Weekly Rollup #67
Connext Rebrands to Everclear | Citrea Devnet Launch | Taiko Goes Based | Introducing Ham Chain & Inertia Chain | Real Time L2 & L3 Stats | Celestia winners | Avail Raises $75M | Week ending June 7th
👋 Welcome to Modular Media! We cover news, updates, educational content, and more within the modular blockchain ecosystem.
Subscribe to get posts sent directly to your email every week, and follow us on Twitter for modular-related updates!
This week’s issue covers:
Connext Rebrands to Everclear, The Clearing Layer ✨
Citrea Announces Public Devnet Launch: A New Era for Bitcoin Scalability 🍊🍋
Taiko Goes Based: Permissionless Proposing & Proving 🥁
Ham Chain: Onchain Social Tipping 🍖
Introducing Inertia: An Interwoven Rollup ⭕️
Rollup.wtf: Real Time L2 & L3 Stats 📊
Celestia Infinite Space Bazaar Winners Announced 🏆
Avail Raises $75M 💰
Upcoming Modular Events 🎭
More News & Announcements 📣
Discourse & Education 📚
📣 News & Announcements
Connext Rebrands to Everclear, The Clearing Layer ✨
Connext has officially rebranded to Everclear, while also introducing their Clearing Layer, which aims to address liquidity fragmentation by coordinating global settlement, significantly reducing costs & complexity for protocols and users.
Let’s break down what this means, below 👇
If you’re familiar with a traditional clearing house, then Everclear may be easier to understand for you, but for those unaware, a traditional clearing house is a financial institution that acts as an intermediary between buyers and sellers in financial markets, ensuring the proper and timely settlement of transactions.
Another important term to note here is netting, which is the process of offsetting multiple transactions to minimize the actual movement of funds (more on this below).
Okay, now back to Everclear.
So what’s the problem they’re solving?
Over the past couple of months, the term “chain abstraction” became quite popular - the idea was that as an end-user, you should be able to interact with blockchain apps (dapps) without needing to know which specific chain you’re using. Chain abstraction simplifies the user experience by hiding the complexities of multiple chains and allowing seamless interactions across different networks. This means not having to bridge from chain to chain when using a new dapp, or having to download a new wallet.
However, this abstraction faces significant challenges, particularly around liquidity management between chains. As users interact across multiple chains, liquidity - essentially the availability of funds - becomes fragmented. This fragmentation makes it difficult and costly to move funds across chains efficiently.
How does Everclear solve this?
Everclear makes this more efficient by introducing a Clearing Layer that aggregates and nets transactions across multiple chains, drastically reducing the volume and cost of fund transfers. This automated process simplifies the operational complexity for protocols and users, making chain abstraction truly seamless and cost-effective.
Netting Transactions:
Netting means aggregating and offsetting multiple transactions to minimize the actual movement of funds. For example, if $100 is going from Chain A to Chain B, and $80 is going from Chain B to Chain A, only $20 needs to be moved from Chain A to Chain B after netting.
By netting transactions, Everclear drastically reduces the volume of transactions needed, cutting costs and complexity.
Clearing and Settlement:
Everclear coordinates the global settlement of liquidity between chains, ensuring that funds are moved in the most efficient manner possible.
It acts like a clearinghouse in traditional finance, managing the settlement of funds between different chains and protocols, reducing the operational overhead for developers and users.
Operational Complexity Reduction:
Before Everclear, each protocol had to manually manage liquidity across multiple chains, involving complex integrations with bridges, exchanges, and liquidity providers.
Everclear automates this process, reducing the need for manual intervention and the associated technical and operational challenges.
Cost Efficiency:
By cutting the complexity and automating the rebalancing process, Everclear reduces the cost of managing liquidity by up to 10x.
Launch Details:
The rebranding includes a transition of the Connext bridge UI to Everclear’s new brand.
Everclear’s native token, NEXT, will continue to be governed by the Connext DAO, now rebranded as Everclear DAO.
The alpha mainnet launch is planned for early Q3, with ongoing enhancements and research to further refine the system.
There’s a lot more to Everclear, so we highly recommend checking out the full post to dive more into the underlying tech, including how Everclear will leverage both Hyperlane & EigenLayer.
Citrea Announces Public Devnet Launch: A New Era for Bitcoin Scalability 🍊🍋
Citrea announced the launch of its public devnet, allowing developers and users to engage with the network. This launch also represents the first time Bitcoin is being tested as a data availability layer, marking a major milestone for the Bitcoin community.
