Weekly Rollup #30
Polygon launches L2 framework | Arbitrum Stylus tesnet launch | Eth alignment good or bad? | What’s the meaning of decentralization? | Should DA be data publication? | Week ending September 1st
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This week’s issue covers:
Polygon launches L2 framework
Arbitrum Stylus testnet launch
More News & Announcements
Ethereum alignment good or bad?
What’s the meaning of decentralization?
Should data availability be data publication?
More Education & Discourse
📣 News & Announcements
Polygon Launches Its CDK, an L2 Framework
Last week, Polygon introduced the Polygon Chain Development Kit (CDK), a rollup framework that allows teams to launch their own custom Ethereum zk-rollups (L2s) using the Polygon tech stack.
As a reminder, rollup frameworks allow teams to utilize pre-built components in order to launch their own dedicated execution environment - get your own dedicated block space.
Over the past year, we have seen the major L2s launch their own rollup frameworks, including Optimism’s OP Stack, zkSync’s ZK Stack, Starknet appchains, Arbitrum Orbit, & now Polygon’s CDK. In other words, we went from thinking maybe 5-10 rollups would live on, to now 5-10 rollup frameworks, each being used to expand the ecosystem of rollups.
Let’s take a look at some of the details for Polygon’s CDK.
What is the CDK
The CDK is an evolution of Polygon Supernets, “which offered projects the ability to operate sidechain like appchains”.
Polygon Supernets: custom sidechains
Polygon CDK: custom L2s
Teams can use Polygon’s prebuilt components, including a sequencer, prover, etc, in order to deploy their own custom L2. Some of the customizations developers will be able to make include:
rollup or validium: This basically boils down to where you want your data to be posted. Want it on Ethereum? Okay, you get a zk-rollup. Want it on Celestia, or on a DAC? You get a validium.
DA: Choose where your data goes, whether it’s on Ethereum itself, Polygon, implement a 3rd party solution (Celestia, Avail, etc.), or a committee of solutions (DAC)
custom chain configurations: choose your own native gas token, how often you want proofs posted on Ethereum (less posting = lower operating costs; more posting = higher security assurances)
Sequencer: “centralized or (in the future) a decentralized sequencer”.
Interoperability
According to their official post, every team that uses the CDK to deploy their own L2 will automatically be connected to every other Polygon chain. The way they’re able to achieve this is through their “interoperability layer”, which was outlined when they first introduced the Polygon 2.0 vision.
“The Interop Layer is a novel protocol that accepts ZK proofs from Polygon chains, aggregates them, and posts the aggregated proof and updated chain states to Ethereum. It can be understood as a ZK-secured coordinator of chain states, guaranteeing composability and allowing unified liquidity at scale“.
It’s the layer between the Polygon CDK chains, and Ethereum:
According to the Polygon team, not only will CDK-built rollups be able to communicate with one another, but they’ll also be “one-click access to the entire liquidity of Ethereum.”
Who’s currently building with the CDK?
According to Polygon, there are already several teams developing their own CDK chain:
On testnet:
Immutable: web3 gaming network
CapX: a platform publishing their own writings across different subjects
In development:
Palm Network: focusing on art
Gnosis Pay, which we talked about in length here
IDEX: perpetuals future DEX
Aavegotchi: the game your probably already know about where you run around with your ghost
Arbitrum Stylus Launches on Testnet
Arbitrum announced the release of its code and public testnet for Stylus, the latest major Arbitrum upgrade, which allows developers to launch their apps using popular programming languages such as Rust, C, C++, and more, while still remaining within the EVM world.
Why Stylus
Arbitrum. built Stylus to try and onboard the broader developer ecosystem to web3.
As we can see from the image above (which was taken from this presentation), we can see that today, there are roughly 20K Solidity developers. Compared to the 3M Rust developers, and 12M C++ developers, 20K is a drop in the bucket still.
So, Arbitrum is taking the approach of taking web3 to web2 developers, rather than waiting for web2 developers to come to web3. Another project aiming to solve this issue by bringing Wasm to the EVM is Fluid, which we spoke about here.
What is Stylus
Stylus adds a second virtual machine (VM) to Arbitrum, the Wasm VM, which enables any common programming language to be used when building your Arbitrum app, whether on Arbitrum One, or Arbitrum Nova. Initially, it looks like Arbitrum will enable Rust, C, & C++ languages to be used, but technically, as long as you can create a Wasm compiler for a language, it can be used on Arbitrum.
Of course, this doesn’t change anything about the EVM, it’s still there, they just added a second one.
