Weekly Rollup #68
Symbiotic: New Shared Security Protocol | Near Announces Nuffle Labs | More Sovereign Rollups: DeFund & SpiceNet | OP Stack Proofs Go Live | Celestia Blobtstream on Eth Mainnet | Week Ending June 14th
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This week’s issue covers:
Introducing Symbiotic: A New Shared Security Protocol ✨
Near’s Modular Team Announces Nuffle Labs 📛
Two new defi sovereign rollups: DeFund & SpiceNet 🚨
Permissionless Fault Proofs Arrive on the OP Stack 🔐
Blobstream Is Live on Ethereum Mainnet 🎉
Modular Raises 💰
Upcoming Modular Events 🎭
More News & Announcements 📣
Discourse & Education 📚
We’d like to thank one of our sponsors for today’s post, AltLayer.
AltLayer is a decentralized protocol that facilitates the launch of native and restaked rollups with both optimistic and zk rollup stacks.
Visit their official website to learn more.
📣 News & Announcements
Introducing Symbiotic: A New Shared Security Protocol
One main highlight from last week was the unveiling and initial launch of Symbiotic, a permissionless “flexible” restaking protocol for the modular ecosystem.
Here’s a more exact definition of Symbiotic, according to their official post:
“Symbiotic is a shared security protocol that serves as a thin coordination layer, empowering network builders to control and adapt their own (re)staking implementation in a permissionless manner.”
Symbiotic allows decentralized networks to independently manage and customize their security and staking mechanisms. This means networks can tailor how assets are staked, select node operators, and define governance parameters without relying on centralized authorities.
Symbiotic promotes flexibility and modularity. It enables networks to adjust collateral assets, determine staking ratios, and implement governance rules according to their specific needs and evolutionary stages.
Symbiotic minimizes risks associated with centralized governance by employing non-upgradeable core contracts on Ethereum, ensuring robust security and execution.
There are already several teams working with Symbiotic:
Here are a few we’d like to highlight:
Advanced defi strategies for Lido stETH:
A new Hyperlane security module:
🤝 Swell Network partnership, for those who staked their assets on Symbiotic:
& several others!
LayerZero partnership - Read
Fairblock partnership - Read
AI partnership with Aizel - Read
partnership with ether.fi - Read
Symbiotic has kicked off its bootstrapping phase and the initial onboarding of restaked collateral.
However,
& as we can see, Symbiotic had quite the successful launch:
We’ll have a further deep dive about Symbiotic coming soon, but for now, you can check out their recently published docs.
Near’s Modular Team Announces Nuffle Labs
Near’s modular team has spun out to form their own entity - Nuffle Labs.
Nuffle Labs will be in charge of the development of, what was Near’s, modular product suite. The first modular products being:
NearDA
Near Fast Finality Layer (NFFL)
NEAR DA
One rollup has already been announced on top of Near DA, RSS3, which is building an open information layer. & according to a recent Near post,
“RSS3 saw significant reduction in their costs, paying a daily average of $10 rather than $1K per day. NEAR DA scales with sharding and currently has a throughput of 24MB/s compared to Celestia’s 6.67MB/s.”
NFFL
NFFL is an EigenLayer AVS that uses NearDA to aggregate state across all connected rollups, unlocking a fast, bridgeless cross-chain experience for users. NFFL can also integrate with additional DA layers, meaning it is not specific to Near DA.
NFFL is live on testnet today, and you can learn more about it, here.
Spinning off into its own entity helps to further decentralize the core Near team, while also allowing Nuffle Labs to make fast, agile decisions to keep up with the growth of the modular ecosystem.
Two New Celestia Sovereign Rollups Unveiled: DeFund & Spice Net
Over the past couple of years, we have seen a proliferation of infrastructure built for the modular ecosystem. Now, we're entering the era of sovereign rollups.
This was exemplified last week, with the unveiling of two new rollups: DeFund, and Spice Net - both sovereign, both defi-focused, and both using Celestia underneath.
Before taking a look at both of these announcements, however, let’s briefly recap on what a sovereign rollup is.
A sovereign chain offers the best of both worlds: the ability to govern itself like an L1 chain while leveraging the security guarantees of Celestia's data availability layer.
This means that the sovereign rollup takes data from the DA Layer, processes it according to its own rules and protocols, and then finalizes its own blocks.
Sovereign rollups have their own governance models, enabling them to make updates and changes independently of the L1.
Now, let’s take a look at the two new Celestia sovereign rollups👇
Introducing DeFund Chain
The first new sovereign rollup unveiled last week was DeFund Chain, built using Rollkit’s rollup framework, and using Celestia underneath.
According to the team “DeFund Finance aims to bring a comprehensive suite of defi products and services tailored for the modular ecosystem”.
As of today, there are three core products listed on their docs:
Spot Exchange: DeFund Finance's Spot Exchange takes on a hybrid approach, combining the precision of an orderbook with the liquidity of an automated market maker (AMM). It features an impermanent loss mitigation mechanism through automated hedging, supports a wide range of assets across modular blockchain ecosystems, and includes advanced order types for enhanced trading control and risk management.
Hedged Liquidity Pools: DeFund’s Hedged Liquidity Pools claim to protect liquidity providers from impermanent loss by automatically creating hedges using their paired Option Vaults. This feature ensures that deposited assets are shielded from price fluctuations, thereby encouraging more users to participate in liquidity provision. Hedged LPs work seamlessly with the Spot Exchange, enhancing overall liquidity and stability while offering attractive yields and additional incentives.
Option Vaults: DeFund’s Option Vaults provide users with flexible risk management tools through Dutch auction options. These options allow users to take long or short positions on assets without the risk of liquidation. The vaults use a Dutch auction mechanism to determine option prices, ensuring simplicity and accessibility for both option buyers and sellers.
