Weekly Rollup #27
Celestia's testnet program concludes | A new zkWasm Ethereum L2 | Benefits of shared sequencers | Decentralized sequencing with Espresso & Caldera | Week ending August 11th
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This week’s issue covers:
Celestia’s Blockspace Race Comes to an End
Introducing Fluent: A zkWasm Ethereum L2
More News & Announcements
Benefits of shared sequencers
Decentralized sequencing with Espresso & Caldera
More Education & Discourse
📣 News & Announcements
Celestia’s Blockspace Race Comes to an End
Last week marked the official end of Celestia’s Blockspace Race, in what ended up being “the largest incentivized testnet ever by participant count of any L1 project”. A quick look at what the Blockspace Race was, and some of the achievements throughout the program below.
What Is the Blockspace Race
The Blockspace Race was Celestia’s first incentivized testnet program, which was split into five different phases.
Phase 1, which kicked off the program, launched on March 7th, and introduced the validator nodes to the network, while Phase 2 introduced the light nodes, bridge nodes, and storage nodes. Throughout all five phases, these nodes were competing with one another to complete specific tasks and accrue points, which participants will be able to exchange for $TIA tokens once Celestia launches its mainnet. These tokens will be distributed according to the number of points each participant gained. In fact, you can find a list of the top 75 performers here, who will end up becoming amongst the first group of network participants once mainnet kicks off. Here’s the top 10 performers, as shown in Celestia’s blog post:
More Stats
As shown above, over 23K people applied to the Blockspace Race, however, only 940 were able to participate
The program also saw +700 light nodes from across the world, all performing data availability sampling (DAS)
In terms of network stats, there were +800 sovereign rollups deployed on Celestia, thanks to Rollkit’s SDK.
New Improvements
The Celestia engineering team also helped in introducing new improvements to the network, including:
New hardfork mechanism: “This facilitates network upgrades akin to the Ethereum approach, where validators upgrade their software before a hardfork, which is in stark contrast to the former mechanism in Cosmos where binaries were switched based on block activation numbers.”
Quantum Gravity Bridge Activation: During the race, one of the validator tasks was activating the QGB, which supports the deployment of Celestiums. Just think Ethereum settlement, with Celestia DA, aka validiums.
Community Contributions
The program also saw a lot of community contribution to the network, including:
B-Harvest created a rollup explorer + research & tools for the community
Brightlystake built an RPC tool monitor
Qubelabs wrote a tutorial for IBC bridging between Celestia’s testnet & the Dymension Hub (1st IBC transfer)
Wayne Wayner wrote a guide on setting up a light node using a Kindle. This in turn kickstarted the whole light client challenge - this is the time you saw everyone posting their light clients on Twitter
ZKValidator contributions to Ignite Manager “which streamlines the deployment of rollups with Rollkit”
Stakeking’s analysis of Celestia node performance
What’s Next
Of course, now that Celestia has gone through stress testing, up next (at least to my knowledge) is mainnet, which is “expected later this year”. This is huge, as Celestia was the team to first formally introduce the modular philosophy to the space. Once we see them hit mainnet, we’ll start seeing a bunch of rollups hit mainnet as well. The Cosmos community has been catching a lot of flack lately, however, I believe Celestia’s mainnet launch will spark new excitement across the entire Cosmos ecosystem.
You can read Celestia’s entire blog post here, and you can follow the team on Twitter to stay up with everything happening across the sovereign rollup ecosystem. Congrats to the entire Celestia team, and community, for this achievement!
Introducing Fluent: A zkWasm Ethereum L2
Last week, Fluent was unveiled to the public - a new general-purpose rollup on Ethereum (an L2) that enables developers to launch scalable applications using their preferred programming language, aside from just Solidity, including Rust, Go, etc. Let’s take a quick look at what we know so far.
The Mission of Fluent: Empowering All Developers
The blockchain realm has made significant progress in scaling solutions and modular blockchain concepts, ushering in a new era of trust-minimized blockspace. However, a challenge persists—providing developers easy access to this expansive blockspace. The intricate world of specialized programming languages and blockchain intricacies often deters potential talents from participating, and this is where Fluent comes in.