They call it ”EVM+”.
Aside from introducing new, more common programming languages, Stylus also provides faster compute and lower costs - “with Stylus, Rust, C, and C++, WASM compute operations run much faster than their Solidity equivalents. Computation is over 10x improved. Memory is over 100x improved”.
Plus, Arbitrum apps will remain composable with one another, regardless of what VM the other is using. Build your Rust app and still have access to EVM tools, users, and liquidity.
What changes for the user?
Nothing. - Well, okay, not exactly “nothing”, considering the faster compute and lower costs that will ultimately reach the end-users.
Ultimately though, as a user, you don’t have to change anything in terms of how you interact with Arbitrum chains. As a user you don’t know what VM the app you’re on is using - it all works the same.
Where does Arbitrum Orbit fit in
Stylus can be used to launch your own Arbitrum chain, using the Arbitrum Orbit framework. As a reminder, Orbit is Arbitrum’s own rollup framework, which developers can use to launch their own custom, dedicated rollup, using the Arbitrum tech stack. In other words, we may see a Rust-based DEX, & more, on Arbitrum soon.
What’s next
Just last week, Arbitrum launched the Stylus testnet, which developers can start playing around with. & if you’re an ARB token holder, be ready for the DAO vote as to whether or not the Arbitrum One & Arbitrum Nova chain should be upgraded to Stylus.
More News & Announcements
Chainway, which aims to build “the first zk-rollup on Bitcoin”, just announced that they open-sourced their Bitcoin Data Availability Adapter, which allows Sovereign SDK to be compatible with Bitcoin”. Basically, this will enable Bitcoin to be used as the DA layer, when building your rollup using the Sovereign SDK.
More Bitcoin rollup news! Kasar just won the Starknet hackathon for their own open-sourcing of “bitcoin-da”, “allowing anyone to run STARK rollups on bitcoin”. From what I understand, similar to how Bitcoin DA was added to Sovereign, it is now also added to the Madara stack in Starknet. So, Cairo meets Bitcoin basically. Looks like Bitcoin rollups are coming 👀
Axiom announces its “ZK Intensive Program”, a 4-week program for zk developers.
Have you checked out Polygon’s mobile-first app store yet?
Galxe hosted a discussion featuring Caldera about “The case for AppRollups with Caldera”.
Rune, one of the co-founders of MakerDAO, wrote a post on the community forum to propose a fork of Solana be used for its own appchain.
Neel, Eclipse co-founder, proposed that Maker should use Eclipse’s RaaS solution to build their own SVM chain.
It was quite a week for AltLayer, as they announced:
Automata Network will be leveraging AltLayer to launch its 2.0. “The first modular attestation network on Ethereum”.
Altlayer integrates Radius, the shared sequencer network, to offer developers encryption based sequencing.
You can now use Orbiter Finance to transfer your assets to AltLayer rollups.
AltLayer integrates the OP Stack.
Hyperlane announces its v3, enabling new features like hooks “which allow you to customize your message routing”, and “Single Call Hyperlane API”.
Omni Network launches its second tesnet, Overdrive, which is now live on Scroll, Linea, and Arbitrum. One of the projects to already deploy on Omnidrive is Collar Protocol.
Doppio (Espresso’s testnet) has already processed +2M tx’s and sequenced +721K blocks.
Light nodes everywhere 🌎
Here are 12 early projects building with Eigen Layer already.
Learn how Eigen Layer is thinking about MEV and censorship resistance with restaking.
Limewire partnered with Polygon “to launch the world's first blockchain-based AI Creator Studio” (lol)
Some announcements from Starknet Summit:
Starknet has open sourced its Stone proving system.
Herodotus released an onchain accumulator.
Autonomous audio was introduced
& here’s a thread that mentions several of the topics that were covered at the event
“Introducing Xai Odyssey, a campaign focused on educating the industry about Xai, a gaming network co-developed with Arbitrum”.
Here’s everything you need to know about native USDC coming to Optimism.
Fuel’s Q4 grants program is now live, with applications closing on the 11th.
Common Ground, a social community platform on Fuel, just announced the newly added features to its app.
Learn all about Ethlets, Saga powered appchains that settle on Ethereum.
Here’s everything you need to know about native USDC coming to the Cosmos, via Noble.