What is Citrea
Over the past couple of months, we’ve heard a lot of talk about Bitcoin L2s, but Citrea is on its way to becoming the first real one to hit mainnet - so yeah, I use Citrea as my radar to see how far along Bitcoin is on its L2 scaling efforts.
While Citrea will be considered a Bitcoin L2, it’ll still be EVM-compatible, meaning devs will be able to deploy dapps using familiar Ethereum tools, such as Foundry, Hardhat, Solidity, etc.
Core Components:
Citrea plans to use Bitcoin for both DA and settlement in the future, via its BitVM-based trust-minimized two-way peg program, Clementine. That said, Clementine is still under development, so this public devnet does not implement Clementine or BitVM.
This devnet will implement proof sampling, meaning not every block will be proven, but only a random selection of blocks.
DA: By using Bitcoin as a data availability layer, Citrea leverages Bitcoin's robust security to ensure the data is accessible and verifiable
Settlement: The final confirmation and recording of transactions. Citrea plans to use Bitcoin for settlement in future phases, but the Public Devnet focuses on data availability.
Proving: Last week, it was announced that Citrea will be utilizing Risc Zero to generate its validity proofs.
Sequencing: Citrea
Who can use it?
In this devnet stage, Citrea is recording changes in the chain’s state, along with zk-proofs, which validate the correctness of these changes, onto the Bitcoin chain, ensuring that the transactions are accurate and secure.
For Developers:
Deploy complex applications that inherit full Bitcoin security
Run Citrea nodes to verify transactions
For Users:
Bridge to Citrea Public Devnet, engage with dapps, & provide your feedback
You can learn how to get started, here.
Taiko Goes Based: Permissionless Proposing & Proving 🥁
Taiko is now live and has announced that proposing and proving have become fully permissionless, meaning setting up a node does not require any third-party or centralized intermediaries.
Taiko is aL2 zkEVM that we’ve covered plenty in the past. What makes Taiko different from other Ethereum L2s is that they are going the based route, becoming the first based-rollup that users can participate in.
“This means that Taiko blocks are permissionlessly sequenced by Ethereum validators/block builders, removing centralization risks entirely.”
Put simply, the L2 is sequenced by the base L1 (Ethereum).
How to get started
To run a proposer or prover node, you’ll need to stake TAIKO, which the team has also just announced this past week. During this phase 1 of their airdrop, 5% of the TAIKO token supply (50M tokens) is eligible to claim by users, from now until July 5th.
Please make sure to check out the complete thread to learn how to claim.
Once you get access to some TAIKO tokens, you’ll be able to set up and run a node. Here’s a guide published by the Taiko team on how you can run a proposer or prover node.
Of course, there are some prerequisites:
& be sure to follow new Taiko spokesperson, Bartek, for more updates (lol)
Ham Chain: Onchain Social Tipping 🍖
A new modular chain was unveiled last week - Ham Chain, a dedicated chain built for social micropayments. More specifically, Ham Chain is an L3 chain built on top of Base using the OP Stack, and Celestia underneath. This launch introduces innovative features like onchain social data and social tipping functionality, making this an exciting launch for the community.
What is Ham Chain
Ham Chain started as an NFT collection called the Based LP, which starred a fictional character who was “well funded, onchain, and slightly over weight”, and had a love for ham - hence Ham Chain.
The Ham community had a lively Warpcast channel, where tons of people were tipping each other ham. Basically, if you engaged with the community channel in a positive way, you were rewarded with ham tokens, which you were then able to use to tip people for their content.
What started with ham has been extended to any erc-20 token, so they built something called “floaties” which are backed by real currencies, and can be leveraged by external teams and communities. The way it works is that as soon as you tip an emoji on someone’s post, that token will be sent to their wallet - buying a “unicorn floatie” (a unicorn emoji) for example, would represent Ham’s own token.
& soon, when you buy a floatie it’ll bridge the to Ham Chain automatically, helping scale the system with speed and transaction costs, and also helping bring native liquidity to the chain.
Ham Chain vs. Degen Chain
So how is this different than Degen Chain, which pioneered this social tipping craze?
Degen is an offchain points system, whereas Ham Chain will be moving their tipping system onchain. This (1) enables users to redeem ham tips immediately, and (2) enables projects to build on top of this tipping system (“tip to mint” or “tip to login” was mentioned by the founder).
& because they’ll be posting Farcaster data directly onchain, smart contracts will be able to interact with Farcaster data directly. In fact, with Syndicate, they’ve already started with the mapping of Farcaster IDs to wallet addresses - input a Farcaster ID and get a corresponding wallet address, and vice versa.
Ham Chain’s founder also sees Ham Chain as being more Ethereum aligned, part of the reason being that they use ETH as their native gas token, whereas a team like Degen does not.