Fluent has a clear-cut goal: To make the onboarding experience much more seamless for developers. As mentioned in their blog post, although there are 25M developers across the world today, only about 25K are in web3. While RaaS solutions, which can be comparable to traditional hosting services, make rollup deployment easier, developers still need to write the underlying smart contracts for their Ethereum dapps. Traditionally, on Ethereum, this is done using the Solidity programming language, however, Fluent enables the use of more common languages, such as Rust, Go, etc. “Think of Fluent as a translator between developers and Ethereum’s Infinite Garden”. Developers can step into this garden armed with their core application knowledge, and Fluent seamlessly translates their insights into the language of the blockchain.
Fluent’s Design
Fluent is a zkWasm Ethereum L2 with three key characteristics:
ZK Rollup: Fluent utilizes zk-proofs to provide increased scalability to dapps, without sacrificing Ethereum’s security - proofs get settled on Ethereum.
Wasm Execution: Fluent integrates a WebAssembly (Wasm) virtual machine, enabling developers to build applications using widely adopted programming languages such as Rust, TypeScript, and more.
EVM compatibility: This means developers can build using their preferred language, without having to sacrifice the EVM tooling & resources users are most familiar with (Metamask, etc.), or the active liquidity and users across the EVM landscape.
What’s Next?
While Fluent is still in early development, their first “testnet is right around the corner”. Those interested in building with Fluent can start applying to the “Early Builders Program”. In fact, one such project that we may see on the new L2 in the future is Omni Kingdoms, a cross-rollup RPG game that has already expressed its interest in deploying on Fluent - see here.
Once we get further along in Fluent’s journey, we may start seeing the L2 network integrated across RaaS solutions as a settlement hub for an ecosystem of L3’s.
You can follow the team on Twitter to stay in the loop. Congrats to the entire Fluent team for the announcement, and to our very own Dino, who is a founding member of the team.
More News & Announcements
Osmosis integrates Celestia DA to “become the modular liquidity hub”. Osmosis aims to be the “connector between modular chains and the IBC ecosystem”. Essentially, Osmosis validators will be running their own Celestia light nodes. So, when Rollup A sends a message to Rollup B, Osmosis will have direct guarantees of DA for the involved chains. They want to enable Rollup A to access liquidity from Rollup B, C, or any other rollup that launches - “access liquidity from anywhere”, as well as to “make cross-chain payments for DA fees on Celestia using any token on Osmosis”.
Check out Diva staking, “Ethereum's first Liquid Staking solution powered by Distributed Validator Technology (DVT)” In other words, “squad staking” - rather than needing all 32 ETH to run an Ethereum validator, squad up to split resources with others, and use as little as 1 ETH to operate a node. This means securing Ethereum becomes much more accessible, leading to further decentralization (more nodes!).
Polyhydra announces its partnership with Lagrange. “Our partnership will enable low-latency and trustless messaging from optimistic rollups at an unprecedented scale.”
Turnkey (private key infra) comes out of public beta, becoming accessible to all now. “Our APIs make it easy to create private keys, sign transactions across blockchains, and set detailed policies around how your keys are used”.
@SuccinctJT introduces Lasso & Jolt, to “change how SNARKs are designed and built”.
Looks like VISA is developing a solution that allows users to pay for gas fees using their credit cards. Want to mint an NFT but ran out of ETH for gas? Use your CC, and have VISA take care of the actual gas payment on the backend.
Caldera partners with Galxe to launch a 6-week long “Bootcamp” to help people learn more about AppRollups and the Caldera ecosystem.
Dymension announces “Elastic Block Production”, a new network enhancement to help rollapps reduce costs. With RollApps, all blocks get posted to DA, regardless of whether there were actual transactions involved in the block or not (this cost money). With Elastic Block Production, blocks are only produced if there is a valid transaction involved, or if a certain amount of time passes, thereby reducing “wasteful block production”.
