

• Partial integration of validity proofs

• Proposers are permissioned (permissionless during Alpha-1): before blocks can be proven, they must go through internal validity tests. Only by passing these internal tests can the block be proposed for proving. In this latest testnet version, proposers are controlled by the team, but of course will transition to permissioneless in future iterations. 

• Provers are permissionless (permissioned during Alpha-1): Once a block is proposed, it can be proven. “Currently, any prover can create proofs for proposed blocks”. 

• Protocol economics are enabled: to reward provers for their computing resources expended during proof generation, Taiko Labs is creating a reward campaign worth up to 50,000 USDC

• Alpha-2 is now connected to Ethereum testnet, Sepolia

How to get started with the network

Taiko will continue to be open to any user or developer that wants to start experimenting with the network. If you’re a user, simply: 

• Add Taiko network to your wallet

• Use the faucet to request sample tokens to use on the testnet

• Interact and swap on the Uniswap v2 fork deployed on Taiko

• View your transaction on the testnet explorer 

• Use the bridge to bridge between the L2 and Sepolia testnet 

What is Taiko

Taiko is developing an Ethereum-equivalent zk-rollup (zkEVM), meaning existing Ethereum contracts won’t have to change a line of code to deploy on Taiko. If you recall, zkSync went for different performance features, as opposed to full Ethereum equivilance. Although most of the zkEVM attention has been centered around zkSync and Polygon, Taiko is a project that every Ethereum fanatic should keep an eye on, especially as they look to launch a fully permissionless zkEVM in early 2024. We’ll go over Taiko in greater detail at a later date, but for now, you can learn more about the network here. 

Fuel’s beta 3 testnet is now live: Fuel’s third public testnet

Fuel

@fuel_network

Fuel's "Beta-3" testnet is live!

Experience new features such as P2P networking, and be a part of shaping Ethereum's future.

fuel-labs.ghost.io

Announcing “Beta-3”, Fuel’s Third Public Testnet

The new beta-3 testnet brings P2P networking, introducing the ability to run synchronizing full nodes on Fuel.

1,197

12:23 PM • Mar 20, 2023

On March 20th, Fuel announced its third testnet launch, as the network inches its way closer towards mainnet.

Fuel’s second testnet launched last November, settling over 900K transactions altogether and growing an ecosystem that now extends about 25 projects deep. 

According to the team, this third testnet (beta-3) expands on the features its previous iteration (beta-2), “introducing P2P networking and the ability to run synchronizing full nodes”.

That said, there are several other features that were added to this latest testnet version, including: 

• Compiler enhancements

• Client updates

• New developer tooling 

• Rust SDK updates 

• New Fuel Wallet enhancements on the front-end

Most of these updates were very technical and too far out of scope for this newsletter to go into detail, but thankfully the Fuel team wrote this detailed article going over each new update on a deeper level. 

How to get started with the network 

• Download and install the Fuel wallet 

• Use the faucet to request some testnet tokens 

• Explore and interact with any of the 25+ live dapps

What is Fuel

Fuel is a modular execution layer that uses its own virtual machine (FuelVM), and programming language (Sway), both of which were developed to extend on the capabilities of the EVM. The Fuel stack has the capability to function as a monolithic chain, however, Fuel v2 specifically will be built as a fraud-provable modular execution layer. The first iteration of Fuel v2 will launch as a rollup that settles on Ethereum, however, other settlement layers will be added over time (thanks to the power of modularity!). We’ll go over Fuel in greater detail at a later date, but for now, you can learn more about the network here.

More News & Announcements

• Last week, Dymension published a new paper, introducing eIBC (escrow IBC), “a novel IBC-based protocol for fast and trust-minimized bridging between Optimistic Rollups”. 

• Teams can start registering for the DAO Global Hackathon 2023 event, featuring over $120K in bounties. The event will take place from April 10 - May 7 and feature several project sponsors, including Mantle Network, Uniswap, and others. 

• Here’s the latest weekly Scroll recap thread. This week featured the unanimous passing of a proposal to launch Hop protocol on the network.

• AltLayer is among one of the 16 teams chosen (out of 400+) to join the UC Berkely Blockchain Xcelerator program this year

• Check out the new Osmosis frontend, now introducing native EVM assets to the platform, including ETH, BNB, MATIC, and more. 

• As you may recall, Arbitrum recently launched its native token, ARB. As part of the distribution phase, several Arbitrum native DAOs received their own allocation of ARB tokens. Here you can see a list of how many tokens some of these DAOs received from this. 

• Now that you have your ARB tokens, you can start participating in Arbitrum governance through the Tally platform.

• Arkham integrates the Arbitrum network into its data intelligence platform, allowing users to start accessing network data

• Here are the “recent happenings and upcoming milestones” regarding Optimism governance. 

• Covalent, a web3 data provider, announced their integration with Mantle Network, allowing developers to access the network’s testnet data “to leverage in research, dapp development, and analysis”.

• Stables announces a partnership with Mastercard & CIrcle, allowing users to spend USDC “anywhere Mastercard is accepted”

• Reports came out that Microsoft started testing an Ethereum wallet integration into the Edge browser. 

• Have you checked out this new human-readable interface for Ethereum transactions made by the Zapper team (view NFT mints, token swaps, etc. from a mobile app)

• New Starknet version makes its way to testnet, kicking off Cairo1.0 and bringing a a 5x reduction in costs. The Starknet community can now vote for this new update to make its way to mainnet launch. 

• Last week, StarkNet announced the appointment of the five committee, “each entrusted with a specific mandate that aligns with Starknet’s mission and priorities” - Provisions Committee, Early Adopter Grants Committee, Developer Partnerships Committee, Governance Committee, Ecosystem Onboarding Committee

• The StarkNet foundation announces Round 1 of its “Early Adopters Grant” (EAG). StarkNet builders can start applying for a grant today. 

• zkMeta “is creating a dedicated gaming rollup on Polygon. Era7 will be their first game launch, with at least four more title releases expected over the following months”.

• Aavegotchi announces that they’ll be launching their own Polygon Supernet, GotchiChain, providing a dedicated chain for the Aavegotchi ecosystem and community, while also adding a new use case for GHST, as it’ll start being used for gas on the supernet. 

• 0vix announces that they will be deploying on Polygon zkEVM, as they look to become the network’s native lending protocol

• OP Labs is offering $160K as part of their audit contest for the latest updates they’ve made to the Bedrock codebase

📚 Discourse & Education

WTF is MEVconomics?

ETHGlobal

@ETHGlobal

2023, ETHconomics meets MEVconomics

Together we will explore the economics of MEV with contributors across research and development.

See you on ethglobal.tv in 〜30mins!

87

11:28 AM • Mar 24, 2023

ETHGlobal and Jon Charbonneau host “MEVconomics”, seven hours of presentations and discussions about (you guessed it) MEV and economics with your favorite giga-brains ⚡🧠

It is well worth watching the event, but in case you don’t have the full afternoon free, here are our favorite summaries and related resources:

• Intern takeaways by @TarunsIntern

• Notes taken by @0xASK

• Comprehensive research guide on “Latency in MEV” by @different_mj

Jon Charbonneau

@jon_charb

Intern to @tarunchitra after this one

Tarun's intern

@TarunsIntern

1/ MEVconomics, organized by @ETHGlobal and Flashbots, took place on Friday. It was 6.5 hours of talks from the smartest researchers and builders in the space covering a wide range of topics in the MEV space.

Here are some intern takeaways (chronologically):

21

3:44 PM • Mar 26, 2023

How will base layers differentiate?

Logan Jastremski

@LoganJastremski

In Vitalik's blog post, he mentions that Block Production will trend toward larger machines over time as the industry is forced to scale

With the introduction of Light Clients, and Data Availability Sampling, all chains will have similar trust minimization for users

The…

95

10:33 AM • Mar 22, 2023

Logan Jastremski from Frictionless Capital suggests that over the long-term, base layer differentiation will come down to three things:

• Throughput

• Latency

• Full node count

He’s a big monolithic blockchain fan, yet he’s referencing Vitalik’s post - so let’s explore this 🤔

Vitalik’s post explains, as the title suggests, that the endgame for blockchain scalability is “centralized block production and decentralized block validation”. To use specific examples, he is saying both (a) Solana and (b) Ethereum + rollups end up looking similar in the end. He does a good job illustrating his thought process in the post, and it’s a pretty easy read, so we won’t attempt to summarize more here.

This brings up a natural question - if chains all take this same shape, how will they differentiate?

While Logan’s perspective has merit, we’d argue it’s missing important nuances unarticulated in Vitalik’s post:

• Verification features: Not all verification is equal. There is value in trust-minimized light nodes that can verify state in real-time, and it will likely be harder for big blockchains to accomplish this (e.g. diet clients won’t let you verify state in real-time).

• Anti-censorship features: This design space is bigger than many people think. Ethereum, for example, is likely years ahead in anti-censorship features. Think about all the optimizations (e.g. PBS, crLists, based rollups, etc.) being implemented. And if you follow MEV and rollup research, it’s clear we are just scratching the surface.

Let’s also assess his argument head on, where monolithic and modular base layers are directly competing on throughput and latency. Modular chains have a lead in full node count, but we’ll put that aside for now.

• Good enough performance: Modular architecture enables many performance workarounds, and there’s a decent chance the workarounds are good enough for many applications. One example that addresses throughput is the validium design, where rollup transaction data is stored off-chain. Logan seems to ignore the security properties and value of validiums altogether. Another example that addresses latency is rollup soft finality, which you can read more about here.

• Configurable performance: Modular base layers can treat throughput as a governance parameter and scale up when it makes sense. Mustafa makes it clear that Celestia can match Solana throughput, and it’s likely that other base layers can too (since they lean on the same cryptographic techniques).

On the topic of base layer comparisons, Alex Beckett from Celestia wrote a great forum post comparing DA layers across key metrics.

Alex Beckett

@likebeckett

As much as rollups can be a scaling solution, they also rely on data availability for costs and throughput potential.

There are a number of DA layers arising to fulfill the need for scalable DA. Here's a brief and incomplete look at a few of them.

forum.celestia.org

A comparison between DA layers

Rollups emerged as a solution to scale layer 1s. As it turns out, rollups also need some help with scaling. In particular, rollups can gain higher throughput capacity with access to more data...

57

12:52 PM • Mar 22, 2023

More Discourse & Education

• @0xJim breaks down the rollup-as-a-service (RaaS) landscape in depth, covering ~27 projects

• Electric Capital releases their annual crypto developer report for 2022, analyzing 200+ million code commits & 11k+ developer profiles 📊 (full report here)

• @0xRainandCoffee writes an article “Modular MEV Part 2”, covering all things MEV as a follow-on to “Modular MEV Part 1”

• @jon_charb summarizes last week’s mega-post on all things rollups

• @sreeram_kannan explains why shared sequencing will return more MEV to rollups (vs. isolated sequencing)

• Celestia writes an article discussing the “Misconceptions of sovereign rollups”, including how sovereign rollups inherit security from and bridge to the DA layer

• @expctchaos and @Louround_ break down Polygon zkEVM in depth, covering everything from their architecture and proving system to their tokenomics and treasury

• @ShivanshuMadan walks through the rollup-as-a-service landscape, including RaaS 101 and key players

• @DavideCrapis writes an article on “MEV Resilient Ethereum”, defining an an MEV resiliency framework and analyzing the MEV landscape

• Celestia releases an episode discussing MEV in the modular stack with builders from Skip Protocol, Duality and Astria

• Bankless releases an episode discussing zkSync Era mainnet with Alex and Anthony from Matter Labs

• Mantle writes an article discussing the differences between ZK and Optimistic rollups and tying in their recent forum post

• @ether_fi hosts a Twitter Space discussing the Shanghai upgrade, DVT, liquid staking and restaking with builders from EigenLayer and Obol Labs

• Polygon writes an article describing the two-stage approach to security for their zkEVM Mainnet Beta

• @LoganJastremski releases an episode discussing all things ZKPs, including their history and scaling applications with Tom from Aztec Network and Geometry

• @colludingnode suggests a scheme for very fast decentralized sequencing with bonded soft confirmations

• Bitfrost hosts a Twitter Space discussing blockspace markets, share security and scalability with Sreeram from EigenLayer, Rob from Polkadot and Leo from Alkimiya

• @jermywkh explains what Argent and Account Abstraction are, highlighting noteworthy features and educational resources

• Big Brain Holdings hosts a Twitter Space deep dive discussion with the Dymension team

• @kelvinfichter explains that there’s a difference between rollup ordering and data availability

• @PhABCD summarizes “EIP-4844 Fee Market Analysis” (post by @DavideCrapis) on ETH Research

• @bkiepuszewski highlights key risk areas of Arbitrum One’s current implementation

• @kobigurk creates an OpenAI-powered bot that answers questions related to the Zero Knowledge podcast - pretty cool! 🤯

• Babylon walks through use cases and benefits of shared Bitcoin security

• @terpayyo explains ProtoRev, an arbitrage module that redistributes MEV to the Osmosis community

• Messari breaks down Fuel Network and the Fuel ecosystem, summarizing @eshita’s full report

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:

Modular Media 🧱🎬

@modularmedia_

Excited to share another week of updates from the modular blockchain ecosystem!

Check out Weekly Rollup #7

modularmedia.substack.com

Weekly Rollup #7

For the week ending March 24th

31

12:03 PM • Mar 28, 2023

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 below:

https://paragraph.xyz

Weekly Rollup #5

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 for modular-related updates!

This week’s newsletter was made possible by our sponsor Celestia

📣 News & Announcements

The Espresso Sequencer

Espresso Systems

@EspressoSys

Rollups are delivering on their promise to scale Ethereum & make it useful for a wider range of applications, but today rely on centralized sequencers.

We are building the Espresso Sequencer: the way rollups will decentralize.

Read more (much more) now:

hackmd.io

The Espresso Sequencer - HackMD

# The Espresso Sequencer - Layer 2 rollups are delivering on their promise to scale Ethereum and ma

297

1:26 PM • Mar 16, 2023

This past week, Espresso Systems published a detailed overview of the Espresso Sequencer, a product that was first unveiled by the team late last year (2022).

The complete paper can be broken down into five parts. 

1. Introduction

2. Espresso Sequencer Motivations

3. Espresso Sequencer Design Principles 

4. Building the Sequencer (component overview)

5. Summary & Roadmap

What is Espresso Systems  

Espresso systems is a web3 company focused on zero-knowledge technology in order to provide developers with scalability and privacy-enhancing features.

As a reminder, “zero knowledge (zk) proofs” can be used as both a scaling mechanism, as well as a privacy-enhancing mechanism for blockchains. Most of the big names in the space today are using zk-proofs to provide Ethereum with improved scalability (StarkWare, Polygon, etc.), while other names are employing the use of zk-proofs for privacy, such as Z-Cash. 

Espresso is building different zk-products to help with both. Their most popular solution is “Configurable Asset Privacy on Ethereum” (CAPE). The idea here is that privacy should be configured and set by each individual team. As we know, blockchains today (Ethereum, Bitcoin, etc.) are not private at all, which has led to the development of entirely private networks such as Monero. CAPE is targeting the group in the middle. and allowing each team to set its own privacy configurations or standards.

Other tools they’re offering include a zero-knowledge proof system (Hyperplonk), and the Espresso Sequencer (HotShot), “a system that decentralizes transaction sequencing for layer 2 scaling solutions on Ethereum without compromising on their scale or speed.”

What is a Sequencer 

In short, a sequencer is in charge of ordering transactions. 

To explain further, a rollup consists of several components: a client software, a mempool, a virtual machine (VM), a prover, a sequencer, and a rollup contract on the L1. When users submit rollup transactions, they get sent to the “mempool”. From here, sequencers gather the transactions and order them in the way they should be processed by the VM. You can imagine the sort of power a user has when controlling the way our transactions are executed, which is why decentralizing the sequencer is one of the biggest milestones for any existing Ethereum rollup.

As of today, pretty much all rollups operate under a centralized sequencer, whereby only a select few are chosen to provide the service of ordering transactions, creating concerns like transaction censorship, and MEV frontrunning. 

Espresso aims to build a decentralized sequencer network that will allow any existing rollup to plug into in order to receive this transaction ordering service (a universal sequencer network). The same group of sequencers will be ordering transactions across several different  L2s, rather than each rollup having its own unique sequencer set. 

The Espresso Sequencer

The Espresso Sequencer is a decentralized sequencing network for rollups that is designed to provide secure, high throughput, low latency transaction ordering, and availability. “This utility will not only allow rollups to decentralize but will also introduce to rollups the interoperability advantages of a shared sequencing layer”.

More specifically, the Espresso Sequencer is a consensus network.

The way this works is that the HotShot validators, which is expected to be the same group of validators from the Ethereum network via Eigen Layer, come to a consensus on how our rollup transactions are ordered. If we trust HotShot consensus, then we can assume that transactions are “finalized” as soon as they pass through the sequencer network. That being said, this only takes care of the “rollup consensus”, meaning the transactions still have to be “finalized” in the eyes of the L1 (Ethereum) consensus protocol. You can also think about the different types of finality as soft vs. firm finality.

What’s Next?

In November of last year, Espresso released “Americano” the first internal testnet of this sequencer network. 

According to the recently published paper, the “Doppio” testnet is up next for deployment and will mark the first steps to supporting live rollups. Rollup teams that are interested in integrating the Espresso sequencer can start reaching out to the team. 

For anyone interested in learning more about the Espresso Sequencer, you can check out the official paper, or docs.

Avail spins off from Polygon Labs

Avail

@AvailProject

1/ Hey there, we're excited to share some big news with you! We’re Avail - a new modular blockchain optimized for data availability. And starting today, Avail will operate independently of @0xpolygon.

150

7:04 AM • Mar 16, 2023

On March 16th, the Avail team announced that it will now officially be operating as its own unique network, independent of Polygon. 

