Weekly Rollup #36
Run a light node in 30 seconds with Vistara | A shared sequencer proposal for Starknet | What’s a Plonky3? | Week ending October 13th
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This week’s issue covers:
Run a light node in 30 seconds with Vistara
A shared sequencer proposal for Starknet
More News & Announcements
What’s a Plonky3?
More Education & Discourse
📣 News & Announcements
Run a light node in 30 seconds with Vistara
Vistara Labs just made it possible for users to start running their own Celestia or Avail light node in just 30 seconds.
About one month ago, the team teased one of their newly developed tools, Vimana, a software that allows people to run different “modular components”. So while today users can only choose to run either a Celestia or Avail light node, we can imagine other modular components to be added over time, such as maybe Eigen DA, Berachain, interop protocol nodes, and more.
Why does this matter?
As you’ve heard us say plenty of times already, light nodes are a crucial component of Data Publication networks. The main task of a light node is to perform “Data Availability Sampling” (DAS), which put simply, means downloading *just a portion* (a “sample) of a block to help make sure everything is being done correctly.
More light nodes means greater:
security: you have more entities making sure blocks are being produced correctly
scalability: more people means more downloaded block samples, which means you can raise the amount of stuff that can go inside a block (blocksize can increase) without giving up security
As important as light nodes are, it’s not the easiest thing in the world to set up, however, teams like Vistara are working to make this process much simpler, abstracting away as much of the technical complexities as possible, until eventually, we get to a point where light nodes are just running in all our wallets without us even knowing.
What is Vistara
Vistara is building a hardware availability layer for the modular ecosystem, and this 30-second light node setup is just the first example of this. While most teams today are striving to build permissionless modular components, this does not mean they will be 100% accessible. But with teams like Vistara removing as many barriers for entry as possible, running blockchain nodes will be both permissionless, and accessible for all.
Aside from building out this hardware layer, Vistara Labs also offers a RaaS solution, enabling developers to launch their own rollups in minutes. While other RaaS solutions that we’ve talked about before have mainly focused on Ethereum based rollup stacks, such as OP Stack and Arbitrum Orbit, Vistara focuses on Rollkit, Starknet, and Dymension (IBC) rollup frameworks. In fact, 300+ Dymension RollApps have already been launched with Vistara, following the recent partnership announcement between both teams, offering 1-minute Dymension RollApp deployments.
Vistara is a very early project. If you want to stay up to date with everything that is going on, make sure to follow them on X.
A shared sequencer proposal for Starknet
Last week, @apoorvsadana (building Madara & Pragma) shared a proposal on the Starknet forum for a shared sequencer design for Starknet & Madara.
Here’s a TLDR of the proposal 👇
Problem
About two months ago, the StarkWare team announced Starknet appchains. In other words, Starknet L3s were on the way. In fact, teams have already began using the Madara rollup stack to launch their own appchains (Starknet L3s), such as Pragma, Dojo, Kakarot, and Mangata Finance.
The proposal mentions that if we were to get to a future with 100 different Starknet L3s, then a new set of challenges would arise for the ecosystem:
Decentralization: it would be quite difficult to bootstrap +100 different decentralized, secure, validator sets. Decentralization of course important for liveness & censorship resistance in this case.
Composability: 100 fragmented chains leads to communication difficulties
Development experience: solving for decentralization and bridging would be a difficult task for any developer
Solution: A Shared Sequencer
The idea is to create a common set of validators (1 set) that sequences blocks for all these different Starknet appchains, thereby helping solve the issues presented above.
Specifically, the idea is to create a Substrate-based blockchain that is solely responsible for sequencing blocks. In other words, this shared sequencer would only be responsible for receiving transactions from the rollups (the Starknet L3s), ordering them within a block, and committing that block to the L1 (Ethereum in this case).
Polkadot Comparison
Apoorv mentions that this is basically what Polkadot has been building over the past 5 years. Make sure to check out the full post to learn more about why this comparison was made.
Apoorv proceeds to ask “if there was a way to bring all the Polkadot tech into the Ethereum ecosystem?”
Apoorv thinks there is. In fact, Madara presents such an example. “Madara is a substrate framework that allows anyone to build their own zk-powered L2/L3 solution on top of Ethereum”.
“What we need next is the Polkadot relay chain in the form of a shared sequencer”.