AltLayer integrates Singularity, the end-to-end payments solution, into its RaaS stack. & also partners with Hyperlane, allowing AltLayer’s rollup ecosystem to take advantage of Hyperlane’s permissionless out-of-the-box interoperability & security modules. Here’s a Twitter Space about this integration.
Eigen Layer to raise the staking cap on the 22nd of this month, allowing more users to participate in the staking protocol. The limit will be reached once one of the LST hits 100K ETH restaked (will most likely be Lido’s stETH). The question is, will it take more than 1 hour to reach the cap this time (lol).
Hyperlane announces the “Shipping Lane”, a new monthly update series by the team.
Now that Omni Network’s first testnet has come to an end, here are some of the numbers it was able to achieve, including +1.8M transactions, +180K active wallets, and more.
RISC Zero posted and verified its first proof on Ethereum. Risc Zero generates zk-proofs off chain using its Bonsai network, then verifies on Ethereum. $15 to post and verify on Ethereum, whether it’s for 10 transactions, or 1000 transactions.
Argus Labs, Celestia, Osmosis, and Keplr announce the “Interchain Hacker House”, which will be held in Korea on September 2-10.
Stader Labs introduces the Liquid Restaked Token. “LRT is a synthetic token provided on top of your restaked ETH, ETHx or other LSTs”, that aims to tackle some of the challenges involved with staking, such as: discovery for node operators, complex reward structures, high gas fees, liquidity constraints, and opportunity costs. Check out the complete article to learn more.
Circle launches its “Programmable Wallets” beta on Ethereum, Polygon, and Avalanche, in what was the company’s first web3 service product.
Nerve Network is now live on Polygon zkEVM, “to provide cross chain support”.
Starknet officially upgrades its testnet to the second stage of its recent Quantum Leap upgrade (the “more TPS daddy” upgrade you’ve seen on Twitter).
The Starknet team hosted a Twitter Space where they discussed Madara’s (sequencer) role across Starknet Appchains.
Bybit adds support for ETH deposits & withdrawals on zkSync, and Zerion wallet now supports zkSync Era.
In regards to new Arbitrum deployments this past week, GMX v2 beta went live, as well as Lexer Markets (perp exchange), JoJo exchange (perps), & Valio. Also, Pixel Vault announced its upcoming release of ”BattlePlan”.
Introducing Mode, a new OP Stack L2, built using Conduit’s RaaS solution, that intends to “reward developers, users, & protocols” - yet another OP Stack chain in production.
Alchemy releases its latest developer report.Take a look at how developer activity has been playing out across chains - hint, a lot of Optimism developers.
Uniswap talks L2s: the team will be publishing quests over the following 8 weeks across Arbitrum, Optimism, Polygon, and Base.
Here’s the latest Scroll weekly recap, this week featuring a meetup in Hong Kong coming in October, “cross-chain messaging and transfers are now fully enshrined in the protocol, with no trusted third parties to rely on”, & new project deployments from Vooi (stableswap), and Zeron (decentralized employment protocol).
Check out Fuel’s new ecosystem page and discover the different apps deployed on the network.
Here’s a short thread going over recent enhancements made to the FuelVM.
Taiko held a space going over how different decentralized proving system designs.
Here’s a summary of Taiko’s latest community call (#5).
Umee (Cosmos lending & borrowing chain) integrates Babylon’s Bitcoin timestamping protocol, bringing BTC security to the chain.
Introducing “Leap Snaps”, allowing users to explore the Cosmos with their Metamask wallets.
In terms of Cosmos Hub proposal updates: prop #804 passes, meaning v11 upgrade is expected to hit the Hub on the 16th (tomorrow). & prop #810 is now up for voting, “add The Fee Abstraction Module to the Cosmos Hub”.
If you deposited into the Mars’ Red Bank instance deployed on Neutron, check your wallets
📚 Discourse & Education
Benefits of shared sequencers
Ben from Espresso Systems clarifies the benefits of shared sequencers. Ben’s description is great and very concise, but the topic can still be confusing when trying to understand how the system components work together. Let’s walk through it.