As part of its separation from the Polygon Labs & Foundation teams, Avail will create a new not-for-profit foundation, and will eventually grow to a decentralized model governed by its community. Avail will remain led by Anurag Arjun, who first started developing Avail back in 2020. To help ensure Avail remains credibly neutral, Anurag, Polygon Labs co-founder, has stepped down from his role at Polygon for good. 

For anyone unaware, Avail is a modular blockchain that specializes in data availability, and has been under development by the Polygon team since 2020.

If we recall, blockchains typically have four duties: execution, security, consensus, and data availability (DA). These four duties make up the three blockchain layers: execution layer, settlement layer, and DA/consensus layer. A monolithic blockchain consists of all three layers within its single chain, whereas a modular blockchain splits the layers up and specializes in one particular area. 

Avail decouples the data availability layer from execution and settlement, strictly focusing on the DA & consensus portion. Other teams can deploy their own rollups (execution environments) on top of Avail, and because Avail only worries about DA & consensus, it for the most part does not care what virtual machine you use (hence, Polygon SVM), opening the door for extreme flexibility and innovations.

Some of the use cases they listed in the article include:

• Sovereign Chains/Rollups: Sovereign rollups are different than a typical rollup we’re used to today in the fact that they’re not tied to an underlying settlement chain (Arbitrum settles on Ethereum for example). Rather than having a “settlement” chain be in charge of checking and validating proofs, the task is left to the sovereign chain itself. With projects like “Sovereign”, developers will be able to launch their own “sovereign” zk-rollup on top of Avail. 

• Validiums: There is one key difference between rollups and validiums, mainly the fact that rollups publish their data directly on the L1 settlement chain, whereas validiums are like rollups that publish their data to a different network. This would be like Arbitrum posting its transaction data to Avail rather than to Ethereum. 

• Optimistic chains, & more

Aside from all this, Anurag has mentioned in the past that each Polygon zk-rollup solution may have its own sovereign rollup on top of Avail in the future. Not only this, but he also mentioned some sort of settlement layer being added to Avail as well.

Polygon SVM is one of the earliest examples of a rollup utilizing Avail for data availability and consensus. Polygon SVM is a customized rollup powered by Solana’s virtual machine (Sealevel), and using Avail for DA & consensus. This means Solana’s high throughput VM, combined with the EVM ecosystem thanks to Avail. You can check out our past newsletter to learn more about Polygon SVM.

Avail represents a new “lego” being added to the modular stack, and we’re excited to see what developers build with this new block. 

As of today, Avail is up on testnet, and is expected to go live on mainnet later this year. You can follow the Avail team on Twitter to stay up to date with the project.

Introducing Worlds EVM

Eclipse @ GDC 🎮

@EclipseFND

Eclipse & @WorldsOrg are launching Worlds EVM

Worlds is deploying its own parallelized EVM rollup with Eclipse and @CelestiaOrg as the base layer for data availability.

eclipse.builders/blog/worlds-to…

115

9:45 AM • Mar 16, 2023

On March 16th, it was announced that the Worlds team will be using Eclipse to build its own EVM rollup, entirely dedicated to its web3 game.

What is Worlds

The same team that developed Unreal Engine 5 is now developing Worlds. Worlds is focused on building different tools and infrastructure that will “allow studios to deliver rock-solid multiplayer experiences without a AAA budget.” 

Aside from developing different infrastructure tools for developers to leverage, Worlds will also be releasing its own set of games. As of today, they have only announced one game, Waifu Tactical Force, which is a web3 free-to-play multiplayer shooter (think of Call of Duty in terms of concept). In fact, this title was just introduced during ETHDenver just a couple of days ago. 

For anyone familiar with shooter-based games, you’ll know that they require very high throughput - it’s not fun to play this type of game if your weapon takes as much as two seconds to fire.

This is the reason Worlds will be building on its own dedicated EVM rollup.

What is Eclipse

Eclipse is a “rollup as as service” (RaaS) provider, enabling teams to choose between different blockchain features and components in order to build their own custom, dedicated execution environment.

These execution environments (rollups) are then connected on top of Eclipse’s settlement layer, which itself is a rollup built using the Sealevel VM (used within the Solana ecosystem). This means that not only will the rollups benefit from having their own dedicated environment (no sharing computational resources with other dapps), but all rollups will also get to benefit from Sealevel’s “parallelism”, which is the core feature behind the VMs high throughput capabilities.

Worlds EVM Component Breakdown

In the image above, we can see how Worlds EVM is broken down (along with Polygon SVM, which was Eclipse’s first partnership announcement). 

Worlds is its own EVM chain that uses Celestia for DA, making this the first gaming-specific rollup to deploy using Celestia. Because Worlds will be using the EVM, they’ll remain connected to the Ethereum community and ecosystem, while still benefiting from the “parallelism” aspect mentioned earlier. 

World's goal is to support thousands of users and having extremely low latency, while also having near-free transaction costs. They hope to accomplish this with Eclipse.  

You can follow the Worlds team on Twitter if you want to stay up to date with their game’s upcoming testnet launch.

AltLayer 100 Flash Layer campaign ends

AltLayer

@alt_layer

7 Days. 10 Winners. 105M+ transactions in total.
100 Flash Layers truly ended with a bang on 10 Mar.

The most popular flash layer, which recorded over 23M txns, exceeded ALL the Layer2s & @ethereum for the time period. What a feat!

Data & Winners

blog.altlayer.io

‘100 Flash Layers’ concludes early-access testing round of rollup launchpad

10 Winners announced. Scroll down for the details!

67

5:45 AM • Mar 14, 2023

March 10th marked the conclusion of AltLayer’s “100 Flash layers” campaign, a 7-day event where 100 developers got the opportunity to build and deploy their own rollup in just a couple of minutes and a few clicks. 

There were several NFT & gaming-related projects that deployed over the 7-day period, such as “Mother Staker”, “SoulFans, DePets, and more. In fact, you can check out the official “project showcase” page here. 

Altogether, the campaign saw over 105M+ transactions across all Flash Layers, “at an average of 173 TPS.” This is an even crazier stat when you realize that these projects are using Ethereum for settlement and security. For a more detailed breakdown of the Flash Layer stats, you can check out this page. 

All in all, the “100 Flash Layers” campaign proved to be a successful event in showcasing the power of disposable rollups. 

What is AltLayer

AltLayer is a no-code rollup as a service provider, where teams “pay as they go”. Similar to Eclipse, AltLayer enables developers to build, and launch their own custom, dedicated rollups. What makes AltLayer unique, however, is that they provide “disposable” rollups, which in other words means rollups with an expiration date. 

You can learn more about Altlayer here if you’re interested.

More News & Announcements

• The Blockspace Race kicks off with 700+ sampling light nodes. Participants can now check out the network’s block explorer, and validator dashboard

• Salesforce launches a new web3 loyalty platform on Polygon, specifically targeting big brands

• Users can now start connecting to the Celestia testnet through the Keplr Wallet

• Aztec connect comes to an end, as the team looks to shift its entire focus to a new, “more powerful encrypted L2 powered by Noir, our universal zk-language”.

• Here’s a look at Mantle’s new testnet explorer, which shows transaction batch details for the rollup data stored on Eigen DA - check your DA hash.

• Here’s a Sovereign update thread, including a demo of how Sovereign’s rollup SDK is used.

• Arbitrum announces its ARB token launch, which in turn also introduces the launch of Arbitrum DAO governance

• KuCoin integrates the Arbitrum network, allowing its users to start bridging to the network via the exchange.

• ApeSwap will be expanding to Arbitrum, in what will be their first L2 deployment.

• Defi Turtle publishes its whitepaper. Defi Turtle is “a powerful and unique blockchain platform for investors on Arbitrum”.

• Optimism will be launching a newsletter soon, so make sure to subscribe today if you’re interested 

• Marble Wallet is joining the Caldera ecosystem

• Introducing the Fuelet wallet, an account abstraction wallet built for the Fuel ecosystem

• Here’s the latest Taiko bi-weekly update, including protocol, node, zkEVM, bridge, and community updates.

• Eigen layer takes on a new visual identity as well as launches new looking website

• Replicated security launches, with Neutron expected to be amongst the first to adopt. Here are some other consumer chains that are actively working with Informal Systems to maybe adopt ATOM security.

• Polygon teamed up with Unstoppable Domains to introduce .Polygon domains

• MantisSwap is going live on Public beta on the 20th, as they hope to become Polygon’s native stableswap solution.

• Starbucks sold out its 2K limited edition digital stamps in just ten minutes

• Announcing StarkNet Asia 2023, which will be held in Tokyo on April 13th

• Influence, the highly anticipated space-based StarkNet game, is announced that they will be launching this summer. Here are the details.

• Here’s the latest weekly update thread from the Scroll team. This week featured zkEVM, an ETH Global presentation, hackathon details, and more

📚 Discourse & Education

How do rollups ACTUALLY work?

In his talk “How rollups actually work”, Kelvin from Optimism offers an excellent mental model for rollups. Here’s his framing:

• A rollup is simply a function over an input array

• Two important properties of the input array are ordering and data availability

• Ordering is important because if the order of the input array changes, the output array also changes

• Data availability is important because if you don’t know what the inputs are, you can’t compute over them

• Therefore, rollups are defined by the data and the ordering of that data - you are deriving the rollup from the parent system

To more explicitly map this mental model to familiar modular terms, the input array is the L1 blockchain, the output array is the rollup blockchain and the properties mentioned demonstrate that the L1 blockchain is the consensus and DA layer.

But what about settlement?

Kelvin outlines settlement functionality like validating contracts / proofs / etc., but intentionally separates them as bridging functionality. He buckets proofs under “ways to make bridges work”, listing the following options:

• One trusted authority

• Multiple trusted authorities

• Light clients

• Fault proofs

• Validity proofs

He covers more ground in his (very entertaining) presentation, so we’d recommend watching it.

Is that it? Has consensus been reached? Does that settle how to think about rollups? 

Not quite. Like many of us, you probably thought rollups worked this way 👇 so you likely still have unanswered questions.

Namely - questions around settlement. Why was it demoted?? Look at that scary monster block thing with the guns! Looks secure to me!

In his talk “How rollups actually actually work”, Toghrul from Scroll offers a very different framing that shines a light onto settlement mechanics and how “classic” rollups work (typical Ethereum rollups AKA smart contract rollups AKA settled rollups). He places greater emphasis on settlement by segmenting different rollup types, defining them by how they handle fork choice rules.

As a refresher, fork choice rules come into play when there are multiple versions of history (ordered transactions) that need to be picked between. In the below example, all three forks contain valid transactions. L1 figures this out via consensus mechanism, but rollups don’t do that kind of consensus. So which fork does the rollup treat as the source of truth?

Here’s where Toghrul draws a distinction between classic and sovereign rollups:

• In classic rollups, the base layer defines the fork choice rule

• In sovereign rollups, the protocol participants define the fork choice rule

Ok, zooming back out. We’ve used a simple mental model to illustrate the essence of rollups and walked through the mechanics that distinguish rollup types. But these POVs ~feel~ very different - do they conflict?

As it turns out, not really! Kelvin and Toghrul actually agree on how rollups “work”. This is evident by how they both describe the rollup’s relationship with its ordering and DA layer.

The debates around settlement and canonical chains are not actually technical debates, they are social debates. It all comes down to “the social contract between the rollup community” and how that community wants to set rules for parsing L1 data. The distinction between classic and sovereign rollups is worth making, but we should place less focus on semantics and more focus on the resulting tradeoffs:

Sreeram Kannan

@sreeramkannan

Nice summary of the talk by @kelvinfichter. One thing to note: we have to pick between sovereignty and (automatic) composability. A given rollup cannot have both, even if we want one assets validating bridge to inherit L1 security, that constrains any sovereignty.

Patrick McCorry

@stonecoldpat0

This is a very interesting talk by @kelvinfichter about deconstructing rollups:

youtube.com/watch?v=NKQz9j…

The key takeaway:

- A validating bridge does not define the rollup

The bridge gets to pick, like anyone, the ruleset for reading the database and how it will protect assets

51

10:14 AM • Mar 12, 2023

Basically everything else about rollups

Now that you have a foundation for how to think about rollups, it’s time we let you know that there is actually no such thing as rollups. That’s right, rollups aren’t real!

However, if they were, Jon Charb would have you covered this week.

Jon Charbonneau

@jon_charb

This is the complete guide to:
- Sequencer decentralization
- Shared sequencers
- X-chain atomicity
- MEV-awareness for rollups
- Where SUAVE fits in
- Decentralizing proving

joncharbonneau.substack.com

Rollups Aren't Real

Decentralizing, Shared Sequencers, X-Chain Atomicity, SUAVE, & MEV

595

8:40 PM • Mar 18, 2023

Jokes aside - Jon wrote an incredible, comprehensive article on the rollup landscape. It’s a long but mandatory read.

More Discourse & Education

• @benediktbuenz explains different ways rollups can order transactions and where the Espresso Sequencer fits in the solution space

• @benafisch explains the benefits of decentralized sequencers and shared sequencers, related to the Espresso Sequencer Announcement 👆

• @nickwh8te walks through highlights from the Espresso Sequencer announcement, also related to the announcement 👆👆

• Zero Knowledge Podcast releases an episode discussing “A Rollup Centric Future & Sovereign Chains” with Mustafa from Celestia

• @jon_charb writes an article on on “Encrypted Mempools” as a tool for MEV and censorship

• Trust Machines hosts a Twitter Space discussing sovereign rollups on Bitcoin and Stacks with Mustafa from Celestia and Muneeb from Stacks

• @bkiepuszewski explains the different ways rollups can make data available on L1 and the tradeoffs involved

• @nickwh8te explains how blockchains rely on social consensus to agree on state transition functions and fork choice rules

• @toghrulmaharram presents “Rollups through the prism of the bridge” (AKA how rollups actually actually work 🤣)

• Bell Curve releases their season finale episode called “Does The Appchain Thesis Hold up?”

• @VolokhIlia writes a post outlining two decentralized proof production protocols (as candidates for Starknet) on the Starknet forum

• @nickwh8te highlights the problems shared sequencers will solve in concise terms

• Delphi Digital releases an episode discussing “Solana’s Endgame in the Midst of Competitive L1s and L2s” with Anatoly from Solana

• Messari creates a graphic to easily visualize the OP Stack components

• @nickwh8te highlights the potential limitations of restaking

• @0xkatz highlights ways that rollup-as-a-service vendors can offer value and differentiate

• @JoshCStein presents a deep dive into modular blockchains and how to technically deploy sovereign rollups on Celestia (gives an EVM rollup demo)

• @apolynya writes an article assessing demand drivers for ETH

• Eclipse explains “token incentivized physical infrastructure networks” (TIPINs), how they can put power plants and weather stations on chain

• @waltjsmith writes a post about “Cross-domain MEV with EigenLayer**”** on the ****EigenLayer forum, highlighting potential MEV risks and ways to mitigate them

• @sreeramkannan frames rollups as “permissionless sharding” and explains the benefits over traditional sharding

• Empire releases an episode discussing L2 Competition with Steven and Harry from Arbitrum

• Epicenter releases an episode discussing Polygon zkEVM with Jordi and David from Polygon

• OP Labs outlines “Optimism’s Path to Technical Decentralization”, including permissionless output proposals and bridge decentralization

• Cryptocito releases an episode discussing Saga partnerships, shared security and more with Rebecca from Saga

• @likebeckett and @shaolin_flow discuss variables to consider when putting data on chain

• @norswap highlights how Ethereum light clients are not secure but how ZK bridges fix this

• @aeyakovenko, @colludingnode and @dubbel06 discuss whether the number of trust-minimized light nodes changes the number of required full nodes

• @sreeramkannan and @ObadiaAlex discuss the benefits of having 5% vs. 20% solo stakers

• Polybase hosts a Twitter Space discussing “Fast and secure web3 app development with Polybase and Polygon Miden VM” with Bobbin from Polygon Miden

That's all for this week! Thanks for reading 🧱🎬

If you found this useful, please like and retweet so more people can see it 👇

Modular Media 🧱🎬

@modularmedia_

Excited to share another week of updates from the modular blockchain ecosystem!

Check out Weekly Rollup #6

modularmedia.substack.com

Weekly Rollup #6

For the week ending March 17th

42

9:24 AM • Mar 21, 2023

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 below:

https://paragraph.xyz

Weekly Rollup #4

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 daily modular updates! You can check out our previous newsletter issue here.

📣 News & Announcements

Celestia Kicks-Off the BlockSpace Race

Celestia

@CelestiaOrg

Today officially marks the beginning of the Blockspace Race, Celestia’s incentivized testnet program

Validators have now entered into phase 1: liftoff.

471

11:00 AM • Mar 7, 2023

March 7th marked the official launch of Celestia’s “Blockspace Race”, the network’s first incentivized testnet.

Why is this a big deal

Although we are now starting to see the rise of more and more modular blockchains, this was not always the case. In fact, modular blockchains are a relatively new concept, as it wasn’t until 2019 that Celestia (or Lazy Ledger as it was known then) first introduced us to the “modular” thesis, following the launch of their first whitepaper.

Traditionally, we were accustomed to seeing monolithic blockchains, which take care of all blockchain duties within the same environment (execution, settlement, data availability, and consensus), however, Celestia introduced the idea of splitting the workload into multiple layers.

More specifically, this whitepaper explained the idea of separating data availability & consensus into its own layer, thereby removing the need to perform execution and settlement altogether, and instead outsourcing these other tasks from other networks.

Considering its been four years now since the release of that first whitepaper, it’s no surprise why a huge portion of the modular blockchain community is filled with anticipation.

Aside from that, there are projects that have to wait until Celestia launches before they themselves launch. One example is Eclipse, which is a sovereign rollup built on top of Celestia.

Details of the Blockspace Race

Altogether, about 20K applicants registered to take part in this event, however, only 1K were chosen to participate, which still makes this one of the largest, if not the largest, incentivized testnet launches to date.