You can learn more by checking out the full announcement.
Introducing Inertia: An Interwoven Rollup ⭕️
Last week, a new “minitia”, or Initia chain, was unveiled - Inertia, which is building an LRT & lending protocol - using Celestia underneath 🧱
Interwoven Lending Hub: A platform where users can borrow, lend, and leverage assets across different rollups in the modular ecosystem. The focus for Inertia is on LSTs and LRTs.
Yield Management Platform: Providing various strategies for maximizing returns on assets
LRT Activation on MilkyWay Zone: If I understand correctly, it sounds like the first LRTs activated on Milky Way will be the first ones supported on Inertia - starting with $INIT and $TIA.
As of today, this thread is all we know about the protocol, so make sure to follow them on X if you’re interested in keeping up with their journey.
Rollup.wtf: Real Time L2 & L3 Stats 📊
Emiliano, from Conduit, announced a new dashboard to keep track of real time metrics across L2s & L3s. As of today, only the top 3 Ethereum L2s, along with all the Conduit chains, are shown on the site, but we can expect other major L2s to be added over time.
Metrics you can track today include:
Really awesome site & would highly recommend you to check it out.
Celestia Infinite Space Bazaar Winners Announced
The winners from Celestia’s Infinite Space Bazaar have just been announced!
Some of the winners include:
Blessed: an event ticketing platform
Interchain Mail: “an app that gives you the ability to chat verifiably with other chains and OSes over IBC.”
Blob Tools: demonstrates blob migration paths
Celestia Hubble: explore the Celestia ecosystem
ods-visualizer: visualizing the distribution of namespaces within an ODS
pessimistic validation: IBC communication between optimistic rollups
CelestiaGPT: a virtual assistant for the Celestia ecosystem
Full list of winners can be seen, here.
Raises 💰
Avail’s $75M Raise
Avail raised $75M to continue its vision of building its unification layer.
Modular Events 🎭
Avail Hacker House
Avail & web3samaj will be cohosting a hackerhouse event during EthCC at Brussels, from July 5-11. Bounties, workshops, whiteboard sessions, networking, & more.
Those interested can start applying!
Succinct Summer Social
Succinct Labs announced their Summer Social event, happening in SF on June 13th
More News & Announcements
Lightlink is now live on Celestia mainnet, bringing operational costs down for the Ethereum L2, and allowing Lightlink to continue on its promise to offer its users a gas-less experience - Read - Lightlink has also been added to the Celenium dashboard - Check out dashboard
Lagrange becomes the first prover network to go live, with support from 20+ operators from day 1, including from Coinbase, OKX, Altlayer, Nethermind, & more - Read
Polymer & Nethermind co-launch Monomer SDK, allowing Cosmos SDK chains to launch as Ethereum L2s (using the OP Stack) - Read
Rari Chain (Rarible’s L2) announces that they will be migrating to Celestia DA - Read
Rari Chain has also announced their Espresso integration, providing Rari with faster finality and improved interop with other Orbit chains - Read
AVS rewards may be coming to ETH restakers soon, as EigenLayer announced that “AVS’s can now start integrating Rewards functionality to incentivize Restakers and Node Operators” - Read
Catalyst chooses Omni Network, to serve as their core messaging infrastructure - Read
ZetaChain integrates Hyperlane, allowing the L1 Omnichain “for chain abstraction”, to connect to other Hyperlane-connected chains - Read
Ankr announces that they will be adding Fuentbase to its RaaS stack, enabling the seamless launch of custom Fluent-based rollups - Read
Polygon announced the acquisition of another ZK team, Toposware, an engineering team that helped in the development of Polygon’s Type 1 zkEVM. As a reminder, Polygon committed $1B to ZK in 2021, which ended up going toward the acquisition of Hermez, Zero, Miden, Nightfall. It looks like Polygon is now tripling down on ZK - Read
Astria revamps its docs - Read
Arbitrum launches phase 2 of its Ambassador Program: community members located across Nigeria, Mexico, and India can now apply for a chance to represent the L2 in your home country - Learn More
Attention Celestia’s Infinite Bazaar hackathon participants, Rollkit has just announced the prizes they will be handing out, including
Taikoons now minting: those on the WL can go mint their Taikoon, which is Taiko’s (zkEVM) NFT collection - Mint
Hyperlane (modular interop protocol) continues on its modular expansion, now supported on Blast’s L2 network - Read - & on Mode - Read
Spark’s incentivized testnet is now live. Spark is a central limit order book exchange built on Fuel (Eth L2) - Read