Shared sequencers have several advantages. Here’s a slide from Ben’s recent talk at Modular Summit:
One reason the shared sequencer topic gets confusing is because it quickly introduces another party: the shared builder. This also explains James Prestwich’s original post where he distinguishes between atomic inclusion and atomic execution.
Consider a user who wants composability across two rollups. Here’s what they receive:
If there’s only a shared sequencer = atomic inclusion. The shared sequencer can only promise that both transactions will be included in the block. It does not know whether both transactions will succeed because it doesn’t execute them. For example, one transaction might not have enough gas to succeed. The shared sequencer has no idea this will happen.
If there’s a shared sequencer + shared builder = atomic execution. The shared sequencer enables the builder to bond money and promise atomic execution without risk. If the builder is honest, they will not lose their bond.
If there’s only a shared builder = neither. The builder can bond money and make promises, but one of the independent sequencers could reject a transaction. The builder would then lose their bond (since they’d break the promise of atomic execution), even if they didn’t do anything wrong.
Put another way:
Shared sequencers offering atomic inclusion = pretty cool 😄
Shared sequencers enabling shared builders to offer atomic execution = very cool 😎
If you’d like to walk through a specific flash loan example, check out Ben’s presentation and this thread by Sanjay from Electric Capital.
Decentralized sequencing with Espresso & Caldera
Speaking of shared sequencing, we hosted a related discussion with the founders of Espresso Systems and Caldera.
Here are some of the topics we covered:
Status quo of centralized sequencing
Changing the status quo towards decentralized sequencing
Projects that most need decentralized sequencing
Developer demand for decentralized sequencing
How RaaS providers think about decentralized sequencing
Partnership between Espresso and Caldera
Make sure to check it out! & don’t worry, we got you covered with intern notes if you prefer reading a quick summary of the discussion instead.
As we said last week, we’ll be doing more Spaces going forward, so let us know if you have educational topics you’d like covered or if you want to jam with us 🤙
More Discourse & Education
@jon_charb explores the endgame for Proof-of-Stake, liquid staking tokens, dual governance and more ✍️🔥
@AnnaRRose and @chjango discuss all things modularity as part of Modular Summit’s Sovereign Radio series 🎙️🔥
@yuxiao_deng deep dives into different types of intents ✍️🧠
Bell Curve discusses Cosmos liquid staking with builders from Chorus One and Osmosis 🎙️🔥
ETHWarsaw discusses all things zero-knowledge proofs with builders from Scroll, Worldcoin and L2Beat 🎙️💎
Across Protocol discusses how intents are shaping web3 with builders from CowSwap and Superfluid 🎙️💎
@soispoke deep dives into Builders’ Behavior Profiles (BBPs) ✍️🧠
@digitalmustafa explains Visa’s Paymaster experiment for paying onchain gas fees with Visa cards 💬
@jarrodWattsDev explains how L2 transaction batching works with a simple example 💬
@ShivanshuMadan explores rollup decentralization and whether it matters ✍️💎
@jiayaoqi explores techniques to decentralize sequencers ✍️
@hudsonjameson explains the base intentions of ZK tech 💬
@terencechain summarizes the Bankless episode discussing Arbitrum BOLD 🎙️
@expctchaos explains hybrid ZK-optimistic proof mechanisms, using a LayerN and RiscZero example 💬
Taiko discusses decentralized and permissionless proving 🎙️
@christine_dkim shares thoughts on @jon_charb’s recent governance post 💬
Hyperlane discusses rollup interoperability with AltLayer 🎙️
@iam_preethi walks through the lifecycle of a ZK proof ✍️
@gonichigo33 summarizes YQ from AltLayer’s recent talk on L2 value capture from EthCC 💬
@OwnerOfJK discusses onchain games and autonomous worlds with Starknet builders 🎙️
Zero Knowledge Validator explains how ZK oracles work 💬
Fuel explains the concept of hybrid proving 💬
@odin_free walks through the history and promising future of Autonomous Worlds
Bankless discusses Lido and whether it’s a threat to Ethereum with Hasu from Flashbots 🎙️
That's all for this week! Thanks for reading 🧱🎬
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