The testnet will be broken down into two phases:

• Phase 1: This phase kicked off the Blockspace Race (testnet) and is dedicated strictly to Celestia validators.

• Phase 2: This phase is expected to happen a week from Phase 1 launch (probably by the time you’re reading this) and allows node operators to start entering the network (this includes light nodes & bridge nodes). This is huge, as it’ll be the first time we’ll see DA sampling take place in a large-scale network. According to the team, during this phase there will be several tasks and projects that the participants will be able to contribute to, such as working on developer tooling.

Highlights from Blockspace Race Twitter space

Following the kick-off of the Blockspace Race, the Celestia team held a Twitter space to go over the event details, as well as answer any questions from the community. Here were some of our favorite highlights.

IBC will be integrated into the Celestia testnet at launch, allowing users to start experimenting with bridging to and from the network. In fact, during their recent Twitter Space, they challenged anyone to try and bridge to Osmosis (do not try using real tokens!).

Aside from IBC connectivity, another exciting aspect that was mentioned during the Twitter Space was when one of the core Celestia engineers mentioned the development of a new “transaction type”. In short, this new transaction type will help pave the way for someone to build & launch a modular sequencer. This doesn’t do this feature enough justice, so if you’re interested in learning more about this, feel free to listen to the original recording (skip 28 minutes in).

What is Celestia

Celestia is a modular blockchain whose sole task is to receive, order, and store transaction data. Aside from introducing us to the modular world, Celestia was also popular for solving the “Data Availability problem”, which asked, how can nodes be sure that all the transaction data was published correctly whenever a new block is produced. Specifically, Celestia uses “data sampling” to accomplish this, but we’ll save the details about this for a future date.

Congrats to the entire Celestia team! We’re excited to see the continued growth from one of the leaders in the modular space. You can read the entire article to learn more about the Blockspace Race.

Coinbase Launches Wallet as a Service

Brian Armstrong

@brian_armstrong

1/ Today, Coinbase is launching Wallet as a Service, a scalable and secure set of wallet infrastructure APIs, enabling companies to easily create fully customizable onchain wallets for their users and apps.

coinbase.com

Coinbase announces Wallet as a Service. Now any company can seamlessly onboard their users to web3....

Coinbase announces Wallet as a Service. Now any company can seamlessly onboard their users to web3.

1,305

1:29 PM • Mar 8, 2023

Coinbase once again proved why they’re one of the best at onboarding new users to web3, as this past week the company announced “Wallet as a Service”, which comes just a couple of weeks after announcing “Base”, their own L2 chain.

What is WaaS?

Coinbase’s WaaS “is a scalable and secure set of wallet infrastructure APIs, enabling companies to create and deploy fully customizable on-chain wallets to their end users”.

This will allow traditional web2 companies (& even web3 ones) to create and integrate their own custom wallets directly on their website, using the team’s own branding, as well as its own set of custom features, such as an added loyalty program. However, unlike the traditional loyalty system that you see today, users will be able to sell/trade these loyalty points to others, thanks to the power of web3.

Seamless Onboarding

As mentioned earlier, Coinbase has been one of the best at onboarding new users into the space, and that doesn’t change with WaaS.

WaaS is meant to abstract away the concept of crypto altogether for the end user (they shouldn’t know they’re using a crypto wallet). One of the ways they are doing this is by removing the need for a seed phrase, and instead using a simple username and password log-in.

They’re able to offer this feature because of their use of Multi-Party Computation (MPC). MPC essentially splits a single key into multiple pieces. These pieces are then distributed to multiple parties so that even if one piece of the key is compromised or lost, the user won’t lose access to his/her funds.

So in this case, the key is split between the end user and Coinbase. If the end user loses his/her account, Coinbase can still retrieve access. That said, the end user will also have the option of retrieving his/her assets under their own account, and removing it from the possession of Coinbase entirely.

Potential Use Cases

• digital storefronts: any existing store would be able to integrate its own custom wallet within its website. Whenever a new user signs up for an account with that particular online store, they’ll be assigned a web3 wallet. As mentioned, each company can add its own custom features, like a loyalty program. Whenever the user buys something from that online shop, they’ll be assigned loyalty points, which can then be used to access exclusive benefits, or can be sold or traded to others.

• Games: any existing web2 or web3 game can launch its own wallet using WaaS. Again, this wallet can be customized to the branding of each specific game, and will enable players to actually take ownership of their in-game assets. Meaning they’ll be able to sell or trade any character skins, in-game “credits”, and everything else.

To learn all about Coinbase’s new Wallet as a Service, you can check out the complete article.

Scroll Raises at a $1.8 Billion Valuation

Scroll 📜

@Scroll_ZKP

An update: To accelerate plans for developing our zkEVM, pursue cutting-edge research, and continue building with a broader community, we've raised capital from a global set of participants.

1,655

1:41 PM • Mar 6, 2023

On March 6th, Scroll announced a $50M funding round that valued the company at $1.8B. This round included some huge names in the VC space, such as Polychain, Variantfund, The Spartan Group, Sequoia, Bain Capital, and others. According to “The Block”, Scroll had previously only raised $33M in funding across two rounds, making this most recent one the compani’s biggest raise yet.

As a reminder, Scroll is an Ethereum L2 network based on the use of zk-technology.

The funds will be used to:

• progress the companies development into mainnet launch

• introduce a public goods and grants program

• continue further research on decentralized provers and sequencing networks

This announcement came just a week after the company announced its testnet launch (you can check out our post from last week to learn more about that), where already they have managed to reach over 790K unique wallet addresses, and over 3.3M transactions.

The crypto industry has had a rough past couple of months, but even in this type of environment, it’s amazing to see Scroll raise at such a high valuation. Congrats to the entire Scroll team!

Proven Raises $15.8 Million

Agustin Lebron

@AgustinLebron3

Well this is it! I’m excited (and a bit terrified) to announce what I’ve been working on for the last year and a half.

It’s been a wild ride so far, and I’m sure it’s about to get wilder.



1/n

coindesk.com

Zero-Knowledge Crypto Startup Proven Raises $15.8M in Seed Round

Framework Ventures led the seed round for the firm, which was founded by former employees of market maker Jane Street.

366

3:54 PM • Mar 9, 2023

On March 9th, Proven announced its $15.8 funding, in a round led by Framework Ventures. According to official reports, the funds will be used “to further expand its development team and scale its world-class zero-knowledge-based technological infrastructure”.

Proven is a team working on zero knowledge (zk) solutions to help provide services like “proof of solvency” for exchanges. To be more specific, Proven specializes in producing zk-proofs, which are a special type of cryptography that proves something is true, without actually disclosing the contents within the proof.

So for example, exchanges will be able to prove to the world that they own enough assets to cover liabilities (there’s enough money in the bank), without actually having to disclose the assets themselves or who owns what.

While most projects today are using zk-proofs for scaling purposes (StarkWare, Polygon, zkSync, etc.), zk-proofs can also be used to provide privacy-enhancing features. Popular examples of such projects include Aztec, who are working on private peer-to-peer (P2P) transactions, and PolygonID, which is allowing users to prove their personal statements/documents without actually disclosing the content within those statements.

When we think back to all the crypto exchange collapses over the past year, we can see that the reason for their collapse was due to essentially not having the correct amount of customer deposits. However, a lot of these collapsed exchanges ran out of money long before we users actually found out, and this is the problem Proven is trying to help tackle.

Whether it’s an exchange like FTX, an investment firm like 3AC, a stablecoin like USDC, or even a traditional bank like SVB, there are tons of use cases for Proven’s solutions.

Congrats to the Proven team!

More News & Updates

• The Ethereum Foundation published the official date and time for the launch of the Shapella upgrade on Goerli testnet, in what “is expected to be the last testnet upgrade before scheduling Shapella for the Ethereum mainnet.” This of course brings us one step closer t beacon chain withdrawals.

• Stackr joins the latest cohort of a16z’s crypto startup school, which featured over 8K applicants!

• Covalent announced their integration of the Arbitrum Network, allowing users to start accessing historical data for both Arbitrum One (Defi & NFTs), and Arbitrum Nova (Gaming & Social).

• For any web3 gamers, Saga will be unveiling the “Saga Multiverse” on March 22nd during a special event. You can sign up today to catch it live.

• Aztec and Aragon co-author a proposal to enable private voting for NounsDAO governance moving forward.

• In a mission to be more transparent, Sovereign will now start publishing regular progress updates. You can catch the first update post here.

• Mintify, a modular trading terminal for NFTs, is now live on Polygon

• Acentrik, which is the enterprise data marketplace platform (decentralized data exchange) built by Mercedes-Benz, just deployed on Polygon

• Compound v3 has been deployed on Polygon

• Reddit Avatars surpass $50M in market cap

• Uniswap drops a limited, early-release version of its new mobile app during ETHDenver

• A couple of weeks ago, we mentioned that Arbitrum was the leading Ethereum L2 in terms of monthly transaction settlement volume, however, it looks like StarkEx was actually the network to hold this title

• Users can now join the waitlist for Hashtack’s upcoming mainnet launch (expected this month)

• Celer Network, a cross-layer communications protocol, announced their upcoming launch on zkSync Era

• Rhino Fi will be integrating zkSync Era, allowing users to bridge to the network via BNB, Polygon, Arbitrum, and Ethereum

• Instadapp introduces Avocado wallet, an Account Abstraction wallet that’ll enable users a seamless multi-chain experience, without having to think of what network gas token to use

• Starknet <> Rollkit <> Celestia: Last week, @ammarif_ used Rollkit to launch a sovereign rollup on top of Celestia using the Cairo VM (the virtual machine used in the StarkWare)

• Arbitrum adds a new bridge feature, giving users the ability to view their transaction history going back over a year ago

• The Coinbase wallet now offers Optimism-focused quests. This is a good way for those new to Optimism to explore its ecosystem while getting rewarded with OP. The first quest involves simply swapping ETH.

• Taiko, who are building their own zkEVM-powered rollup, shares its new roadmap as they approach mainnet launch

• “On March 15th, the Lambda upgrade will take place on Cosmos Hub”, which will activate the replicated security feature and introduce interchain security. In short, this will allow other app-chains to bond ATOM tokens in order to borrow security from the hub

• Rollkit announces “Let’s Roll”, a community-driven meeting meant to share knowledge, explore ideas, and discuss the latest updates. The first community call takes place on March 21st

• Convex Finance expands to Polygon

• Lido expands its wstETH token to the Polygon network

• Users can now start bridging their testnet ETH from Goerli to Polygon’s zkEVM, using Orbiter Finance

📚 Discussions & Education

What are sovereign rollups on Bitcoin?

Rollkit

@RollkitDev

You can now run a sovereign rollup on Bitcoin.

Announcing the first research integration of Bitcoin as a data availability layer for sovereign rollups.

rollkit.dev

Sovereign rollups on Bitcoin with Rollkit | Rollkit

Last week, we introduced Rollkit, a modular framework for rollups. Today, we are proud to announce that Rollkit is the first rollup framework to support sovereign rollups on Bitcoin. This allows...

1,467

12:50 PM • Mar 5, 2023

Last week we covered Rollkit (a rollup SDK developed by the Celestia team) enabling Bitcoin as a DA layer option. The announcement post blew up on Twitter, garnering over 1 million views and sparking hundreds of discussions 🤯

Let’s start with the basics. What’s a sovereign rollup and what does it mean to be sovereign rollup on Bitcoin?

Celestia walks through the basics of sovereign rollups and does a good job contrasting them with the “classic” rollups you might be used to. They also have a more in depth post on the concept.

Wait a minute - sovereign rollups on Bitcoin? Doesn’t the Bitcoin community frown upon “alt” assets and other blockchain use cases? How’d rollups come into the picture?

We actually touched on it a few weeks ago, but as a refresher:

• Inscriptions AKA Bitcoin NFTs brought attention to Bitcoin “blobspace”

• Eric Wall gave a talk on how Bitcoin blobspace can be used to build sovereign rollups

• This unlocks Bitcoin as a data availability layer

Without getting too technical, here’s how it’d work:

light.btc

@lightcoin

Rollup full nodes would then scan bitcoin blocks looking for transactions that contain block data relevant to them, and if the attached proof validates, then they will add that block to their chain, apply the state diff to the state, and proceed to the next block.

24

3:18 PM • Feb 27, 2023

So are Bitcoiners on board with this idea?

TBD - they are now open to discussion about sovereign rollups, but it’s unclear whether the community will embrace or reject them.

What is clear, however, is that Rollkit has made implementing them much easier.

Do Bitcoin sovereign rollups inherit Bitcoin security?

Daniel "e1c04d99" Goldman (Sybil account)

@DZack23

"...that inherit Bitcoin’s data availability guarantees"
yep!

"and security guarantees"
nope!

Rollkit

@RollkitDev

You can now run a sovereign rollup on Bitcoin.

Announcing the first research integration of Bitcoin as a data availability layer for sovereign rollups.
rollkit.dev/blog/sovereign…

84

2:26 PM • Mar 5, 2023

Daniel from Arbitrum makes a strong statement - sovereign rollups inherit L1 DA guarantees but do not inherit L1 security.

But what exactly does this mean?

Other builders weigh in too, with takes spanning the full range of “no-kinda-yes”:

• Ryan Berckmans says sovereign rollups sound like L1s and aren’t “real” rollups or L2s

• Nick from Celestia says sovereign rollups are not trying to be L2s or scale the underlying L1

• Toghrul from Scroll says sovereign rollups at most inherit some L1 security

• Sreeram from EigenLayer says sovereign rollups can inherit up to all 4 security properties of L1

So which is it? What do sovereign rollups inherit?

Sreeram Kannan offers an excellent framework to think through the question:

Sreeram Kannan

@sreeramkannan

(ii) There are four properties that together determine the security of a chain: (a) re-org resistance, (b) censorship resistance, (c) data availability and (d) validity.

58

1:00 AM • Mar 6, 2023

We highly recommend reading his thread, but here are our takeaways:

• Blockchain security has 4 properties (listed in the above tweet). It’s a more nuanced topic than many people make it seem.

• An attacker would need to corrupt Bitcoin to mess with the order (a) and availability (c) of transactions. This security is achieved by simply posting transaction data on Bitcoin - pretty straight forward.

• Censorship resistance (b) is rock solid if the sovereign rollup users can submit transactions directly to Bitcoin. As made clear above, once the transaction hits L1 it’s safe and there are ways to make sure it gets executed.

• Validity (d) is inherited in some scenarios, but not others. If you are running a rollup node, you get state transition security for assets on the rollup. However, you don’t get state transition security when bridging assets between the rollup and Bitcoin.

What does Bitcoin look like as a DA layer?

Mustafa Al-Bassam

@musalbas

The correct take.

I don't actually think Bitcoin is interesting as a DA layer (long block times, low throughput), but hopefully this will redpill more Bitcoiners into rollups. Who knows, maybe we'll get an zk verification op code in Bitcoin in the future...

𝚓𝚋𝟶𝚡

@jb0x_

it's like a shitpost, but implemented as infrastructure. bullish

60

11:47 AM • Mar 6, 2023

Since Bitcoin can technically serve as a DA layer, let’s consider a couple of other questions:

• Would it make a “good” DA layer?

• If it becomes one, are there drawbacks?

The above tweet by Mustafa (whose team built Rollkit!) hints at the answer “no” to the first question, but let’s consider the pros and cons.

Pros:

• High economic security

• Easy to verify

Cons:

• Long block times (translates to slower rollup finality)

• Slow data throughput (again, slower rollup finality)

• Doesn’t support smart contract rollups (can’t verify proofs)

What else is there to consider? Other community members (from both Bitcoin and Ethereum) point to drawbacks, even if Bitcoin rollups were to success:

• Ryan Berckmans says Bitcoin rollups will actually discredit the Bitcoin meme

• Eric Wall says rollups might introduce MEV challenges to Bitcoin

The drawbacks are clearly speculative (and controversial) but worth thinking about in advance.

