Weekly Rollup #59
The 1st declarative chain | Dymension 2D Upgrade | Celestia 🤝 ZK Stack | Nodekit's Javelin | Initia 🤝 Elastic Block Production | Gelato on Bitcoin + Blueberry Launch | Raises | Week ending April 7th
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This week’s issue covers:
Essential: The First Declarative Blockchain
Dymension 2D Upgrade
Celestia 🤝 ZK Stack, Arbitrum Orbit, & more
Nodekit Introduces Javelin
Initia Announces Elastic Block Production
Gelato on Bitcoin + Blueberry Testnet Launch
Camp Network Raise: a modular chain for consumer apps
More News & Announcements
📣 News & Announcements
Essential: The First Declarative Blockchain
Last week Essential unveiled itself as “the first declarative blockchain”. In short, Essential is an “intent-centric L2” - & as a reminder, intents allow users to express their desired outcomes of a transaction, rather than the institutions on how to get there.
They’ve also released Pint, their own Domain Specific Language (DSL), for “programmable intents”. You can listen to this Twitter Space from this morning to learn more about Essential.
Dymension 2D Upgrade
The Dymension team just proposed the 2D upgrade, which is set to introduce a set of new features, such as sequencer bonding and eIBC integration, while also kickstarting the launch of RollApps.
This upgrade is part of the originally proposed Dymension roadmap - in the spirit of web3 however, it is up to the community of DYM token holders to vote on the launch of the 2D upgrade.
The biggest upgrade feature will be that DYM stakers will be able to vote for which RollApp they want to see become amongst the first to go live on mainnet, through the RollApp Draft - this is where the RollApp Draft comes in.
However, other prominent features will include:
“fraud-proof handling”: this means users can start submitting fraud-proof challenges
“sequencer bonding and staking”: stake DYM, get rewarded. Misbehave, lose your DYM.
eIBC: using fraud proofs requires a 7-day (usually) challenge period, meaning transactions won’t officially finalize, when transferring from RollApp to RollApp for example, until the end of this challenge period (you need to give people enough time to make sure all transactions are actually valid). As end-users, we won’t have to wait 7 days to receive our withdrawal request because there will be users on the other side, LPs, who front us the money. With 2D, users will start being able to participate in this system, for rewards earned by fronting users their funds.
“Virtual ERC-20 tokens”: The Ethereum ecosystem has its own token standard, ERC-20. ICS-20 is basically the same thing, except for the IBC ecosystem, “which allow IBC (ICS-20) tokens on Dymension to be represented as ERC-20 tokens in EVM wallets”.
Celestia 🤝 ZK Stack, Arbitrum Orbit, & more
ZK Stack with Celestia Underneath
It looks like builders will soon be able to leverage alternative data publication (DP) solutions when building with the ZK Stack.
As a reminder, the ZK Stack is zkSync’s own rollup framework, enabling developers to build and deploy their own dedicated zk-rollup or validium. Up util this announcement, Ethereum & zk Porter (by zkSync) were the only two data publication networks that were known to be able to be used by builders, however, it looks like the LambdaClass team has helped onboard others to the stack.
As mentioned below, Celestia will be the first alternative DP solution added to the ZK Stack, however, we can expect others to follow suit soon after as well.
Yeah, so it looks like Celestia is going to be used across all Ethereum-based rollup frameworks (OP Stack, Orbit, CDK, ZK Stack, Starknet).
Blobstream Hits Arbitrum
ICYMI, Celestia Blobstream is now live on Arbitrum, following it’s initial launch on Base.
We spoke more about what this means, here, but the TLDR: Arbitrum L2s & L3s with Celestia underneath.
Celestia Dev Call
Celestia held its 8th core dev call, which covered “new updates to Lemongrass Hardfork and any other proposals”.
Nodekit Introduces Javelin
Last week, the Nodekit team announced Javelin, “the super builder” that is expected to enable “atomic synchronous composability between rollups”.
So how this works:
Nodekit is a shared sequencer that is expected to house an ecosystem of rollups.
While these rollups will be independent of one another, they’ll still be able to share the same block, thanks to Javelin
“Javelin Super Builder provides a way to guarantee atomic execution across multiple rollups”
Javelin enables atomic “execution” as opposed to atomic “inclusion”, which is what is typically offered.
atomic inclusion: a guarantee that the transactions from two different rollups will be included in the same block
atomic execution: a guarantee that the transactions from two different rollups will be executed within the same block
Nodekit x Hyperlane
& through this partnership with Hyperlane, which they announced shortly after Javelin, it looks like any rollup with a Hyperlane integration will be able to leverage Javelin.