Passage launches on Cosmos: create virtual worlds from your browser (Cosmos metaverse).
wstETH is coming to Cosmos this month, which of course is the wrapped version of Lido’s staked Eth ~ “Hadron Labs is collaborating with Lido Finance and Axelar to bring wstETH liquidity to Neutron and the Cosmos Ecosystem”
Voting period for prop #821 is now open. “This significant software upgrade proposal brings the Liquid Staking Module (LSM) to the Hub.” Two days left to vote ATOM holders, but pretty sure it’s going to pass.
Skip is now “a major contributor” to Osmosis.
Warp Protocol is live on Neutron, which aims to bring a new set of defi opportunities to users, starting with limit orders. They held a Twitter Space going over this launch.
📚 Discourse & Education
Ethereum alignment good or bad?
Jon Charb from DBA distinguishes between different “types” of “Ethereum alignment”. This was sparked by LST discussions and following reactions to Ryan Berckman’s Lido take.
TLDR many Ethereum community members are signaling that Lido should restrict itself to control under 1/3rd staked ETH (a threshold it is about to cross over). The counter view is basically “everyone is shouting at Lido, not enough challenging the opinions of core Ethereum devs, feels like group think”. There’s also the question of whether a credibly neutral protocol should resist free market dynamics to begin with.
Jon is trying to peel apart different motivations behind Ethereum alignment. The reality is that some motiviations are healthy and some are not.
Another interesting part of this discourse is “who decides what is and ins’t Ethereum aligned?” Does Ethereum rough consensus leave room for new voices to be heard? Jon says yes.
What’s the meaning of decentralization?
Nick White from Celestia initiates a discussion about what decentralization means. The term is clearly overloaded but it’s useful to see how people think about it. Many interesting perspectives surfaced.
Here are our key takeaways:
zkSync has a great breakdown as part of their “ZK Credo”
a16z made a comprehensive overview of decentralization factors
Should data availability be data publication?
Bartek from L2Beat makes a case for referring to “data availability” (how the function is known today) as “data publication”. He also offers a fantastic explanation of this function and how it differs from “data storage”.
Here are our simplified takeaways:
You can’t prove data unavailability. There are numerous reasons why your node might not have received data and you can’t prove that another node withheld it from you.
You can’t force data storage. After the consensus process, full nodes can do whatever they want with data. They don’t need to store it and don’t need to let you see it.
There are protocols like FIlecoin working on Proof-of-Custody AKA Proof-of-Storage, which offer economic incentives to store data.
Data publication is part of consensus, while data storage comes from node decentralization.
Ethereum upgrades like EIP-4844 and danksharding concern data publication, not data storage.
So, should data availability be changed to data publication? The idea is already well-supported across ecosystems. Whether or not data publication is the perfect term, there appears to be consensus that data availability is too confusing.
More Discourse & Education
Uncommon Core 2.0 discusses the Incomplete Guide to PBS 🎙️🔥
Bankless discusses the Superchain with OP Labs and Coinbase teams 🎙️
Delphi Digital dives into intent-centric architectures and transaction flows ✍️🧠
@awasunyin summarizes Delphi Digital’s intents article 💬
@nickwh8te analogizes blockchain VMs to Linux distributions (shoutout @smsunarto) 💬💎
Clave deep dives into Account Abstraction with an ultimate guide ✍️
Galxe discusses The Case for AppRollups with the Caldera team 🎙️
Bankless discusses how RiscZero enables very low compute requirements for zkEVMs 🎙️
Namada explores Shielded Data Publication using Celestia DA ✍️
@gluk64 explains why smart contract implementation risks remain the biggest unsolved problem of DeFi 💬
@adeets_22 breaks down the term MPC and why you should care ✍️
@expctchaos unpacks execution layers in the first part of series on modular components 💬
@WinfredKMandela explains the difference between Anoma and Namada in simple terms 💬
Polygon discusses the new Polygon CDK for customizable rollups 🎙️
Porfo curates a resource guide for all things intents 💬
@terencechain summarizes Arbitrum co-founder Ed Felton’s recent L2 ordering thread 💬
@bkiepuszewski explains what is vs. isn’t possible when a dishonest majority signs an invalid block 💬💎
@LoganJastremski discusses danksharding, modular vs. integrated chains, and scaling DA with Anurag from Avail 🎙️
Polyhedra founders propose Pianist: Scalable zkRollups via Fully Distributed Zero-Knowledge Proofs ✍️🧠
@rahatcodes walks through how to build Account Abstraction powered dapps using the Biconomy SDK 🎥
@kakia1989 explores shared sequencing economics on the Arbitrum research forum ✍️
That's all for this week! Thanks for reading 🧱🎬