Either way, Bitcoin is getting more exciting ⚡️

Jon Charbonneau

@jon_charb

Seeing people do interesting things on Bitcoin for the first time in a long time is cool to see

Even as someone not close to development there, just appreciate that

Yes we all understand it’s not an optimized DA layer, needs changes to verify validity, etc etc

45

5:28 PM • Mar 6, 2023

ETHDenver content

Just a handful of the many awesome panels and presentations from the week

• “Shared Security Summit” presented by Babylon and EigenLayer

• Here are a couple of threads that include ETHDenver presentations that featured members of the zkSync team. Here are the talks regarding hyperscalability, security, and account abstraction

• “Data availability in blockchain uncloak” panel with builders from Celestia, EigenLayer, StarkWare, Sui and Liberty Gaming Kit

• “Zero Knowledge Virtual Machine” presentation by Jeremy Bruestle from RiscZero

• “Commitments and Privacy in the MEV Supply Chain” presentation by Robert Miller from Flashbots

• “Account Abstraction” presentation by Yoav Weiss from the Ethereum Foundation

• “Scaling Ethereum for Global Adoption” panel with builders from Optimism, Filecoin, Coinbase and Lens

• “Fully on-chain games” presentation with Nicolas Laurent

• “Enter the Modular Playground” presentation by Yaz Khoury from Celestia

• “Polygon zkEVM Mainnet” presentation by Jordi Baylina from Polygon ZK

• “Scaling Ethereum with Rollups and Zero-Knowledge Proofs” presentation by Orest Tarasiuk from Scroll

• “App-Specific Rollups” presentation by Matt Katz from Caldera

• “Cartesi Agnostic Modular Execution Layer” presentation with Abdelrahman Omran from Cartesi

• “Bringing Linux to the Ethereum Ecosystem” presentation by Max Hatesuer from Cartesi

• “Doing Decentralized Identity Right” presentation by Kelvin Fitcher from OP Labs

• “Babylon: Bitcoin Security for All” presentation by David Tse from Babylon

• “The Limits of L2” presentation by Martin Koppelmann from Gnosis

• Series of Bankless interviews, including “Cosmos Ecosystem” with Sunny from Osmosis, “Polygon’s zkEVM” with Jordi from Polygon ZK, “The State of EigenLayer” with Sreeram from EigenLayer, and the “L2 Wars” with Steven from Arbitrum

More Discussions & Education

• @lemniscate says that L2s need more than one entity operating sequencers to be decentralized and @dankrad disagrees, saying L1 can act as the decentralized sequencer if anyone can submit transaction bundles

• @sreeramkannan explains how L2 finality can be faster than Ethereum finality using a “pre-settlement” layer built on EigenLayer

• @jon_charb responds to @koeppelmann's "Limits to L2s" talk, explaining how many of the problems can be addressed

• @koeppelmann illustrates how EIP-4337 offers another way to include “meta transactions” on chain

• @0xJim explains “modular interoperability”, framing the three components and where individual solutions fit

• @kinaumov breaks down the EigenLayer protocol and example use cases

• @arjunbhuptani explains “the messaging bridge stack”, including bridge basics and takeaways for better bridge security

• OP Labs walks through the technical vision for the Superchain

• @bertcmiller says the FCFS approach to transaction ordering is bad for censorship resistance

• @sanjaypshah explains why sovereign rollups have underrated security benefits

• Optimism explains how the OP Stack fits in the crypto ecosystem

• Sovereign Labs explains how sovereign ZK rollups can achieve fast finality by creating and distributing proofs to light clients before the batch proof is generated

• @CannnGurel highlights how L1 smart contracts are not needed to enforce a rollup’s fork choice rule, referencing the Sovereign Labs thread 👆

• @colludingnode explains how the experience might work for users interacting with numerous sovereign rollups

• @toghrulmaharram clarifies that L2s can implement fee markets (e.g. Fuel can do this easily) and Ethereum can increase DA capacity

• @looksrare_eth explains RiscZero, its benefits and example use cases

• @0xDinoEggs (👋) writes an article about “Light nodes and their benefits”

• 0xResearch releases an episode on “How zkSync and Argent 10x Ethereum’s UX”

• Bell Curve releases an episode on “How Bitcoin Will Secure The Appchain Future” with builders from Rollkit, Babylon and Stride

• zkSync clarifies that Optimism’s Superchain vision is very similar to their own Hyperchain vision

• Arbitrum writes a post on the ETH research forum, analyzing how optimistic rollups could safely reduce the 7 day challenge period

• L2Beat explains how the forced withdrawal mechanism works on dYdX’s StarkEx instance

• @BigBrainKasey writes an article on Dymension, discussing the protocol, use cases, competitive solutions and more

• @drakefjustin writes a post on the ETH forum, highlighting a special subset of rollups called “based” or “L1-sequenced”

• Taiko explains how they think about and are implementing “based rollups”, referencing Justin’s post 👆

• The Defiant releases an episode “Everything You Need to Know About EigenLayer” with Sreeram Kannan

• Celestia releases an episode discussing Modular Cloud and their block explorer for modular blockchains

• @0xSalazar explains how the zkEVM underlying tech works in depth

• Starknet hosts a community call discussing the SHARP proving system

That's all for this week! Thanks for reading 🧱🎬

If you found this useful, please like and retweet so more people can see it 👇

Modular Media 🧱🎬

@modularmedia_

Excited to share another week of updates from the modular blockchain ecosystem!

Check out Weekly Rollup #5

modularmedia.substack.com

Weekly Rollup #5

For the week ending March 10th

28

12:03 PM • Mar 14, 2023

Subscribe to get issues sent directly to your email every Tuesday, and also, make sure to follow us on Twitter for daily modular updates!

You can check out our previous newsletter issue here.

📣 News and Announcements

Scroll Alpha Testnet Launch

Scroll 📜

@Scroll_ZKP

For nearly two years, we've built our zkEVM in the open alongside @PrivacyScaling and other contributors, and today, we're taking the next step to Goerli, the final stage before mainnet.

Our testnet on Goerli is 100% permissionless.

Here are the details:

1,506

12:30 PM • Feb 27, 2023

While most of the recent zkEVM talk has been centered around Polygon & zkSync over the past couple of months, there’s been one project quietly building its own zkEVM, Scroll.  

Last Monday, Scroll announced the launch of their zkEVM Alpha testnet on Goerli. This essentially means that any user can add the Scroll zkEVM network to their wallet and start playing around with some of the dapps that have already been deployed.

To recap, a zkEVM adds zero-knowledge cryptography to the Ethereum virtual machine. While ZK tech is mainly used for scaling purposes (viewed as the holy grail for Ethereum scaling), it also allows for privacy capabilities. Privacy is not only important for us individual users, but for businesses that want to keep their company data private.

Today, StarkWare is probably the team best known for its use of ZK technology, as they’ve had a working zkVM for some time now (see StarkEx & StarkNet). However, StarkWare doesn’t use the EVM, but rather its own architecture (CairoVM & Cairo programming language), which in turn leads to its own set of tools.

Adding ZK tech to the EVM lets developers add scalability to their dapps, translating to high speeds and low fees for us users, while being able to utilize the Solidity programming language and existing tools like Metamask. This means existing Solidity-based dapps will be able to easily port their code to Scroll.

zkEVMs were expected to be years away. However, we now have three different projects expected to release a permissionless version of their zkEVM on mainnet this year (Scroll, Polygon & zkSync).

For anyone interested in playing around with Scroll’s testnet, simply:

• Add the Goerli testnet network to your wallet

• Request testnet ETH from a faucet

• Add the Scroll zkEVM network to your wallet (make sure it’s the correct one!)

• Head over to Scroll’s bridge interface and bridge your testnet ETH from Goerli to the Scroll network 

• & that’s it, you can start playing around with some of the dapps currently running on the zkEVM testnet, like Uniswap or Tic-Tac-Toe!

For a complete breakdown of how to onboard to the Scroll network, check out this guide - shoutout to @Gaurangtorvekar for the amazing guides!

This is Scroll’s last big milestone before they reach full mainnet launch. Congrats to the entire Scroll team!

ERC-4337

Cointelegraph

@Cointelegraph

The new ERC-4337 "account abstraction" standard will be launched at WalletCon in Denver today. It provides Ethereum accounts with all the features of a bank account: 2FA, password recovery and set spending limits.

cointelegraph.com

Ethereum ERC-4337 'smart accounts' launch at WalletCon: Account abstraction is here

Crypto finally gets user friendly, with the ERC-4337 “account abstraction” standard meaning new users can join any EVM-compatible blockchain without understanding seed phrases, private keys or...

292

4:01 PM • Mar 1, 2023

One of the biggest headlines to come out of ETHDenver this past week was the launch of ERC-4337, which means we're a step closer to account abstraction.

Not to get confused with EIPs, which are hard forked into the actual protocol, ERCs are smart contracts that hold standards by which developers follow. The biggest example of an ERC is ERC-20 tokens, which set the standard for how fungible tokens are created on Ethereum.

As mentioned, ERC-4337 introduces Account Abstraction, which “allows users to use smart contract wallets containing arbitrary verification logic instead of EOAs as their primary account”. In short, this means we can start adding logic to our individual wallet accounts (2FA, FaceID, etc.).

There are two Account types on Ethereum, Externally Owned Accounts (EOAs), and Contract Accounts. Today, we use EOAs, which are controlled by private keys, however, account abstraction introduces contract accounts, which are accounts controlled by a smart contract rather than a private key.

Because accounts are represented by smart contracts, developers are able to add their own logic, enabling end users to benefit from extra security features. To be a little more specific, there are three major components that go into our account’s security: Authentication, Replay protection, and Payment. With contract accounts, you can abstract away some of the features that go into these three components, whether that means adding a recovery method, adding multiple signers to your account, etc. You can watch this great presentation about ERC-4337 to learn all about this new standard and what exactly is being “abstracted away.”

Some account abstraction use cases include:

• Social recovery: use a separate wallet (the ledger in your vault) to recover access to your lost wallet

• Session keys: you can have different keys for different purposes within one account. So, you can use one key to interact with a game using your assets, and another to actually sell/trade your game items.

• Paymasters: allows teams to choose a separate account to take care of gas fees, as opposed to having the end platform users pay (gasless transactions by having the dapp itself pay for fees)

• Authentication: add 2FA, FaceID, Social log-in, or any other form of authentication mechanism, & much more!

Account Abstraction has been highly anticipated for some time now. Over the following year, we should expect existing smart contract wallets like Argent and Braavos expand to multiple chains, as well as Metamask and other traditional Ethereum EVM wallets to add account abstraction support. Plus, what is even more exciting is that we’ll probably see other EVM networks like Arbitrum, Optimism, and Polygon add support too!

There are tons of use cases that are enabled by account abstraction, If you’d like to dig deeper into the subject, we recommend this amazing paper written by Cami.

AltLayer’s 100 Flash Layers Campaign Begins

AltLayer

@alt_layer

No-code Rollups-as-a-Service are HERE.

To the 100 select people who are testing Altlayer’s ‘rollup launchpad’ from 3rd-10th March: Congrats!

Eager to see how #rollups can revolutionize #DeFi, #SocialFi #NFTs #Gaming etc. Stay tuned for the showcases!

blog.altlayer.io

100 Flash Layer Campaign Kickoff: Instructions, Rewards and Resources

Hello all,

117

2:34 AM • Mar 3, 2023

March 3rd marked the official launch of AltLayer’s “100 Flash layers” campaign, where 100 selected developers are able to test the rollup launchpad by each launching their own rollup.

To recap, Altlayer is building a system of disposable, optimistic rollups, or as they refer to them, “Flash Layers”. Using their dashboard, users will be able to deploy their own custom, no-code rollup in just ten minutes. They currently support rollups on Ethereum and other EVM chains but will expand to other environments in the future. 

From February 10-28th, they allowed anyone to apply for a chance to be among the 100 people/teams to try the rollup launchpad. Now that registrations are out of the way, the 100 chosen experimentoors have until March 10th to launch their own disposable rollup. Those who were chosen for the campaign should have received an email by now.

There are several use cases for disposable, or short lived rollups, mostly revolving around the gaming/NFT space. For example, disposable rollups can be used by individual NFT collections that want to have their mint take place on its own environment, thereby removing congestion, which then removes gas wars. Or by builders who want to launch their own mini or Indie game. The point is to use flash layers for projects that don’t need to be running a chain for more than a certain period of time (Yuga launching Dookey Dash on its own short lived rollup for example).

Since the campaign started, there have been several deployed public rollups for users to interact with, including the “Dragon Eyes” NFT collection launch, and “Mother Staker”, an ERC-20 token staking platform.

For anyone interested in testing out AltLayer, here’s a complete set of public projects you can start using. To learn more about the campaign you can check out this article.

Rollkit Adds Bitcoin DA to Its Modular Stack

Rollkit

@RollkitDev

You can now run a sovereign rollup on Bitcoin.

Announcing the first research integration of Bitcoin as a data availability layer for sovereign rollups.

rollkit.dev

Sovereign rollups on Bitcoin with Rollkit | Rollkit

Last week, we introduced Rollkit, a modular framework for rollups. Today, we are proud to announce that Rollkit is the first rollup framework to support sovereign rollups on Bitcoin. This allows...

1,414

12:50 PM • Mar 5, 2023

On March 5th, just two days ago, Rollkit announced the addition of Bitcoin as a data availability (DA) layer option for the rollup stack. 

Rollkit is a modular rollup framework that enables developers to choose between different features in order to build their own custom, sovereign rollup, and now, they just gave builders an option to deploy their rollups using Bitcoin as the underlying data availability solution. 

This means that with Rollkit, developers can now build a sovereign CosmWasm, EVM, FuelVM, etc. powered rollup that utilizes Bitcoin DA, thereby connecting these respective communities to Bitcoin. In fact, here’s a demo of the EVM running on Bitcoin as a sovereign rollup!  

As a reminder, there are three layers that go into a blockchain: execution layer, settlement layer, and DA/Consensus layer. A monolithic chain includes these three components into a single layer, whereas modular chains separate them into their own layers. 

Rollkit enables developers to plug in custom execution and data availability layers in order to create the rollup best suited for their own particular dapp. For example, it allows developers to choose their preferred virtual machine (EVM or SVM), gas token (pay gas in ETH, USDC, etc), along with any other features for their execution environment, as well as their own data availability solution. Celestia was the first DA solution to be added to the stack, but just two days ago, Bitcoin was added as another option, enabling developers to start building sovereign rollups on Bitcoin. 

There’s been a lot of talk & debate going on in crypto Twitter regarding this recent announcement, but regardless of what anyone thinks, at least people are talking about rollups on Bitcoin now. You can check out the complete article to learn more.

Polygon ID

Mihailo Bjelic

@MihailoBjelic

1/3 Polygon ID, @0xPolygon’s identity infrastructure is here!

Polygon ID’s open-source identity infrastructure unlocks passwordless login, verifiable proof-of-uniqueness, reusable KYC, and instant onboarding use cases for web3 developers.

436

4:22 PM • Mar 1, 2023

About ten days ago, Polygon released the official docs for Polygon ID docs, an identity solution that relies on zk-proofs, enabling users “prove their identity without the need of exposing their private information.”Here’s a quick summary:

Polygon ID relies on verifiable credentials (VCs), which are the actual documents that “represent any type of information related to the individual/enterprise/object.” This could be a license, a car title, birth certificate, or anything else you want to have proof of owning, without: A) actually having to carry the physical document, or B) show the actual contents within that document. Of course, we’ll be able to use our own individual Polygon ID wallets to hold our VCs.

There are three core pieces within Polygon ID:

• Identity Holder: you, me, or anyone else that holds the VCs within a Polygon ID wallet.

• Issuer: the person or organization that issues the VCs to users (a DMV issuing your license, your doctor issuing your medical documents, etc.)

• Verifier: the person who verifies the proof of your VC. This could be a bartender verifying you’re over the age of 21 for example, and because Polygon ID uses zk-technology, you won’t even have to show your birth date, just the proof of VC ownership (a QR code)

Now let’s look at some of the use cases Polygon ID enables:

• Lending: A lending protocol could integrate the ID solution to enable uncollatoralized lending. 

• Ticketing/Events: Enable NFT collectors to start attending token gated events wqithout having to actually carry their wallet that holds their NFTs with them. Yuga could offer VCs for ape ownership, carry that proof (not the JPEG) in your Polygon ID wallet, and use that VC to access the event. 

Polygon ID has been in development for several years now, but it looks like starting this year, we’ll start seeing this new tool be used across the Polygon ecosystem. Polygon ID was originally known as the Iden (Identity) protocol, and was founded by the same original team behind Hermez, or what is now referred to as Polygon zkEVM. As a reminder, Polygon acquired Hermez, along with the team and their identity solution about a year ago, in what was part of their $1B effort to expand their zk stack.

We’re excited to see what developers build over time with Polygon ID. For anyone interested in learning more about this, you can check out the complete Polygon ID docs here. 

More News & Updates

• Fuel gets a new look

• Curio announces the launch of their own game dedicated rollup on Caldera 

• Great Wyrm leverages Caldera to launch their own gasless rollup, Wyrm Chain

• ChainSafe makes proposal to bring privacy to ENS domains using the Aztec Network

• In preparation for their zkEVM launch, Consensys integrates Hop protocol, to serve as a bridge from Goerli to testnet once it officially goes live to the public 

• “The next chapter of Saga is arriving” 

• Looks like Osmosis is one step closer to adding BTC security to their network, thanks to a recent proposal by the Babylon team

• NodeSet releases the first set of details for Project Hyperdrive, Rocket Pool’s L2 blockchain. 

• Introducing the Mantle Grants Program, aimed at expanding the Mantle ecosystem through milestone based funding

• Another update to Polygon website, now featuring learning material, building resources, community tools, and more

• The Robinhood wallet is now available for anyone with an IOS device! Any user can now download the Robinhood Wallet. As of today, users can deposit/withdraw from Ethereum, Polygon, and Binance. Token swaps are only available on Polygon & Binance though.

• StarkNet Social launches their testnet. You can learn more about that here.

• It looks like Australia is one step closer to having their own central bank digital currency (CBDC), as the Reserve Bank of Australia just announced an upcoming pilot phase to launch a digital version of the Australian dollar. Also looks like it’ll be done using StarkEx technology, which would be huge for the StarkWare ecosystem - first VISA, now this.

• Axelar announces their new interoperable VM

• ETHDenver attendees were able to experience using the zkSync Era zkEVM for the first time, while getting free food at the same time!

• JokeDAO announces their deployment on zkSync Era

• zkSync announces collaboration with WorldPay Global, the largest global payments acquirer

  ---

📚 Discussions and Education

EigenPaper

EigenLayer

@eigenlayer

We're proud to release the 1st public version of the EigenLayer whitepaper:

- in the new forum.eigenlayer.xyz/t/announcing-t…
- and at eigenlayer.xyz/whitepaper.pdf

It describes the key ideas the core developers are implementing into the 1st version of the protocol launching later this year.

1/6

1,510

11:25 PM • Feb 20, 2023

EigenLayer broke CT with their whitepaper announcement. This isn’t all that surprising, since the project has made waves across the industry for months.

It is well worth a read - but we know how busy everyone was at ETHDenver - so here are our 5 favorite threads about the whitepaper to scroll through while recovering from the week:

1. Thread by @nuss_eli

2. Thread by @DeFi_Cheetah

3. Thread by @saniyamore

4. Thread by @0xkydo

5. Thread by @100y_eth

Let’s zoom in on Eli’s thread. He and the Stratos team did an excellent analysis of EigenLayer, covering everything from the team and revenue projections to a Q&A style breakdown of key risks. It really makes you feel like you’re thinking in the trenches with them.