If you’ve swapped or LP on Catalyst, then you may be eligible for Round 2 of their “eggdrop” - Read
Users can now deposit & withdraw through zkSync’s native bridge, following this recent upgrade.. I wonder why - Read
Alchemy announces, what seems to be, its own RaaS solution, enabling developers to seamlessly launch custom OP Stack or Arbitrum Orbit chains that can leverage Alchemy’s suite of products and tools from day 1, such as RPC services, faucets, & more. Celestia was announced as the first external DA layer added to the rollup stack - Read
Dymension announces DYM sponsorships, allowing DYM stakers to vote on where they’d like reward incentives to be distributed towards. An interesting aspect about this is the fact that RollApp teams will be able to incentivize & try to convince the Dymension community to vote in their favor. DYM sponsorships are expected to kick-off during their 3D upgrade - Read
Optimism has committed 600K OP towards their Onchain Summer initiative. From June 3rd to August 30th, teams will be able to cast what they’re building on Farcaster (/onchainsummer channel), and then the community will be able to vote for a winner each week - Read
Risc Zero’s universal verifier expands to Starknet, extending on the list of L2s it now supports - Read
Forma (Celestia sovereign network) is now supported on Swapfast, enabling quick TIA bridging between Forma <> Celestia - Read
Succinct announces a $110K audit competition - Read
Hedgehog to launch its pooled predictions and PvP markets on Eclipse (Eth SVM L2) - Read
Base TVL surpasses Optimism TVL for the first time - View
📚 Discourse & Education
Blogs, Threads, & More 📝
OP Labs (Optimism team) published a blog post about their updates regarding their path towards decentralization, featuring bridge improvements, Security Council decentralization, & more - Read
StarkWare founder, Eli Ben-Sasson, claims “Starknet will be 1st L2 on Bitcoin and Ethereum”, as the L2 scaling team shares its vision for scaling Bitcoin - Read
Avail shares its monthly recap for May, featuring technical updates, phase two of their Unification Drop ($AVAIL), partnerships, & more - Read
Learn how Conduit’s “super blocks” are decreasing costs for Celestia rollups (even more!) - Read
New proposal up on the EthResearch forum, about based sequencer selection: “The proposal aims to use Ethereum's base layer as a neutral mechanism to select sequencers for L2 networks, ensuring synchronous composability between L2s” - Read
Is issuance a cost to Ethereum? Andres thinks so: “higher issuance leads users-as-stakers to incur higher costs”. Check out his full paper on the subject to learn more - Read
Particle Network proposes the first formal definition for “chain abstraction” - Read
Diego Kingston shares why he believes all aggregation layers will use RiscV zkVMs: “you simply use the VM to prove the verification code written in Rust, and you are ready to go” - Read
“Ethereum will need non-native DA”: Guy Wuollet explains what non-native DA is and why it matters - Read
“On block-space distribution mechanisms”: Learn about in-protocol MEV gadgets and execution-ticket-enabled allocation mechanisms by reading this new paper by Mike Neuder (Eth research), Pranav Garimidi (a16z), and Tim Roughgarden - Read
Satyaki shares the USPs for Morph’s L2 network, “building the first-ever optimistic zkEVM rollup w decentralized sequencers” - Read
Audio & Podcasts 🎤
Nick White (Celestia), Barry (Skip), c-node (Rollkit), & Preston (Sovereign Labs) got together for a panel discussions to break down sovereign rollups & why they matter - Listen
Nader brings on Dino & Dmitry (CTO) from Fluent Labs to discuss blended execution - Watch
The Blockworks team just announced a new podcast show about modularity and had Monad & Initia co-founders on for their first episode to discuss modular vs integrated - Watch
Good Game podcast chats with Monad’s founder & intern about memes, growth strategy, Monad, & more - Watch
Blockworks hosts a panel discussion about “the evolution of shared security”, featuring Omni Network, Ether.fi, & Drosera - Listen
The Rollup crew chats with Citrea (Bitcoin L2) founder, Orkun, to talk all things Bitcoin L2s - Watch
The Rollup also hosted an interview with Molecule, who is aiming to bring the SVM to Bitcoin - Watch
Aligned Layer & Gevulot talk about their recently announced partnership - Listen
Alex from Bitcoin Magazine, Januszg from Bitcoin, and others broke down the new Bitcoin Layers framework (how they analyze Bitcoin sidechains & L2s) - Listen
Bankless has on Brendan (Polygon) and Ben Fisch (Espresso) to discuss “synergies between the Polygon AggLayer and the Espresso shared sequencing marketplace” - Watch
That's all for this week! Thanks for reading 🧱🎬