It sounds to me like the idea is to leverage the validator set from Polkadot’s relay chain, and have this set be responsible for building blocks for Starknet’s L3 ecosystem, while still leaving verification and settlement to Ethereum itself. Put a different way, a parachain that settles on Ethereum. Make sure to read the complete post to learn all about this shared sequencer proposal.
More News & Announcements
RaaS Updates
Caldera is now offering “Whitelabel Docs” to any team building a Caldera Chain, helping both developers and rollup users learn how to access each particular rollup - how to bridge to the rollup, understanding, gas pricing, etc.
Caldera also announced a partnership with Lore, who will be providing Caldera Chains with a data hub, and block explorer. & with Polyhydra (zkBridge), providing Caldera Chains with zk-powered interoperability.
Conduit reaches 1000+ ETH in cumulative fees paid to Ethereum for DAT/Settlement costs. As a reminder, Conduit is a RaaS solution that teams like Zora and Ancient8 have used to deploy their own OP Stack rollup.
Data Publication Networks
Mustafa shared “a proposal for five core values of the Celestia social layer”:
offchain governance > token holder governance
users are treated as first-class citizens of the network
credibly neutral
economies of scale
overhead minimization
Learn all about Stackr’s “micro-rollups”, through this Avail whiteboard session.
Sequencers
Espresso officially announces that they will be bringing a shared sequencer to Arbitrum. Speaking of Espresso, this might be the first time an entire chain gets rickrolled lol courtesy of Cartessi.
LSTs & Restaking
If you’re a solo staker on Eigen, then check this out. Participate in product testing, feedback collection, and future roadmap initiatives.
Introducing Rio Network. “a network for issuing Liquid Restaking Tokens (LRTs). Our first product is restaked ETH (reETH)”.
“A proposal by @KimonSh is currently live on the Lido DAO forums discussing adding SimpleDVT as a new mainnet module with DVs to the Lido protocol in early 2024”.
Bridges
AltLayer integrates Catalyst. “With Catalyst, the AltLayer ecosystem will share unified liquidity between one another and connect to liquidity hubs like Ethereum, Cosmos and more”. In other words, AltLayer chains will be able to leverage Catalyst’s rollup AMM to swap across different chains.
Catalyst will be integrating the OP Stack, connecting liquidity for “the entire Optimism Superchain”. In other words, Superchain apps will have seamless interoperability between one another, and any other Catalyst-connected ecosystems, such as Cosmos.
Omni Network integrates Vienna, the first live optimistic rollup with Espresso integration. This means Vienna will be leveraging Omni to connect to the broader L2 ecosystem, including Scroll, Arbitrum, and Linea, which have already integrated with Omni as well.
L2s
@daniel_taikoxyz, Taiko CEO, just shared its “progressively hybrid rollup” design. Looks like teams will get to choose the % of blocks that are optimistic, and % of blocks that are zk. This design will be rolled out in Taiko’s next testnet, Alpha-6.
Mantle team held a Q3 report discussion on X last week.
Help Aztec determine how it should go about prover coordination for Aztec blocks. Speaking of Aztec, if you have any remaining funds on zkMoney, then you might want to withdraw now, considering the platform has now been sunsetted.
Saga v1 is set to launch soon, according to a 6-phase rollout plan. Check out the link to learn all about these phases.
Users can now bridge between Ethereum Sepolia testnet and Fuel, using Fuel’s native bridge. Speaking of bridging, the Fuel team held a “Bridging Roundtable” discussion with Hyperlane.
Round 2 of the Security Council: Arbitrum Foundation will be distributing 50M ARB to support network growth and more. This is part of the Short-Term Incentives Program we mentioned last week.
Coinbase Wallet users can now DEX trade, bridge in & out of, and perform gas-free transfers on Arbitrum.
Introducing Superposition Chain, a defi-specific Arbitrum L3. This chain was built using Arbitrum Orbit, the chain’s own rollup framework.
Manta Pacific has already reached $10M in TVL, after just one month since launch.
A new version of the Miden VM has just launched, introducing new features and performance improvements.
Cosmos
Cosmos Hub completes v13 upgrade, which (1) “Removes old Gravity DEX Liquidity Module code from Gaia codebase”, and (2) “Updates the Interchain Security Provider Module”.
Wallets, Consumer Apps & more.