Here’s one of their projections, showing how EigenLayer could become a multi-billion dollar protocol:

Eli Nuss

@nuss_eli

10/ Using these revenue projections we can estimate a range of possible valuations for EigenLayer depending on the level of penetration over time.

As you can see from the chart, its quite believable that EigenLayer can become a multi-billion dollar protocol over time.

8

1:14 PM • Feb 28, 2023

Are zkEVMs overrated?

Paul Razvan Berg

@PaulRBerg

Potentially hot take:

zkEVMs will go down in history as one of the most overrated concepts in all of crypto.

316

3:09 PM • Mar 1, 2023

Micah Zoltu

@MicahZoltu

I have been saying essentially this for a while. A VM that is designed to be proven is far better than trying to write a prover for a VM that is basically hostile to being proven.

79

3:38 PM • Mar 1, 2023

zkEVM hype has largely been around which rollup project was “first”, but Paul Razvan Berg hints at a different question: do zkEVMs deserve the hype to begin with?

He says no - they are overrated - and mostly points to Micah Zoltu's argument that VMs designed to be proven are better. The EVM was definitely not designed to be proven.

Micah makes two main points. He says it’ll be hard for zkEVMs to:

• Be cost competitive

• Have good developer UX (e.g. loops are hard to prove)

No surprise - ZK teams don’t agree. Here are some of their responses:

• Polygon zkEVM has ~ L1-equivalent UX and proving costs of $1.90 per hour (not very costly)

• Teams have gotten around developer UX hurdles like proving loops

• Being able to port battle tested smart contract code is good developer UX

It appears the basis of Micah’s argument is outdated, which he’s willing to concede.

Micah Zoltu

@MicahZoltu

As to why loops are hard, I am not an expert in this area but my understanding is that they have to be flattened using current ZK tech. Maybe someone has solved this since I last looked?

0

11:58 PM • Mar 1, 2023

L1 valuations and sustainability

Vance Spencer

@pythianism

I think we break the collective hallucination that L1s are valuable because reasons this cycle

ICP is trading at a 37,210x multiple to earnings, ATOM is at 231,000x, Aptos is infinity, DOT same

Not sustainable. At some point trash goes to 0 under the weight of VC unlocks

956

5:00 PM • Feb 27, 2023

Vance Spencer claims that many L1s are overvalued and unsustainable. And at first glance it seems obvious that they are - a 230,000x multiple is insane.

But does that mean we should write them off completely?

Not sure. Like any startup, protocols will balance growth vs. monetization. Growth can mean a number of things - mindshare, users, etc. - even if users are temporarily subsidized.

The key word, though, is temporarily. If you want to stick with the corporate analogy, each protocol needs a monetization strategy that eventually gets executed. If you want to think about it in a more nuanced and crypto-native way, check out Jon Charb’s recent article.

So which L1s have plausible strategies?

There are arguments to make for some. Cosmos Hub, for example, has interesting demand drivers for both growth and monetization:

• Cosmos narratives gaining momentum

• Replicated Security gives ATOM a value accrual mechanism

• Cosmos Hub alignment with modular ecosystem

If you want to take this exercise a few steps further, Polynya created a pretty comprehensive framework that can be mapped to any protocol:

polynya

@apolynya

Just some of the ways ETH is used beyond just staking. LSDs help, but the idea should be to have as little staked as possible while still maintaining adequate economic security - so ETH can be actually used.

A 61% staking rate just implies the asset isn't very useful.

160

12:37 AM • Jan 5, 2023

More Discussions & Education

• @jbaylina explains why ZK rollups are not bottlenecked by provers

• @toghrulmaharram clarifies why ZK provers aren’t bottlenecks, agreeing with @jbaylina 👆

• @TaschaLabs hosts Sreeram from EigenLayer to discuss how restaking can scale PoS and change staking yield on Ethereum

• @stonecoldpat0 writes an article discussing numerous different rollup designs

• Messari compares the time to finality (TTF) of popular blockchains

• Bankless hosts the OP Labs founders to discuss Base

• Bell Curve releases an episode discussing Base

• Eclipse explains how EigenLayer impacts rollups and modular blockchains

• @dannyryan reflects on his experience building Ethereum - the good and bad

• 0xResearch hosts Tim Beiko to discuss the evolution of Ethereum

• Delphi Digital creates a graphic comparing the three types of bridges

• Polymer Labs introduces the concept of “modular interoperability” for messaging across chains

• Polygon breaks down the EVM-equivalent attributes of their zkEVM

• @lightcoin explains how sovereign rollups on Bitcoin would work

• Labrys explains how Ethereum rollups work in depth

• @anthonykrose explains how Matter Labs approached the open-sourcing of zkSync Era

• @Cryptocito hosts Neel from Eclipse to discuss IBC enabled Solana VMs

• @mevtiger illustrates how challenging the MEV problem space can be

• @seunlanlege explains state proofs and other cryptography concepts in simple terms - plus how they relate to light clients and modular architecture

• @DrewVdW writes an article offering perspective on the future of block building

• @colludingnode describes three ways sovereign rollups with centralized sequencers can ensure censorship resistance

• @odin_free creates an updated Starknet ecosystem graphic

• @DefiIgnas compares the current state and future outlooks of Optimism and Arbitrum

• @binji_x explains the importance of attestations in blockchain and the world around us

• OP Labs writes an article explaining how their Bedrock upgrade will bring significantly lower fees (47% lower) to mainnet

• Messari illustrates how Babylon chain leverages Bitcoin security

• Blockworks Research points out the many benefits of Account Abstraction

• @RennickPalley explains what Monetary Premium is and where value will accrue in modular blockchains

• @nico_mnbl creates a list of informal ZK jargon

• Saga writes an article explaining how their token model serves developers who want commoditized and dedicated blockspace

• @DavideCrapis writes a post on the Ethereum research forum about latency arms race concerns in MEV design

• @sreeramkannan proposes the idea of optimistic rollup “watchtowers” using EigenLayer

• @0xshake proposes the idea of a decentralized sequencer using Cosmos SDK and IBC

That's all for this week! Thanks for reading 🧱🎬

Subscribe to get issues sent directly to your email every Tuesday, and also, make sure to follow us on Twitter for daily modular updates!

You can check out our previous newsletter issue here.

📣 News and Announcements

Coinbase Announces Base

Coinbase

@coinbase

1/ We’re excited to announce @BuildOnBase.

Base is an Ethereum L2 that offers a secure, low-cost, developer-friendly way for anyone, anywhere, to build decentralized apps.

Our goal with Base is to make onchain the next online and onboard 1B+ users into the cryptoeconomy.

11.6K

9:14 AM • Feb 23, 2023

Last week, Coinbase announced the testnet launch of Base, an Ethereum L2 built using the OP Stack, which is a set of software tools used to build within the Optimism ecosystem.

Not only is this the first publicly traded company to launch its own blockchain, but this announcement also helps validate the rollup thesis - we now have the biggest company in the entire space building its own L2 network!

Just as Coinbase made it easy for users to buy crypto, they now want to make it seamless for their customers to get on-chain and take advantage of all the cool DeFi protocols. Their goal is to take people from a blockchain-centric focus, to a dapp-centric one. The users shouldn’t have to know which chain they're on, or what native gas token to use, they should just worry about whether or not they want to use the dapp.

Here are some of the features Base will have to offer:

• Ethereum Security: As mentioned earlier, Base is built using Optimism’s OP Stack, keeping them within the Ethereum ecosystem .

• Empowered by Coinbase: Base will be completely open and permissionless, allowing any team to leverage the platform’s 100M+ customer base, along with their products and tools, such as Coinbase Wallet.

• Big features, small fees: “full EVM equivalence at a fraction of the cost”

• Open source: building everything open source

On top of all this, Base will not have its own native gas token, instead, it’ll be using ETH.

According to the team, they’re building Base on the OP Stack, “with the vision of creating a standard, modular, rollup agnostic Superchain powered by Optimism.”. Optimism’s Superchain aims to become a unified network, or “mesh”, of multiple interoperable L2 networks, all built using the OP Stack and all working together.

In the coming weeks, the Base team will be sharing their road to mainnet, so make sure to follow them on Twitter if you want to stay in the loop.

Introducing Rollkit

Celestia

@CelestiaOrg

Introducing Rollkit, a modular framework for rollups.

Neutral and independent from Celestia, Rollkit serves as a community-led public good that empowers developers with the freedom to deploy throughout the modular stack and accelerate innovation.

blog.celestia.org

Introducing Rollkit: a modular rollup framework

Neutral and independent from Celestia, Rollkit serves as a community-led public good that empowers developers with the freedom to deploy throughout the modular stack and accelerate innovation.

225

12:35 PM • Feb 21, 2023

Last week, the Celestia team introduced Rollkit, a modular rollup framework that enables developers to pick and choose between different features in order to build their own custom rollup.

Rollkit (previously Rollmint) has been in development by the Celestia team since 2021 but has now been introduced as its own neutral project, independent from Celestia.

Think of the Cosmos stack, which consists of the Tendermint consensus engine, an app layer, and ABCI, which is a tool used to convert dapps written in different programming languages into one that is compatible with Tendermint.

Rollkit replaces Tendermint.

Specifically, Rollkit is a sequencer node that is used to publish data to Celestia. So the rollups built with Rollkit will take care of their execution, and then use the rollkit sequencer to communicate with the DA layer.

And since Rollkit and Celestia are independent from one another, you can tell this sequencer node which DA layer to connect to, whether you want that to be Celestia or a different solution.

With Rollkit, developers will have the power to choose and switch between different execution environments, sequencers, proof schemes, and rollup types. 

Image Source

It’s important to note however that not all of these features have been added yet. According to the team, “Rollkit is in an early stage of development and many features remain to be built to reach this vision. In its current state, Rollkit rollups are sovereign rollups with single sequencers, with support for a pessimistic mode and a work-in-progress optimistic mode.”

For anyone wanting to see a PoC, @dferrersan, a Celestia engineer recently ran a sovereign rollup that uses the FuelVM as an execution environment by leveraging Rollkit. You can read all about that here.

You can also check out the full article to learn more about Rollkit, and for any developers interested in experimenting today, you can start building with Rollkit on Celestia’s Mocha testnet.

Eclipse x Polygon: Introducing Polygon SVM

Eclipse (@ ETHDENVER)

@EclipseFND

Eclipse & @0xPolygon are launching Polygon SVM
A L2 blockchain capable of running all smart contracts and tooling compatible with Solana.

dApps built for Solana can now easily migrate or go multichain to Polygon SVM

techcrunch.com/2023/02/23/pol…

525

3:08 PM • Feb 23, 2023

On February 23rd, Eclipse & Polygon announced Polygon SVM, an L2 blockchain that combines some of the strongest features from the Solana and Polygon networks.

To recap, Eclipse lets developers combine their favorite parts of different blockchains to create their own dedicated, custom rollup. So rather than having to build on top of a generalized rollup (dapps living together on the same chain), teams can instead have their own dedicated rollup.

Eclipse enables builders to choose their preferred virtual machine (Ethereum VM or Solana VM), and preferred data availability layer (Celestia, Polygon Avail, Eigen DA), along with whatever other customizations they think are best for their specific rollup. This could be using the chain’s own native gas token, adding privacy features, MEV options, and more.

So what is Polygon SVM?

Here’s a breakdown of the different modular components within this Polygon SVM stack:

• Settlement Layer: Eclipse

• DA Layer: Polygon Avail

• Execution Layer: Teams can build their own execution environment on top of Polygon SVM, using Solana’s high throughput virtual machine

Polygon SVM combines Solana’s Sealevel virtual machine, with Polygon Avail, Polygon’s own data availability solution.

Developers will be able to build their own custom rollup on top of Polygon SVM, allowing them to remain within the Polygon ecosystem (access to EVM tools & wallets, Polygon users, dapps, etc.), while leveraging the high throughput of Solana’s VM.

Specifically, these rollups will use the Sealevel VM to execute transactions, then post the blocks of data to Polygon Avail. Of course, Eclipse remains as the settlement layer, responsible for bridging and passing proofs that are received from the execution layer.

As of today, Eclipse has ten partnered projects that will be announcing their launch over the next several weeks. Polygon SVM was just the first of ten to be announced and is expected to launch on testnet during Q1, with mainnet release expected for this upcoming summer. 

Make sure to follow Eclipse on Twitter to stay up to date with all their future announcements.

Arbitrum Surpasses Ethereum Mainnet in Transactions Processed

Arbitrum (💙,🧡)

@arbitrum

For the first time ever, Arbitrum One processed more transactions than Ethereum

This is a huge milestone achieved by our team and Arbinauts. We've come a long way as a community and we're grateful to have you along with us!

Our mission to scale Ethereum continues!

5,931

10:04 AM • Feb 22, 2023

It was a huge week for the Arbitrum community, as for the first time ever, the Arbitrum network processed more transactions than Ethereum mainnet, becoming the first rollup to accomplish this feat. 

On February 21st, Arbitrum processed slightly over 1.1M transactions within that 24-hour span, which was about 20,000 more than Ethereum mainnet.

Source 

Aside from processed transactions, Arbitrum also saw a rise in the number of active addresses, a rise in bridged ETH, along with an increase in TVL throughout the year. 

Many believe this rise in activity is due to the network’s upcoming airdrop, however, with popular dapps like Gains (GMX), along with strong commmuntites like that of TreasureDAO, one could make the assumption that a lot of this growth has been organic. 

Arbitrum is an L2 optimistic rollup deployed on top of Ethereum. Projects & dapps can deploy on top of Arbitrum to take advantage of high speeds and lower fees, while still being able to benefit from Ethereum security.

More News & Updates

• Attention developers, Arbitrum just released a new version of their SDK (3.1.0)

• Fuel Labs will be co-hosting a hackathon from March 10-29, including $125K in prizes

• Check out Fuel Labs’ latest edition of “Inside Fuel”, an article series that takes you through some of the biggest, recent developments within the Fuel ecosystem

• The BitDAO community just passed a proposal to provide funding to Mantle, to help them continue to develop their network over the following months

• Risc Zero recently released a repo and a whitepaper highlighting details of their proof system. You can check out the details about that in this thread.

• Ethereum’s KZG Summoning Ceremony surpassed 50K contributions

• Saga announces a strategic partnership with Onenet, a video game distribution & showcase platform

• Here’s an in-depth thread going over Celestia, the first modular network

• EigenLayer, a protocol that is re-distributing Ethereum security, just released the first public version of their whitepaper - we’ll have a summary about this done for you soon!

• Arkham, a data & insights platform, officially integrates the Polygon network

• Timeswap launches v2 on Polygon mainnet - here is what this new version adds.

• Looks like Compound v3 is coming to Polygon mainnet

• Polygon zkEVM testnet upgrade is coming next week, featuring support for Etherscan, and FFLONK (universal trusted setup)

• Next week, StarkNet will upgrade StarkNet Goerli to SHARP 4.0

• Here’s an article covering android app development for StarkWare, developed by the Crypto Mansion team, who build tools for the StarNet community

• A StarkNet builder just released a PoC of a substrate based StarkNet sequencer

• zkSync announces collaboration with Sygnum Bank, a crypto-native regulated bank

• Check out the details for zkSyncs upcoming hackathon, featuring a $25K prize pool - running from now until March 19th

• Check out the Scroll team's latest “Weekly Update” thread, this week featuring an Aave deployment

  ---

📚 Discussions and Education

Coinbase Rollup Good or Bad?

ً

@lightclients

This coinbase L2 play doesn't make much sense to me; it further fragments the ecosystem. Good bridges are hard, and now there is another destination to bridge to. UX is also hard. Now there is another option in wallet drop downs. I'd love to see more unification!

78

11:06 AM • Feb 23, 2023

Most people in the Ethereum community seem excited over the Coinbase announcement, but Ethereum developer @lightclients challenges the idea that Base is good for the ecosystem.

Their main points are:

• A separate rollup means extra bridge and UX complexity

• Bridges and UX are hard enough already

• Why not just use Optimism mainnet?

The points are reasonable, as no one will argue that bridges and UX are easy. If Coinbase simply used Optimism mainnet, these would be non-issues.

Here’s what the OP Labs team thinks:

• There are good reasons to run a separate rollup, citing common appchain arguments like custom gas and token economics.

• Because Base is part of the Superchain, they will benefit from unified bridge designs and mitigate bridge complexity. It also makes sense for Base to customize UX around their distribution channel and users - so this complexity is worth it.

Ryan Berckmans also weighs in with a comprehensive take on why Base makes sense and how we’ll solve the design challenges. He starts by emphasizing something we at Modular Media believe whole heartedly - one chain CANNOT do it all:

Ryan Berckmans - ryanb.eth🦇🔊

@ryanberckmans

Everyone knows that we're living in a multichain world. A takeaway from the modular chain thesis is that no single chain, regardless of scalability tradeoffs, can hope to satisfy even a sliver of the growing global demand for blockspace.

20

9:07 AM • Feb 23, 2023

If you buy this notion, the conversation shifts to how we’ll solve the bridging and UX challenges (vs. whether we should try). He touches specifically on the bridging topic.

In the OP Twitter Space, Coinbase makes clear they will be progressively decentralizing the sequencer. But let’s assume they don’t. Ryan explains why a centralized Base would still be valuable and capable of trust-minimized bridging to separate rollups like Optimism mainnet and even StarkNet - using an NFT bridge example.

Takeaway: Coinbase rollup good 👍

Question: Is this the start of a larger trend? 👀

Nick White

@nickwh8te

I 'member in 2018/19 when "enterprise blockchains" were hyped

None got built and enterprise chains became a laughingstock, a symbol for failed blockchain use cases

Modular blockchains might unironically bring them back

27

4:01 PM • Feb 23, 2023

Did Cosmos Miss its Window?