Initia Announces Elastic Block Production
Initia announced their addition of “Elastic Block Production”.
The TLDR:
if the block is sufficiently filled, you get 500ms block times
if there’s not enough transactions in a block, you get 60s block times
This is opposed to the traditional method of just consistently producing block after block at the same rate, regardless of whether or not there are any transactions inside the given block. Also should note, that this is for CosmosSDK builders.
Elastic Block Production is actually becoming more popular now, as we’ve also seen teams like Dymension and others announce this.
Gelato on Bitcoin + Blueberry Testnet Launch
Gelato 🤝 Bitcoin L2s
Gelato (RaaS) announces that they will be supporting the launch of Bitcoin L2s, using the PoW network as a settlement layer for rollups.
Blueberry Testnet Launch
Gelato also launched its “Blueberry” public testnet, intended to serve as a “playground” for building with Arbitrum Orbit. As a builder, you’ll also have access to 10 different Gelato infrastructure partners for out-of-the box integrations - partners include Safe, Blockscout, and more.
Raises
Camp Network
Camp Network announces a $4M seed raise, led by Maven11, as they look to build a modular L2 network to house consumer apps. This chain is also expected to leverage EigenLayer’s restaked security protocol.
Ellipsis Labs
Ellipsis Labs, the core team behind Pheonix Trade (onchain orderbook app on Solana), announced a $20M raise, led by Paradigm, and including some of the biggest names in the space.
More News & Announcements
KelpDAO brings native staking to Scroll, allowing users to deposit ETH in exchange for wrsETH, and use across Scroll’s defi ecosystem. & yes, you get points. Check out the full thread to learn about some of the Scroll defi apps you’ll be able to use wrsETH across.
& here’s everything else you missed from the Scroll eco this past week, including a new bridge integration,a new DEX launch, and more.
Herodotus just verified the first STARK proof on Starknet mainnet. For those new to this, STARK’s are basically the alternative to SNARK proofs, which is what is typically used in zk proving systems. STARK proofs were traditionally viewed as the superior of the two, as they enabled trustless universal verification (key generation?) and were quantum-resistant, both of which SNARK proofs did not provide. However, I’m not sure if teams have been able to solve for this since then - I am no cryptographer by any means, so please explore the subject in further detail yourself if you’re interested, Another project working on STARKs is Polygon Mide, for example.
Noble (Cosmos appchain) partner switch Frax Finance to bring Frax (the stablecoin), and sFrax, the staked version of it, to Cosmos. Noble now becomes the home for native USDC & Frax for the Csomos ecosystem.
Here’s everything AltLayer was up to over the month of March, including the launch of their ALT token & more.
New proposal just hit the Arbitrum DAO, to activate Stylus (EVM+) on Arbitrum One and Nova. “Stylus is an upgrade that introduces a new virtual machine that runs alongside the EVM. This enables developers to write smart contracts in new programming languages, like Rust, that are more efficient than Solidity smart contracts”. For those new to Stylus, here’s a small deep dive about it when it was first announced, months back.
Polygon zkEVM analytics are now live on Dune, “offering vital insights into transaction speeds, smart contract performance, and more”. Initial dashboards include zkEVM Asset Deposits & Asset Withdrawals.
dWallet has partnered with Avail, allowing users to manage native BTC when interacting with Avail-based rollups. As a builder, this means “enabling smart contracts on Avail L2s / rollups to programmatically handle native BTC”
Pryzm becomes the latest team to announce their own Rollchain (an L1 appchain with Celestia underneath). This will allow Pryzm to tap into Celestia’s growing ecosystem of apps and users. & for those new to the project, Pryzm is an L1 for yield tokenization & trading.
OKX rebrands its CDK chain to “X Layer”, as they approach mainnet launch.
Yes, even rollups scale: Base just announced its second gas target increase in the past two weeks.
Check out Kartel, a newly announced orderbook derivatives layer on Bitcoin. “Simply put, you can trade 50+ pairs with 20x leverage, achieving CEX-level experience on any Bitcoin chain“. The team has made it clear that this is a defi gateway for Bitcoin degens. This chain was built with AltLayer (RaaS0, and will leverage EigenLayer & Hyperlane. Check out the full post to learn more.
AltLayer partners with Sei to bring their “Parallel Stack” to the RaaS platform, and thereby, to Ethereum.
Aligned Layer publishes the “first draft version” of its whitepaper for its Universal Verification Layer. This team is building a network of users who serve the role of submitting fraud (or validity by what it looks like) proofs.
Avail publishes its “road to mainnet”.
That's all for this week! Thanks for reading 🧱🎬