Farcaster is now permissionless. “Developers are now able to build an app, sign up users, and read/write Hub data without any 3rd parties”.
Introducing Alchemy Kit. a new framework for devs to embed Smart Accounts in their apps. The TLDR of what end-users can expect from a UX perspective: (1) familiar UX including sign up with an email, social login, or a seed phrase for native web3 users, (2) sponsored gas so the user can try the app for free, no ETH required, and (3) design your own checkout flow and sign transactions in the background. Check out the blogpost linked above to learn more!
Check out ZK Hunt, a new onchain game created by @FlynnCalcutt
📚 Discourse & Education
What’s a Plonky3?
Daniel Lubarov from Polygon Labs highlights an experiment run on his M1 Macbook Air, showing remarkable performance for Plonky3. Ok, what in the world is Plonky3? Come to think of it, what happened to Plonky 1 and 2??
Don’t worry, we’re going to do it the easy way - but we need to start somewhere.
If you’re reading this, you’re probably aware of ZK proofs. To generate ZK proofs, you need a proving scheme. You probably already think of proving (ZK proofs, fraud proofs, no proofs lol) as one module in the modular stack. Well - think of the proving scheme as a submodule within the ZK proving module. You can generate ZK proofs using all different proving schemes which themselves have all different tradeoffs (e.g. performance, cost).
Now let’s take a look at different proving schemes. Warning - they all have funny names.
Here’s a broad walkthrough of how proving schemes have evolved, and here’s a discussion focused specifically on the history of Plonk. TLDR proving schemes are often remixed (e.g. Scroll uses Halo2 which is based on UltraPlonk but replaces some stuff) and the Plonk “family” is extremely promising.
Back to Daniel’s experiment.
Daniel is one of the most advanced ZK practitioners in the blockchain space and continues to push the boundaries of what’s possible. His latest innovation is Plonky3 (he’s also working on an exciting project based on Plonky3) and his latest Macbook Air test shows how quickly performance bottlenecks are being removed.
Polygon Labs will soon publish benchmarks to show exactly how optimizations have progressed over time, but regardless it’s very impressive to see how far the industry has come.
Three cheers for democratizing ZK 🎉
More Discourse & Education
@mikeneuder breaks down the magnitude and direction of Lido attack vectors ✍️🔥
Bankless discusses the magnitude of the Lido thread and possible solutions with Danny from the Ethereum Foundation 🎙️
@VitalikButerin explores protocol and staking changes that could improve decentralization and reduce consensus overhead ✍️
@GwartyGwart explores a tradeoff underlying the Lido controversy ✍️💎
@weboftrees deep dives into Ethereum staking economics and minimum viable issurance (MVI) 💬🧠
Devconnect.eth discusses the state of light clients in the Ethereum ecosystem 🎙️
@stacy_muur dives into all things intents, covering key concepts and leading solutions in intent subcategories 💬
Taiko discusses based sequencing with Justin from the Ethereum Foundation 🎙️
@OwnerOfJK discusses building onchain games and scaling game infrastructure with Mohamed from Alliance DAO 🎙️🔥
@MohamedFFouda explains ZK state channels and why they are better options for multiplayer games 💬💎
Taiko discusses the current landscape, performance and open-source ethos of zkVMs 🎙️
Lifi discusses unifying liquidity in the modular ecosystem with Nicolo from Catalyst 🎙️
ZK Validator dives into common themes surrounding the modular ecosystem 🎙️
EigenLayer breaks down Programmable Trust and what it unlocks ✍️
@hal2001 explains Across Protocol’s intent-based architecture and how cheap it makes bridging between Ethereum and Optimism 💬
The Defiant discusses why Layer 2s and appchains will converge with Alex from Aurora 🎙️
@ayyyeandy walks through the search for decentralization in the L2 sphere 💬
Manta discusses a modular future for Pacific with Nick from Celestia 🎙️
Optimism discusses blockchain gaming and why Ancient8 deployed an OP Stack chain 🎙️
Catalyst explains the mathematics that drive their protocol’s secret sauce - the Unit of Liquidity ✍️
@arixoneth explains Diva, distributed validator technology (DVT) and how to run a validator with just 1 ETH 💬
0xResearch discusses Cosmos Hub and whether it will enshrine Stride to save ATOM 🎙️
That's all for this week! Thanks for reading 🧱🎬