Vance Spencer

@pythianism

Base is the start of the app-chain narrative, built on ethereum

tbh increasingly seems like cosmos has missed its window

still doesn't even have stablecoins

554

10:55 AM • Feb 23, 2023

Everyone knows that Cosmos pioneered the appchain narrative. The question is - did Ethereum hijack it? Will all appchains be built as Ethereum rollups?

Vance from Framework Ventures thinks so, but others disagree. Let’s review different takes.

shakeshack.ibc

@0xshake

There’s some wild speculation that Eth L2s are now eating the app chain thesis.

This view confuses scaling for innovation. The design space for Eth L2s is limited as whereas the design space for app chains is infinite.

App chains == Innovation.
Eth L2s == scaling.

Coinbase

@coinbase

1/ We’re excited to announce @BuildOnBase.

Base is an Ethereum L2 that offers a secure, low-cost, developer-friendly way for anyone, anywhere, to build decentralized apps.

Our goal with Base is to make onchain the next online and onboard 1B+ users into the cryptoeconomy.

50

7:07 AM • Feb 24, 2023

@0xshake is part of Polymer Labs, pioneering ZK-IBC for Cosmos appchains, so it’s unsurprising that they disagree with the idea of Ethereum dominance. Their meme is appchains = innovation, L2s = scaling. If that’s the case, it certainly doesn’t sound like Ethereum L2s will eat everything. We need innovation!

This meme might not be all that accurate, though. Innovation is possible at L2. For example L2s can use different execution environments - Toghrul from Scroll explains how this works.

But does @0xshake have a point? Are there limitations to L2 innovation?

Yes. As usual, it’s a spectrum. And there are even points along that spectrum in between Ethereum L2s and Cosmos L1s:

• Ethereum L2s

• Sovereign rollups on Celestia

• Middleware on EigenLayer

• Cosmos L1s

Dougie DeLuca

@DougieDeLuca

app-chains will be the narrative everywhere, Cosmos is just the first (and thus far the best) to do it.

across Celestia, Ethereum, Cosmos, EigenLayer, etc. they'll be widespread and likely highly interconnected.

Ethereum will likely remain dominant but not the only player.

21

1:04 PM • Feb 23, 2023

Which designs will win the majority of use cases? TBD (sorry).

Can ZK Provers Keep Up?

toly 🇺🇸

@aeyakovenko

ZK L2s will not be scalability solutions. Real time loads have long sequential state dependencies. For a ZKP to keep up with the tip of the chain prover time + validation time has to be lower than real time execution. This can only be true for loads that are intermittent. Real…

369

2:04 PM • Feb 24, 2023

Anatoly expresses skepticism over ZK L2s, saying they aren’t performant enough to be scalability solutions. What does he mean? Where is this coming from?

Solana’s goal is to synchronize global state at the speed of light, and Anatoly maps everything to that goal. His argument is that it’s impossible for a ZK prover to be as fast as real-time execution, and therefore it’ll always lag behind chain finality and be unhelpful.

Let's assume he is technically right. Practically, he’s still definitely wrong.

The ZK gigabrains are on the same page and make this clear:

• Preston from Sovereign Labs

• Alex from zkSync

• Polynya

Basically, it doesn’t matter if one ZK prover lags behind execution. You can solve the problem by having many ZK rollups running in parallel.

And ZK provers might have even more tricks up their sleeves 🤯

Nick White

@nickwh8te

Aha, so you can prove faster than execution.

Prove each state transition in parallel and then recurse them up?

7

6:52 PM • Feb 24, 2023

More Discussions & Education

• OP Labs hosts a Twitter Space discussion about building Base on the OP Stack with @jessepollak

• @kelvinfitcher explains Optimism’s vision for the Superchain

• @jessepollak clarifies that Base will let users pay fees in whatever token they want

• @jon_charb writes an article outlining better ways to think about blockchain profitability

• Bankless releases a podcast episode with @job_charb, discussing his article 👆

• @yezhang shares lessons learned from building the Scroll zkEVM

• @zooko shares his thoughts on Scroll’s zkEVM work 👆

• @jiayaoqi illustrates the past few years of building AltLayer and scaling blockchains

• AltLayer hosts a discussion about all things Layer 2 with @dberenzon

• @Cryptocito hosts a discussion about the endgame for shared security with @nickwh8te and @sunnya97

• Bell Curve releases a podcast episode on rollapp stacks with Sovereign Labs and Slush

• @gluk64 explains the rollup security trilemma and how zkSync solves it

• @LeThang137 summarizes the shared security discussion 👆

• @seppwurscht summarizes Mesh Data Availability, a concept introduced by @sunnya97 in the shared security discussion 👆👆

• Celestia hosts a Twitter Space discussion about MEV in the modular stack with builders from Skip Protocol, Duality and Astria

• @stonecoldpat0 writes an article explaining the tiers of transaction finality for rollups

• @eclecticcapital writes an article exploring MEV in the Solana and Cosmos ecosystems

• @toghrulmaharram joins Solana’s Validated podcast to discuss rollup and ZK proofs

• Celestia depicts Rollkit’s long-term vision

• Eclipse explains sovereign rollups in simple terms

• Hyperplane explains synergies between them and EigenLayer

• @toghrulmaharram explains DA trust assumptions and why there’s low risk of DA failure

• Saga hosts a Twitter Space discussion about building web3 games on dedicated blockspace

• @sreeramkannan clarifies that EigenLayer is highly complementary to rollups

• @0xSalazar explains how zkEVMs interact with base layer Ethereum in simple terms

• @toghrulmaharram distinguishes between sovereign rollups and L2s

• @arjunbhuptani explains the differences between L1<>L1 and L2<>L2 bridging

• @terencechain shares notes from the EIP-4844 implementer call

• @NoahCitron explains that if an optimistic rollup doesn’t need withdrawals (likely many use cases), it also doesn’t need a fraud proof mechanism and can still inherit DA benefits

• @nosleepjon explains how Hyperplane fits into Optimism’s Superchain vision

• @WestieCapital explains how Danksharding allows synchronous composability between the L1 and ZK rollups, so liquidity is not fragmented

• @toghrulmaharram explains that it’s not possible to use two chains for rollup settlement

That's all for this week! Thanks for reading 🧱🎬

Subscribe to get issues sent directly to your email every Tuesday, and also, make sure to follow us on Twitter for daily modular updates!

You can check out our previous newsletter issue.

News and Announcements

zkSync launches zkEVM - fair onboarding phase begins

zkSync ∎

@zksync

The wait is over.

All aboard zkSync Era∎ Mainnet!

Today, Ethereum's first zkEVM is:

• Opening mainnet to builders
• Adopting a brand new name
• Open-sourcing its entire codebase



1/8

blog.matter-labs.io

All Aboard zkSync Era∎ Mainnet

The first zkEVM on Ethereum is lifting the gates to let projects deploy.

6,832

10:01 AM • Feb 16, 2023

Last week, zkSync caught everyone by surprise after officially launching the first zkEVM on mainnet.

As you may already know, ZK-rollups are thought to be the holy grail of blockchain scaling. StarkWare was the first team to deploy a general-purpose ZK-rollup, however, it’s built using their own custom, native programming language, Cairo (as opposed to Solidity). zkSync on the other hand, natively supports the EVM (EVM compatible), and Solidity enabled, which makes it easy for developers to port their existing Solidity code to zkSync.

To be specific, February 16th marked the launch of the network’s fair onboarding phase, allowing all registered teams to start deploying on the zkEVM. Mainnet will remain closed for users during this phase, allowing teams to test their projects in a closed environment. This phase is expected to last 4-6 weeks, and assuming everything goes well, the Full Onboarding phase will begin soon after.

Aside from this, zkSync also announced:

• their now fully open sourced, allowing anyone to view, modify, and fork the code (although, it’s highly recommended to avoid forking until full onboarding phase)

• zkSync2.0 is now zkSync Era

Some of the projects that have already announced their upcoming deployment on zkSync’s zkEVM include: Aave, Uniswap, 1inch, Curve, Chainlink, Ramp. Hop, Hashflow, and Juno.

The zkSync team will be posting their new roadmap and milestones soon, so make sure to follow them on Twitter so you don’t miss that.

35-C testnet is now live

Dymension

@dymensionXYZ

Dymension Hub 35-C Testnet is Now Live!

At 2PM UTC today, nearly 100 genesis validators brought life to the Dymension Hub testnet and with it a new Dymension of modular blockchains.

Read more about the 35-C Testnet here:
medium.com/@dymensionXYZ/…

1/4

498

12:56 PM • Feb 15, 2023

This past week, Dymension officially launched their Dymension Hub testnet, 35-C. 

As a recap, the Dymension Hub is a Proof of Stake blockchain that acts as the settlement layer for the entire Dymension ecosystem. Builders can then launch their own dedicated RollApps, or execution environments, on top of this settlement hub. 

As of today, there is one RollApp deployed on the testnet, RollApp X, which was launched by the Dymension team shortly after the hub’s launch. Anyone interested in playing around with the testnet can go into the community discord and request tokens from their faucet, which can then be bridged into RollApp X for staking. Once the team determines the network is stable enough, they’ll deploy two more RollApps on top of the hub, an EVM RollApp, and a CosmWasm RollApp. 

You can learn more about the Dymension testnet here.

Introducing Modular Cloud

lzrs

@lzrscg

Today, we unveil @modularcloud1.

Our initial product is Explorer, a block explorer for modular blockchains.

The process of understanding and building new pieces of the modular stack is now simpler.

medium.com

Modular Cloud Introduces Explorer

Today, we unveil Modular Cloud. Our initial product is Explorer, a block explorer for modular blockchains. The process of understanding and…

89

1:12 PM • Feb 15, 2023

Last week, we saw the launch of a new modular project, Modular Cloud. The first product they released is Explorer, a block explorer built specifically for modular blockchains. 

As you may already know, a block explorer is a tool that allows users to dive into specific transactions, blocks, addresses, and more. The most popular example is Etherscan. However, what separates Modular Cloud’s Explorer from Etherscan and the rest is that it’s specifically made for modular chains. 

A modular blockchain separates the different components that make up a blockchain into multiple layers, rather than doing everything on the same one, as with your typical monolithic chain. 

Let’s take Dymension (mentioned above) as an example. As of today, the Dymension ecosystem consists of three different layers: RollApp X (the execution environment), the Dymension Hub (settlement layer), and Celestia (data availability layer). When a user submits a transaction on RollApp X, they’ll be able to see in which rollup block that transaction was included, which block that transaction settled on, as well as which DA block the original transaction was included in. 

As of today, the only networks that are integrated into the modular explorer are Celestia, Dymension, and Eclipse, however, they’ll soon be launching an automated integration tool so that any execution, settlement, or data availability solution can easily integrate their network within the modular explorer. For now, if any modular solution wants to integrate their network into Explorer, you cn reach out to the team.

Aside from this, the team will also be releasing “visualization of the transaction flow through all layers of the modular stack and paid cloud services in the future. 

You can learn all about this new modular block explorer here.

Caldera announces $9M funding

Caldera

@Calderaxyz

gm!

We’re excited to announce our $9M of funding across two rounds, lead by @shaunmmaguire at @sequoia and @ani_pai at @dragonfly_xyz respectively, with participation from @neo, @1kxnetwork, @alliancedao , and @etherealvc.

mirror.xyz

Caldera raises $9M to enable Web3 at scale

We’re excited to announce that Caldera has raised $9M in funding across two rounds, lead by Shaun Maguire at Sequoia Capital and Ani Pai at Dragonfly respectively. This funding will help us grow our...

450

12:08 PM • Feb 13, 2023

Last week, Caldera announced their $9M raise, in a round that was led by multiple big-name firms, including Sequoia, and Dragonfly. 

According to the team, the funds will be used to “rapidly accelerate the development timeline”, as well as to hire more team members in order to strengthen their core product, and to improve the UI.

This funding round came just a week after Caldera announced the launch of Spark, a testnet version of their no-code deployment platform that allows users to launch their own rollup in just one click. You can learn more about Spark here if you’re interested. 

As a reminder, Caldera is an EVM-based, rollup as a service provider, allowing any team to spin up their own individual, custom rollup.

More News & Updates

• Polygon announces the official date for their zkEVM mainnet launch - March 27th

• Fuel testnet beta reaches over 850K settled transactions

• The Ethereum Foundation recently announced the L2 community grant recipients, and amongst the names included was Stackr, an SDK for building application specific rollups

• Clearpool Finance starts their whitelisting phase for Clearpool Prime, their new gateway service for institutions

• Starbucks NFTs are already selling for thousands

• Here are the current mint stats for Nike’s recently launched .Swoosh campaign

• MantisSwap, a Polygon native stableswap protocol, deploys on Polygon’s zkEVM public testnet

• Introducing the first Yearn vault using zk-proofs

• Here’s a recap of StarkTank, “a startup pitching session that took place at StarkWare Sessions last week

• For any StarkNet enthusiasts, some of the big projects within the ecosystem are hosting StarkDenver on March 3rd

• For anyone looking to connect with the zkSync team at EthDenver

• Tevaera, an on-chain gaming platform built natively on zkSync, just shared details on their 2.0 gaming ecosystem

• Arbitrum flips BSC in 24-hour DEX volume, becoming the second L2 to accomplish this feat

• Both Kraken, and Coinbase announce their Arbitrum integration, allowing users to start sending and receiving assets through the network

• APWine launches on Arbitrum

• Aldrin exchange to deploy on Nitro SVM’s testnet

• On February 15th, 5M OP tokens were transferred from the Governance Fund to the different protocols across the Optimism ecosystem, as part of their recently launched Delegation Program

• Quix, Optimism’s native NFT marketplace, open sources their codebase

• Attention Optimism community, check out the network’s new governance portal, where all Token House votes will now take place moving forward

• Poolshark protocol introduces Price Pools, “a new way for traders to provide liquidity to the market whilst applying buy-and-hold under the hood”

• Eclipse launches a glossary to help new web3 entrants understand basic blockchain & rollup terminology

• Take a look at this thread covering Mantle’s journey so far. Mantle is the first project to leverage EigenDA

• Check out some of the newest updates the Buttrfly app has added, including push notifications for messages

• On February 15th, the Cosmos Hub went through its Rho upgrade, “containing an extensive update to the testing infrastructure and the addition of the Global Fee module”

• The Sovereign team just released details about how their SDK works. As a reminder, it’s only been two weeks since we were introduced to Sovereign, who are building an ecosystem of zk-rollups

• The Flashbots team just released their transparency report for the months of December & January, going over everything that happened within the ecosystem during the two months

• Following Ethereum’s recent ACDE call, it looks like the Shanghai/Capella upgrade is still set for launch on the 28th

• Here is the complete recording of Saga’s recent community call & project update

• Eclipse gets a new orange look

• For any modular enthusiasts looking to work in the space, check out these cool projects currently hiring

Discussions and Education

The first zkEVM on mainnet

Mihailo Bjelic

@MihailoBjelic

It's official:

Polygon zkEVM mainnet will be launched on March 27th!

After more than a year of intense and inspiring research, development and testing, we are incredibly proud to launch the FIRST EVER zkEVM mainnet!

Join us on this day to celebrate the future of scaling!

3,398

11:28 AM • Feb 14, 2023

Alex G. ∎

@gluk64

Today, developers can deploy their existing Solidity code, without modifications, on a live ZK-rollup on mainnet. For the first time ever.

I'm so proud of the entire @the_matter_labs team who made the first Ethereum's zkEVM possible!

zkSync ∎

@zksync

The wait is over.

All aboard zkSync Era∎ Mainnet!

Today, Ethereum's first zkEVM is:

• Opening mainnet to builders
• Adopting a brand new name
• Open-sourcing its entire codebase

blog.matter-labs.io/8b8964ba7c59

1/8

848

10:18 AM • Feb 16, 2023

The Polygon and zkSync announcements spark a series of back-and-forths between project teams. As usual, the debates implicitly center around which rollup is “the first zkEVM”. This time, the focus is on provers:

• Mihailo (Polygon) clarifies their prover will be live and permissionless upon launch

• Alex (zkSync) says their prover has been live since October

• David (Polygon) says two audits are in progress and will be complete before launch

• Alex (zkSync) says audits are complete with further audits on the way

One thing left without clarity is which ZK protocol Polygon will use - Groth16 (used by zkSync) or FFLONK. We don’t need to get into this very esoteric topic, but it matters which one they pick. Groth16 requires a “trusted setup” and FFLONK does not. On the other hand, FFLONK might bring more risk.

Privacy and upgradability for ZK L1s vs. L2s

Brendan

@_bfarmer

I have a ton of respect for anyone working on ZK tech.

But I’m skeptical of ZK Alt-L1s for two reasons:

1) There’s a false belief that ZKPs are more efficient on ZK L1s than on Ethereum

2) They're effectively impossible to upgrade.

Why you should stick with Ethereum...

[1/n]

684

12:28 PM • Feb 15, 2023

Brendan Farmer (Polygon ZK) makes a case against ZK L1s and for ZK L2s. Before Polygon, Brendan worked on a ZK L1 himself, making him a credible person to speak on the topic. His main arguments are:

• Recursion makes the cost of verifying ZKPs on Ethereum not a practical problem

• Upgrading ZK L1s is really hard

ZK teams from L1s like Mina Protocol / Aleo mostly disagree with his upgradability argument. They offer potential upgradability solutions which Brendan acknowledges.

There doesn’t appear to be a simple answer here - at least not yet. ZK L1 upgradability is possible, but hard. There are solutions, some more practical than others, and all with tradeoffs.

Rollups posting different types of data

DinoEggs.eth 🧱🎬

@0xDinoEggs

Can someone simply explain the tradeoffs involved in ZK rollups publishing tx calldata vs. state diffs? Is one strictly better?

Alex G. ∎

@gluk64

@zksync, similar to @Starknet, is putting the state ∆s (outputs) on chain. Both @0xPolygon and @Scroll_ZKP are publishing tx calldata (inputs).

This has several BIG implications. 4/

33

8:26 AM • Feb 13, 2023

DinoEggs here 👋 This question is posed by yours truly, with the goal of understanding why different rollup teams might post different data types on L1. The different types are:

• Transaction data

• State diff data

To be clear, this decision is unique to ZK rollups (due to the ZK part). Since they can prove state transition validity without revealing transaction data (inputs), they can get away with only posting compressed data about state changes (outputs).

At first glance the answer seems obvious - post state diffs since it’s cheaper - but my question is whether there are tradeoffs and good reasons to post transaction data. A few key advantages stuck out:

• Greater insight into value flows, useful for entities like block explorers

• Verification before proofs are posted, unlocking faster finality

• Easier forced transaction inclusion for arbitrary transactions

Are there mechanisms to get the best of both worlds? Alex (zkSync) says yes.

More Discussion & Education

• @nero_eth illustrates the journey of blocks, from creation to validation

• @norswap breaks down the Rollup-as-a-Service landscape

• @sunnydece creates an updated diagram of the Rollup-as-a-Service landscape

• @0xPolygonZK demonstrates how they’ve exceeded ZK performance expectations of years past

• @CelestiaOrg conveys the advantages of scaleability, shared security and sovereignty

• @thebellcurvepod releases a podcast episode on MEV

• @TheDeFISaint explains zkEVMs in depth

• @ThorHartvigsen breaks down the roadmaps of top Ethereum L2s

• @stonecoldpat0 explains the goal of rollup systems in simple terms

• @alt_layer releases a podcast episode discussing the Layer 2 landscape with @dberenzon

• @domothy explains how sequencers can offer pre-confirmations for quicker (soft) finality, likely good enough for low-value transactions

• @p_e explains Cairo 1.0, the latest version of StarkWare’s programming language, in depth

• @Cryptocito hosts a Twitter Space AMA on cross-chain MEV with @0xbrainjar and @brapse

• @stonecoldpat0 writes an article on what it means to decentralize a rollup

• @FlywheelDeFi interviews @sreeramkannan discussing EigenLayer

• @nickwh8te emphasizes the importance of standard interfaces in modular systems

• @veradittakit explains the properties of ZKPs and highlights projects that use them

• @nosleepjon explains how Hyperplane works and lets anyone launch a bridge for any asset or chain

• @toghrulmaharram outlines a design for “Multi-Verifiers”, building on @VitalikButerin’s “Multi-Prover” idea

• @gakonst suggests that L2-as-a-Service offerings will differ significantly, depending on whether they are ZKRs or ORs

• @RealVision releases an episode discussing the massive innovation in the Layer 2 space with @antonimarber

• @thebellcurvepod releases an episode discussing modular vs. full stack architectures with @nickwh8te and @valardragon

• @stonecoldpat0 writes an article on how one honest party protects rollup systems

That's all for this week! Thanks for reading 🧱🎬

Subscribe to get issues sent directly to your email every Tuesday, and also, make sure to follow us on Twitter for daily modular updates!

News and Announcements

StarkWare Sessions Recap

As you may have already heard from everyone in your Twitter feed, this past weekend was StarkWare Sessions, a two-day conference dedicated to the StarkWare, StarkNet, and the entire Ethereum community.  The meet up took place in Tel-Aviv, and featured several amazing panel speakers, including Eli Ben-Sasson and Uri Kolodny, the two StarkWare founders, Bobbin Threadbare and Jordi Baylina from Polygon zk team, Stani from Aave, and many others. 

Here are some of the main highlights and announcements from the event:

Kasar Labs introduces Starknode

Kasar Labs just announced the launch of a plug’n’play StarkNet full node. If you know how to plug in a cord, you can start contributing to the network from your own home. Limited pre-orders open soon!

Kasar Labs

@kasarLabs

Ready for the #StarkWareSessions23? We're excited to introduce Starknode! A plug'n'play full-node that allows you to contribute directly to the network without any coding skills!

616

6:02 AM • Feb 5, 2023

Bravos Wallet Adds a 3FA Layer to its Security Pyramid

In short, the pyramid consists of five levels of security, and with the new 3FA Multi Signer Feature, transactions can only go through if signed from two devices (browser extension & mobile app). On top of this, the Multi SIgner also leverages BioID approval (lke faceID from your phone). Check out the original thread to learn how to activate these new features.

Braavos - StarkNet Wallet

@myBraavos

Account Abstraction Security Pyramid announcement at #StarkWareSessions2023

Our security concept strikes a balance between high levels of protection & ease of adoption.
It ensures a seamless experience.

On top of the Hardware Signer, we added the Multi-Signer (3FA)

454

4:51 AM • Feb 6, 2023

Chainlink Oracles Arrive to StarkNet

During the conference, StarkNet was announced as the next chain to be added to the Chainlink SCALE program, meaning StarkNet developers will now be able to access the leading oracle network’s services. Chainlink data feeds are already live on testnet, and expected to launch on mainnet soon. Here’s the official announcement for more details.

ChainLinkGod.eth

@ChainLinkGod

.@StarkWareLtd is joining the #Chainlink SCALE program

An allotment of StarkNet $STRK tokens will be used to cover certain operating costs of Chainlink oracles on Starknet mainnet

Massive move towards blockchain oracle sustainability

starkware.medium.com

Starknet Joins Chainlink Labs in Partnership To Accelerate Starknet Adoption

We’re excited to announce a new partnership between StarkWare and Chainlink Labs!

302

9:41 AM • Feb 6, 2023

Argent Announces Argent Web Wallet

Typically, when we want to open a crypto wallet, we have to download an extension/app and write down our own seed phrase. However with Argent’s new feature, we can open a wallet in just a few clicks, by simply entering our e-mail address - a new way to onboard users onto the ecosystem. Oh, and it’s non-custodial. Just as with Braavos, Argent is showing the power of Account Abstraction.

Argent

@argentHQ

announcing Argent Web Wallet: a new way to onboard to @Starknet by creating a wallet with just an email address

no app, no download, no friction

simple, seedless, secure, and fully non-custodial

coming soon

513

9:30 AM • Feb 7, 2023

Reddio Announces Updated Dashboard with new L2 Functionalities

“This new dashboard offers a wealth of features and tools to help developers quickly mint NFTs, deposit ERC20s, create in-app marketplace and more on layer 2.”

Reddio

@reddio_com

Reddio's CEO @NeilHANYD has just announced their brand-new dashboard during the #StarkWareSessions2023 , to bring developer onboarding experience to the next level for developers looking to build and deploy blockchain applications on layer 2
blog.reddio.com/reddio-upgrade…

13

10:36 PM • Feb 5, 2023

For anyone interested, you can catch the full live recordings from the event here.

100 Flash Layers

AltLayer

@alt_layer

As the first-ever Rollups-as-a-Service provider, we’re pumped to unveil “100 Flash Layers” - a campaign where 100 select users can set up and deploy a custom, disposable flash layer in 10 mins!

Apply now: galxe.com/altlayer/campa…
Details:

blog.altlayer.io

Deploy an L2 in 10 minutes with Altlayer’s “100 Flash Layers” Campaign!

Applications open from 10–28th February: All welcome to apply!

4,424

1:50 AM • Feb 10, 2023

In preparation for the upcoming launch of AltLayer’s no code rollup dashboard solution, the team just announced their “100 Flash Layers” campaign, where 100 selected users will be able to deploy their own custom, disposable rollup “in 10 minutes”. 

For anyone new to the project, AltLayer is building a system of disposable, optimistic rollups, or as they refer to them, “Flash Layers”. Using their dashboard, users will be able to deploy their own custom, no-code rollup in just minutes! They currently support rollups on Ethereum and other EVM chains but will expand to other environments in the future. 

Let’s use web3 gaming as an example. If I wanted to launch my own mini-game during the Superbowl using Reddit avatars, I would be able to do so in just a few clicks using AltLayer (as long as I have the actual game built already of course). Rather than competing for block space with all the other dapps on L1, this game would have its own dedicated rollup, allowing users to experience low gas costs, and higher speeds compared to the L1. And considering these are disposable rollups, I’d be able to set it so that once the Superbowl ends, so does my rollup. This is done thanks to the “end of life” feature they have implemented. 

Another use case would be NFTs. I can launch my collection on its own rollup (a Flash Layer), get away from L1 congestion, and then dispose of the rollup once the collection sells out. 

As mentioned, 100 selected users will be amongst the first to test this new no-code rollup solution. So whether you’re a developer, enthusiast, or VC, you have until February 28th to apply! Those who get chosen will take part in the testing campaign, which will run from March 2-10.

Make sure to check out the complete article for more details if you’re interested in applying.

Arbitrum Announces Stylus

Arbitrum (💙,🧡)

@arbitrum

 Attn Devs:

Stylus is on its way!

Join the brilliant @CryptoIsCute for the unveiling of Stylus, Arbitrum's next-gen programming environment deploying later this year—and learn why we say it’s “EVM+.”



Announcement highlights

offchain.medium.com

Hello, Stylus

tl;dr: Today we’re announcing Stylus, our next-gen programming environment upgrade for Arbitrum One and Arbitrum Nova. Through the power of…

1,138

9:05 AM • Feb 7, 2023

For all you Arbitrum developers out there, this past week Arbitrum announced Stylus, “Arbitrum’s next gen programming environment”. 

So what exactly is this?

As most of us are aware by now, Ethereum as it is today cannot scale. However, luckily for us, there are tons of projects working to solve this issue. One of these projects is Arbitrum, an L2 blockchain that enables users to take part in the Ethereum ecosystem, without having to pay high gas fees or go through long transaction times. 

Ethereum is based on the EVM, which requires programmers to write their contracts in Solidity, and so as you may imagine, this requires some learning. While Arbitrum is committed to always remaining EVM equivalent, Stylus represents a new step forward, one that goes beyond the EVM. They call it, “EVM+”. 

What Stylus does is allow developers to start writing their smart contracts in a language that’s more familiar to them, whether that’s Rust, C, or C++. This means Solidity and Rust (or whatever language you choose) smart contracts will now live side by side on Arbitrum, and best of all is that they’ll be interoperable with one another. 

Not only that, but Stylus will also bring a 10x performance boost, which adds to the 10x performance boost that was just added with the launch of Arbitrum Nitro this past August. Aside from all this, Stylus “users will be able to create their own precompiles”. 

For anyone wanting to learn more about everything Stylus has to offer, feel free to check out the official article.

Ticking Optimism

paco bytes

@therealbytes

Presenting ticking-optimism

A proof-of-concept implementation of a "ticking blockchain" built on top of @optimismFND Bedrock.

1/

therealbytes.substack.com

Presenting ticking-optimism

Ticking-Optimism is a proof-of-concept implementation of a "ticking blockchain" built on top of the Optimism Bedrock rollup architecture.

168

12:44 PM • Feb 7, 2023

Last week, @therrealbytes presented a proof of concept implementation of a “ticking blockchain” built on top of Optimism Bedrock. 

In short, a ticking blockchain enables certain predefined conditions to be triggered automatically after a certain period of time, rather than having to call on these conditions manually. Take a web3 game for example. 

As presented in the article, there are two ways to have an NPC move around in a game:

• Lazy updating: NPCs are constantly moving, but positions only updated when the user sends a transaction

• Manual ticking: NPCs position is updated after a certain period of time based on set preconditions. 

Essentially, a ticking blockchain just automates the latter option. 

While automated ticking comes with some downsides, here are some of the benefits listed:

• State is always on-chain & up to date

• Logic implemented in the chain, not the client

• Simpler code audits

• Users don’t pay for update costs

Highly recommend any Optimism fan to check out the original article, linked here. 

Constellation Rebrands & Launches 1-Click Rollup Solution

Caldera

@Calderaxyz

Constellation is now Caldera.

Launch a rollup for your dApp in one-click.

Build the future with us: caldera.xyz

176

1:10 PM • Feb 9, 2023

The project’s previous name, “Constellation”, reflected their mission to build a constellation of blockchains unified by Ethereum. However, according to the team, with so many brand names involving “Constellation” (Constellation Network, Constellation Brands, etc.), they  figured it was time to switch things up, and thus, Caldera was born.

According to the team, “like the natural phenomenon — each Caldera Chain is unique, molded by each project’s specific design requirements and goals”.

Of course, as the team makes clear in the article, “Although our name has changed, our goals remain the same: empowering developers to build apps in Web3 by making it easy for anyone to launch performant, customizable layer-two blockchains”.

For anyone unaware, Caldera enables developers to build their application on its own dedicated, custom rollup “in 5 minutes''. As of today, Caldera is already up and running on both Ethereum and Polygon, in case you’re interested in trying it out. 

Also, you can catch a sneak peak of how the dashboard will look in the article, linked here.

Dymension Announces $6.7M Raise

Dymension

@dymensionXYZ

Thrilled to announce a $6.7M raise to bring to life a network of easily deployable modular blockchains!
Get ready for 35-C the first-ever testnet of IBC-enabled rollups (aka RollApps) launching on Feb 15th. Join the community and take part in the future of Modular blockchains!

364

9:33 AM • Feb 9, 2023

Last Thursday, Dymension announced their $6.7M raise, led by Big Brains Holdings, Stratos, and several others. The funds will be used to continue building their network of easily deployable RollApps.

They’ll be launching on February 15th, and for anyone interested, you can check out our newsletter from last week to find out how you can prepare for that upcoming launch.

Hyperlane Releases MVP

Masha | Everstake 🇺🇦

@Everstake_Masha

Permissionless Interoperability is here: @Hyperlane_xyz's MVP has been released.

What it is and what it eats? Below in the thread:

15

9:35 AM • Feb 9, 2023

Hyperlane is a modular interoperability protocol, and on February 9th, their much anticipated MVP was released. 

As @AsaOines puts it, Hyperlane is building “security legos”.

The problem they’re solving is that current interoperability protocols (for security reasons) tend to gatekeep. For example, developers have to rely on bridging protocols to deploy on their chain, as well as needing to have their tokens whitelisted before they can deployed on a certain chain. Although this process is to ensure a certain level of security, we need a better way, and this is what Hyperlane is trying to do with their permissionless interoperability protocol. 

Hyperlane hopes to enable any blockchain, app, or rollup to add interoperability functionalities to their platform at any time, without having to ask permission from anyone. 

Hyperlane’s modular design enables the following features:

• Permissionless deployment: “there’s no need to rely on the team to bring you interoperability anymore, Hyperlane is opening up the interchain highway.”

• Sovereign consensus: leverage Hyperlane’s security modules to customize your own chains security model - put the security legos to work! 

• Warp Routes: “Wrap and move any asset to any Hyperlane-supported chain permissionlessly.”

Hyperlane’s proof of concept with Celestia was just launched on testnet, meaning developers can start experimenting and launch their own rollup solution on Celestia today, with built in interoperability from day one. 

For anyone interested in learning more, please check out the original article.

Other News & Updates

• For anyone attending EthDenver, Fuel Lasb will be hosting L2 Day, featuring guests from some of the top projects in the space, including Arbitrum, Aztec, Scroll, and others.

• Sway v0.34.0 is now out, with new features and improved compiler performance. Check out the thread to learn more.

• Swaylend, Fuel Labs’ first lending protocol, is now live on testnet.

• For anyone looking for a job in the modular ecosystem, Fuel Labs is now hiring for a developer relations engineer position.

• Here’s a really good thread comparing user numbers from across the different social apps launched on Polygon, such as Galxe & Lens.

• Check out Polygon’s new, revamped website.

• Squid, a swap protocol launched on Axelar’s communication network, just integrated the Polygon network onto the platform, connecting Polygon to 24 other chains.

• Introducing IDriss Send, allowing people to send crypto/NFTs to each other using phone number, email, or Twitter username

• Pocket Universe launches on Polygon, a browser extension that provides users with extra security & assurance whenever they sign a transaction.

• Over 1M Reddit Avatars were minted in 4 days - a new record! This high activity was due to a free Superbowl Reddit Avatar users were able to mint.

• Nostra Finance, “the liquidity layer of StarkNet”, releases their Nostra Money Market Alpha analytics dashboard to the public. Check out TVL, debt markets, utilization rates, and more.

• Attention StarkNet users, make sure to upgrade your wallets so you don’t lose your funds!

• Three Sigma open sources StarkEx SDKs

• zkSync completes regenesis of their 2.0 testnet. The regenesis introduced changes to account abstraction, SDKs, and L1 contracts.

• zkSync announced some of the added security measures the network will take for 2.0 release, including: limiting the early flow of funds, and a restriction of withdrawals.

• “Railgun is now live on Arbitrum’s Goerli testnet with a proposal for full deployment up for voting on the governance forum”. Full deployment is expected to come today.

• Silo Finance launches on Arbitrum, giving users access to risk-isolated money markets on Ethereum.

• Bluefin (formerly FireFly), which is a decentralized perpetuasl protocol, is now live on Arbitrum. Their Beta release is for only a subset of selected users, with a full public launch expected later in the month. 

• JPEGz, a total NFT market cap token created by Cryptex Finance, is now on Arbitrum

• Avault is now live on Arbitrum, allowing users to interact with Arbitrum dapps without having to switch networks. Avault is the first omnichain yield platform on the market, powered by Layer Zero, the interoperability protocol.

• Attention devs, Nitro Upgrade v2.0.11 is here. It’s an optional, but recommended upgrade.

• .arb domain pre-registrations are coming. Check out the article to learn how you can get a head start and grab your domain.

• Check out the latest quarterly updates issue written by the Arbitrum Developers team to see a recap of what Arbitrum has achieved over this last quarter

• OP airdrop #2 is here. You can check out the complete details and see if you’re eligible  for the airdrop here. There is no claim so don't interact with any addresses to claim. Tokens will be airdropped to wallets directly!

• RetroPGF Round 2 window closed. Check out if your project was nominated, as you’ll have to opt-in by Feb 21st (just fill a short form). Results will be announced in late March.

• Shapella upgrade on the horizon. For anyone with questions about Eth staking withdrawals

• EF publishes their first Grantee Roundup of the year, Check out what the grantees have built over the past couple of months

• Eigen Layer: Shared security summit at EthDenver

• Governance proposal for Turkey relief is now up for voting

• “What 2023 has in store for the interchain”

• Looking for a job in the modular ecosystem?

Discussions and Education

zkEVM Proving Efficiency

Eduardo Antuña 🦇🔊

@eduadiez

Really excited about our results on the @0xPolygon zkEVM Prover! Batchproof 2:30 (2min soon) ~500 or ~250 ERC20 tx/batchOn a spot m6id.metal prover's cost: $0.064/proof ($0.0001/tx) The fastest ZK tech and the first production-ready zkEVMThe prover is no longer a bottleneck

433

10:40 AM • Feb 9, 2023

Eduardo (DAppNode co-founder and Polygon zkEVM core dev) releases prover efficiency benchmarks for Polygon zkEVM - and impressive would be an understatement. Proving time and cost have historically been the biggest arguments against ZK systems, but those arguments are getting harder to make.

As you’d expect, reactions followed from rollup wizards:

• Polynya (anon researcher) alludes to how unclear it was that ZK prover efficiency would progress this fast and how the time-to-market advantage for optimistic rollups might be fading

• Alex from zkSync alludes to comparable performance for zkSync proof generation and explains why most rollup costs will actually come from transaction data publishing

• Polynya emphasizes further how ZK rollups in validium mode can already compete on cost with optimistic rollup designs

• Toghrul from Scroll makes a case for publishing transaction data over state diffs, despite costing more, due to increased security in certain cases

Rollup Honesty & Scrutiny

polynya

@apolynya

I hope the ethereum community will hold L2s to the same (and preferably, higher) scrutiny and standards as alt-L1s

622

9:25 PM • Feb 3, 2023

suzuha ⚡🌙

@dystopiabreaker

i think that ethereum people should probably wait for rollups to actually have working proofs and a security model different than a 3/5 msig before doing heavy criticism of L1s for being "insecure" (having too few validators/consensus security) and shilling L2s

421

2:34 PM • Feb 7, 2023

Polynya and Suzuha, two well respected anon researchers, express hope that rollup advocates hold themselves to the same standards as L1s they criticize for being insecure / centralized.

Reactions and general sentiment, even from rollup teams, is “fair point”. The reality is that many people evaluate rollups based on envisioned properties and not necessarily properties they have today.

We should make better use of rollup evaluation tools and frameworks such as L2Beat Risk Analysis and Vitalik’s rollup milestones framework. We should also push toward more tools and frameworks aimed at non-experts.

One notable discussion, sparked by Polynya’s tweet, is between Friederike from Gnosis and Toghrul from Scroll:

• Friederike states that L2 bridges are not more secure than ZK light client bridges to separate L1s, citing Gnosis chain as an example with 110k mostly home staking validators

• Toghrul points out that light client bridges, even using ZK proofs, are not trustless and have fundamentally different trust assumptions than rollup bridges

The main takeaway is that even though ZK light client bridges are exciting, they are unable to achieve the same properties as validating bridges.

Bitcoin as a DA Layer

ansgar.eth 🦇🔊 .oO

@adietrichs

Two main modular rollup visions right now: Ethereum combining DA and settlement, and the Celestia/Cosmos variant of sovereign rollups on top of pure DA. Now that Bitcoin casually beat Ethereum to blobspace, we should start calling the latter the Celestia/Cosmos/Bitcoin vision imo

78

4:22 AM • Feb 6, 2023

Ansgar (Ethereum researcher) shines a light on how Bitcoin has the ability to support sovereign rollups and how it has beaten Ethereum to blobspace (without really meaning to). Ethereum will ship blobspace in several months with EIP-4844, giving it 3x the data throughput of Bitcoin - not all that much!

“But I thought Bitcoin wasn’t a good DA layer?”

If you were under this impression, you weren't alone. You also weren’t wrong - Bitcoin wasn’t well suited for rollup DA until two upgrades that raised the theoretical block size limit and removed the transaction size limit.

“Can it also be a good settlement layer?”

Not in its current form. Ansgar clarifies that Bitcoin would need to change its feature set, likely requiring a significant cultural shift over time since they are anti-hard fork.

Other Discussion & Education Posts:

• @jon_charb frames PoS blockchains via corporate analogy

• @0xRainandCoffee writes an article explaining “Modular MEV” in depth

• @pseudotheos categories ZK rollups in a helpful way

• @0xkhan_ explains zkEVM in depth

• @theempirepod releases a podcast episode discussing sovereign blockchains with @sunnya97 and @dberenzon

• @camiinthisthang hosts a Twitter Space on building cross-chain applications with 

• @0xSalazar curates beginner friendly ZK resources

• @nickwh8te explains why modularity enables both protocols and apps to capture optimal value

• @nosleepjon explains how permissionless interoperability empowers cross-chain bridging

• @JesseT2605 hosts a Twitter Space discussing modularity and Celestia with @nickwh8te

• Celestia explains data availability

• @imperator_co explains Polygon Supernets and how Saga facilitates them

• @arjunbhuptani conveys a hard stance on canonical bridges

• @0xresearch releases a podcast episode discussing the Ethereum roadmap with @WestieCapital

• @uF4No hosts a “Introduction to L2s” workshop

• Ethereum Foundation creates a new website page to answer staking withdrawal questions

• @rainyreece_ explains why Polygon can disrupt the ticketing industry

• @smpalladino writes an article on using ZK proofs from a developer’s standpoint

• @toghrulmaharram explains why Ethereum requires 32 ETH per validator

• @shaolin_flow explains rollapp economics in simple terms

That's all for this week! Thanks for reading 🧱🎬

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News and Announcements

L2 & Execution Layers

Introducing Sovereign: “The Internet of Rollups”

Sovereign

@sovereign_labs

Today, we announce Sovereign, the Internet of Rollups.

Sovereign is an ecosystem of interoperable and scalable rollups that can run on any blockchain.

Why are we building this?

mirror.xyz

Introducing Sovereign

Sovereign is an open, interconnected rollup ecosystem. Our goal is to enable all developers to deploy seamlessly interoperable and scalable rollups that can run on any blockchain. That’s why we’re...

752

11:30 AM • Jan 30, 2023

Last week, the Sovereign Labs team introduced their new project, Sovereign, which will be an ecosystem of interoperable rollups that can run on any blockchain. Here’s what we know so far:

• The team is building the Sovereign SDK, which will enable developers to create their own individual, secure and interoperable zk-rollups, using a set of pre-built tools and modules built by the Sovereign Labs team (current modules include token implementation, data storage, and bridging).

• This means that developers won’t need to become cryptography experts to launch their own dedicated zk-rollup. Write your logic in a language you’re familiar with, and let Sovereign take care of the compiling for you.

• Their current research prototype uses Celestia for DA and Risc0 for proving, however more options will be added after this research phase, which is expected to conclude sometime in Q2

• Some of the properties Sovereign will provide include: interoperability between rollups, being securely scalable thanks to the use of zk-proofs and parallelism, and giving projects the option to run on any chain.

• The project roadmap is split into three phases: research (in progress), initial implementation, and hardening.

You can follow them on Twitter to stay up to date with anything else they share over time, but of course, we’ll make sure to keep you updated with this project as well. 

Eclipse Releases Their Official Docs

Eclipse

@EclipseFND

ANNOUNCEMENT

We are excited to release our official documentation

Eclipse - your fully-configurable, composable infrastructure platform, supporting a blockchain designed just for you — with no compromise on security, reliability, or convenience.

eclipse.builders/documentation/…

62

3:20 PM • Feb 3, 2023

Last week, Eclipse, a project that enables developers to easily deploy customizable rollups, released their official docs. Here’s a quick summary:

The Docs were separated into three different sections:

• Architecture Fundamentals:

  • Choosing VM: EVM or SVM to start, but more will be added over time

  • DA options: Celestia, Eigen, and Polygon Avail to start

  • Settlement: “The Eclipse settlement layer is essentially a Celestia sovereign rollup”. Currently offer optimistic settlement, but zk will be added also. 

• Customizing the Execution Layer: 

  • Projects can add customization to their execution layer, such as gas fees, compliance & privacy, MEV, and more. 

• Leveraging Existing Tools:

  • “Since Eclipse shares a virtual machine with Ethereum or Solana, you can deploy any smart contracts that are already written for the EVM or SVM.” Use familiar wallets, explorers, and other tools. 

Eclipse has spun up some private testnets for partners to experiment with and provide feedback about. You can reach out to them via Twitter or email if interested.

Scroll Introduces “Weekly Updates”

Scroll 📜

@Scroll_ZKP

For nearly two years, we've been heads-down building a bytecode-compatible zkEVM in public.

Today, we're increasing that transparency even further by introducing regular weekly updates.

Here's what we were up to this week:

732

12:17 PM • Feb 3, 2023

Last week, the Scroll team announced that they will start doing weekly updates for their community. Here are some of the highlights from their Weekly Update #1:

• We should be expecting more details soon, as it relates to their upcoming deployment on Goerli

• An improved v2 bridge design for a better user experience 

• 68% improvement in prover memory 

• For you developers out there, “Graph protocol support is on the way”

• Uniswap v3 was deployed on Scroll’s testnet 

• The Scroll team will be at EthDenver later this month, for anyone who wants to pay them a visit at their booth

Introducing Dove Protocol

Dove Protocol

@DoveProtocol

Introducing Dove Protocol.

medium.com

Introducing Dove

Dove is a cross-chain AMM.

155

4:43 PM • Jan 27, 2023

On January 27th, the Dove Protocol was introduced to the world. 

Usually, we’re used to seeing fragmented liquidity (liquidity on Polygon Uniswap cannot be shared with liquidity from Arbitrum Uniswap), however, that changes with Dove’s cross-chain AMM. 

Dove Protocol uses cross-chain messaging to allow for trading to take place on multiple chains (Polygon, Arbitrum, Optimism, etc.), while liquidity stays unified and secure on Ethereum. 

“Provide liquidity on L1, trade on L2.” 

This means users won’t have to bridge their assets away from Ethereum in order to become an LP on Arbitrum or Polygon. They’re able to do this because of the fact that unlike a typical AMM, Dove decouples liquidity and pricing. 

The protocol is not live for the public yet, as they’re still looking to get their codebase audited and make sure everything is safe and ready to use for the broader community. You can follow them on Twitter or Discord to stay up to date with the project.

Saga partners with Polygon for the Automated Deployment of Supernets

Saga ⛋

@Sagaxyz__

1/
@0xPolygon + @SagaXYZ__ =

Saga is very excited to partner with @0xPolygon for the automated deployment of Supernets, an appchain scaling solution secured by #MATIC validators.

Learn more in the & link

medium.com

SAGA AND POLYGON ANNOUNCE PARTNERSHIP TO AUTOMATE SUPERNETS, POLYGON’S APPCHAIN SOLUTION

The collaboration will accelerate the development and adoption of appchains as a dominant scaling solution for Web3

278

10:01 AM • Feb 1, 2023

Supernets are Polygon’s appchain solution, allowing teams to spin up their own dedicated chain without having to bootstrap their own validator network, and on February 1st, Saga announced that they will be “automating the instantiation of Supernets.”

Saga enables developers to launch their own dedicated chains, or “chainlets” as they call them, and according to the team, “A project deploying a Supernet blockchain on Polygon can choose the Polygon Edge Chainlet stack on Saga and then deploy to their MATIC validators.” 

It looks like this partnership will focus mainly on gaming and entertainment, so if that sounds like your project, make sure to reach out to the team via Twitter or Discord to see how you can spin up your own dedicated appchain with ease.

Arbitrum & Optimism stETH Trading Volumes Surpass Ethereum

Blockpour

@Blockpour

Data from our API shows #Arbitrum & Optimism both have over 10X the trading volume of $stETH than @ethereum!

27

7:06 AM • Jan 31, 2023

According to data from Blockpour, a multichain defi data and analytics platform, both Optimism and Arbitrum each have over 10x the stETH trading volume compared to Ethereum! 

For anyone unaware, stETH is a product of Lido Finance, a multichain staking platform. Users can deposit ETH into Lido, and receive stETH in return, a liquid staking token that can be used across several defi protocols. 

According to the data, total trading volumes for both Arbitrum and Optimism have exceeded over $15M, while for Ethereum L1, this number is still below $5M. 

For anyone interested, you can check the data for yourself here.

Coinbase Wallet Adds Support for the Optimism Network

Coinbase Wallet

@CoinbaseWallet

1/ Swap around the clock

Start the new year with Optimism, and swap tokens on the @OptimismFND network using our in-app DEX.

Now you can trade more than 18,000 tokens on @ethereum, @0xPolygon, @avalancheavax, @BNBChain, @Solana and @OptimismFND.

14

11:01 AM • Jan 31, 2023

Last week, Coinbase Wallet announced their support for the Optimism Network, allowing users to leverage the network’s low trading fees to swap between different tokens on the Coinbase app. 

This was the sixth network integration for the wallet, and only the second L2 (after Polygon). Some of the first tokens you’ll be able to transfer to and from the network include DAI, ETH, and wBTC. 

For anyone interested, you can head here to download the Coinbase Wallet and start trading on Optimism. Congrats to the whole Optimism team! 

Other Execution Layer News & Updates:

• Hamilton Lane, will be tokenizing its $2.1 flagship fund by leveraging Securitize’s platform on Polygon

• Primex beta just received its first major update (Beta 0.3.0) with deployments on Polygon and zkEVM testnet 

• Polygon announces Mobile Play (“decentralized open source dapp stores”)

• Dopex is officially live on Polygon

• Polygon zkEVM Road to Mainnet Twitter Space on the 7th

• SoRare announces Premier League partnership

• Modulus Labs announces the release of “The Cost of Intelligence: Proving Machine learning Inference with Zero Knowledge”. 

• @freshpizzadev just made this StarkNet defi and STRK token dashboard

• Zkx protocol announced their testnet launch date (March 14th) and also announced the open sourcing of their ZKX smart contracts”

• Switchboard Labs expands to StarkNet. Switchboard is a permissionless, customizable, multichain oracle protocol

• Lync collaborated with zkSync to simplify the game development process 

• For any devs on zkSnc’s 2.0 testnet, the network will be going through a regenesis on the 8th

• A thread on what to expect for zkSync’s upcoming Fair Onboarding Alpha

• “Announcing Vest Exchange, “a decentralized perpetual futures exchange on Arbitrum that enables users to propose and trade almost any asset.”

• Vela exchange starts opening access to their platform

• Lyra’s options protocol, just went live on Arbitrum

• Nuon Finance is now live on Arbitrum: “the first flatcoin, pegged to inflation, not fiat”

• Dinosaur Finance, a yield aggregator on Arbitrum, just released their whitepaper

• Binance completes integration of $BUSD on Optimism

• BibliothecaDAO, the DAO behind LootRealms game, raises $668K USDC in a private sale community raise

Settlement & DA Layers

What We Can Expect From Dymension’s Upcoming Testnet Launch

Dymension

@dymensionXYZ

Dymension's 35-C public testnet is right around the corner, here's a medium article on what to expect
medium.com/@dymensionXYZ/…

Tl;dr

131

10:36 AM • Feb 1, 2023

The Dymension team just posted an article going over what we can expect in regard to their upcoming 35-C public testnet launch. For those unaware, Dymension is a network of easily deployable modular blockchains, or “RollApps”. Here are some of the highlights from the post:

• Testnet launch will begin with the deployment of the PoS Dymension Hub chain, which will act as a “bridging hub” for RollApps 

• RollApp deployments will happen soon after. This will be a permissioned process at first, but will then open up to the Dymension community. 

• The first RollApp to be deployed is “RollApp X”, which “is its own app-chain with a dedicated sequencer full node that utilizes Celestia’s Mocha testnet for data publication and the Dymension Hub as the source of truth”

• Users will be able to go into Dymension’s Discord faucet and request tokens, which they can then transfer from the Hub, to RollApp X, “the first IBC-enabled modular chain”

• After stability assurance, the core team will launch two more RollApps - an EVM RollApp, and a CosmWasm RollApp. 

Make sure to give them a follow on Twitter, or join their Discord, if you want to stay in the loop with everything going on with Dymension.

Informal Systems Launches CometBFT

Informal Systems 🌱

@informalinc

1/ Today we announce the launch of CometBFT, a state machine replication engine for the interchain!

CometBFT is a fork and successor of Tendermint Core, stewarded by @informalinc and supported by @interchain_io on behalf of the wider @cosmos

543

10:45 AM • Feb 1, 2023

Last week, Informal Systems, which is the original team behind the development of the Cosmos Hub (as well as different interchain tools & infrastructure), announced the launch of CometBFT, “a state machine replication engine for the interchain and beyond.”

To be specific, CometBFT is a fork and successor of Tendermint, the consensus engine across the Cosmos ecosystem.

According to the team, “CometBFT will build on the strong foundation laid by Tendermint Core, with a renewed focus on users, quality, and integration.”

For any teams building on top of Tendermint Core, or maintaining a fork of Tendermint Core, make sure to check out the original thread to learn how you can upgrade and transition to CometBFT.

We should be expecting more details about the roadmap for the development of this new consensus engine sometime in early Q2, so make sure to give the team a follow on Twitter to stay updated.

Other Settlement & DA News and Updates:

• A new Hyperlane docs page was added, detailing the project’s long-term vision

• Here’s a summary of a recent AMA session between Mantle and EigenLayer, where they discuss data availability and L2s.

• For all you Cosmonauts out there, results for the Game of Chains are now in.

• Prop97 is now up for voting. This is a governance proposal to adopt Gaia v8.0.0. ATOM holders have until February 14th to make their vote!

Discussions and Education

Optimistic vs. ZK rollups