DeFund also leverages some “asset abstraction” magic, via integrations with Calypso and the Cosmos Metamask Snap. This allows “users to perform any action with any asset using one of the most widely used wallets”. For example, if you have 10 MATIC on the Polygon network that you want to use on DeFund, which is a Celestia sovereign rollup, you can do so in one click, without having to download a new wallet or bridge tokens.
DeFund will also allow external teams to build their own structured products on top of the DeFund chain, which we can also see here on their roadmap:
Make sure to follow the team on X to stay in the loop with all things DeFund, and to learn when the chain goes live for the public.
Introducing SpiceNet
Another defi-based sovereign rollup was announced last week - SpiceNet. While both DeFund & SpiceNet will utilize Celestia underneath, SpiceNet was built using the Sovereign SDK, as opposed to DeFund, which used Rollkit.
SpiceNet is being developed by the PepperDEX team - PepperDEX is a perpetual futures exchange powered by Hxro Network, which is a distributed liquidity layer built specifically for derivatives trading.
SpiceNet aims to offer a faster, more performant onchain trading experience, claiming to be “50x faster than Solana” 👀
We mentioned some of the highlights of sovereign blockchains, above - but why did Spice Net specifically choose Celestia?
According to the team, Celestia’s roadmap “includes a path to gigabyte blocks”, plus the fact that Celestia is building tools & innovations specifically for sovereign rollups, such as ZK accounts, “which provides trustless bridging of TIA to rollups like SpiceNet”.
We owe you all a further deep dive into Spice Net, but for those who’d like to start learning more about this team today, check out their docs, here.
Permissionless Fault Proofs Arrive on the OP Stack
Optimism and the entire Superchain ecosystem have just made a giant leap towards decentralization, with the arrival of permissionless fault proofs to the OP Stack.
This means (1) anyone, such as yourself, can start contributing to the network’s security by challenging invalid transactions, and (2) this also means users can permissionlessly exit from the network without relying on a third party.
& now that Stage 1 has been achieved, Optimism is now on its path towards Stage 2 decentralization.
Gud Vitalik meme:
Congrats Optimism team & community!
Blobstream Is lLve on Ethereum Mainnet
Celestia announced the launch of Blobstream on Ethereum mainnet, which means permissionless, high throughput DA is now available to all Ethereum L2s.
As a quick reminder, Blobstream is the component that relays the data attestations made by the Celestia validator set, to Ethereum. We wrote a full deep dive about Blobstream, here, if you’d like to learn more.
Blobstream is also now live on Celenium, for those who want to track commitments to Celestia.
Modular Raises 💰
Layer3 Raises $15M
Layer3 closed a $15M series A round, bringing total funding to $21M. Layer3 is an omnichain identity and distribution protocol live across Arbitrum, Base, Celo, & more. Here’s what the cofounder had to say about the raise.
Irys Raises $8.9M
Irys will use these funds to continue development of their data storage network.
Squad Labs Raises $10M
Squad Labs will use these funds to continue on their mission to develop smart account technology.
Modular Events 🎭
Modular Summit 2024
Modular Summit is quickly approaching - get your tickets now! & check out the amazing list of some of the speakers attending the event 👇
Movement Labs’ Olympus Hackathon & Integrated Day Event
From July 17th and onwards for about 8 weeks, you’ll be able to compete with others as you try to build the best defi, NFT, Gaming, Infra, Tools, & more for Movement.
& for those who’d like to participate but are not developers, there are 4 other guilds to choose from!
Check out the full post to learn more.
Integrated Day
Going to EthCC? RSVP for a Movement Labs & Omni Network co-hosted event, “Integrated Day”.
More News & Announcements
Stargaze to transition from a Cosmos appchain, to a sovereign rollup, via Rollkit. As NoSleepJon puts it, “Cosmos eco continuing its Modular realignment“ - Read
Powd3r Chain announces that they will be utilizing AvailDA. This chain promises to enable Bitcoin PoW mining rewards, directly from participating in their L2 chain - Read
Versatus will be utilizing AvailDA for its Cloud AVS product. “Versatus is also providing access to a runway of free compute resources, allowing developers teams building on Avail, to focus on innovation without worrying about infrastructure costs” - Read
Ankr adds Espresso to its RaaS stack. This will allow developers to add an Espresso sequencer integration to their rollup, at the click of a button - Read
A new feature release has been added to the rollup.wtf dashboard, which was just launched last week by Conduit. This update added new dimension views (DA, settlement), and filters - View
Particle Network’s universal accounts are now supported on Build-on-Bitcoin (BOB) chain, “enabling you to use tokens on any other chain to interact with its ecosystem” - Read
Fluent partners with Aligned Network: "In order for blended execution networks built using Fluentbase to support novel use cases, it'll be crucial to have fast, affordable settlement options" - Read
Espresso & Gevulot announce their partnership, aimed at creating a bundled experience for Polygon CDK builders: “Packaging these two solutions together streamlines the flow from sequencing to proving/verifying to DA, creating more cost-effective and secure rollups” - Read
DODO has integrated Hyperlane (interop) into its testnet chain, to enable its cross-chain trading app - Read
Nebula Finance makes its submission to deploy on Dymension mainnet. Nebula is aiming to build a liquid staking protocol for the modular ecosystem, as its own Dymension RollApp. Check out the full proposal to learn more - Read
Mande Network is live on Dymension mainnet, as they build an onchain credibility hub using Dymension & Celestia - Read
EigenLabs acquires RioRestaking: “the code and intellectual property from Rio Network is separately being purchased by the Eigen Foundation, and will be open-sourced as a reference implementation in the EigenLayer ecosystem to better support new and developing LRTs.” - Read
“based preconfs are live on devnet” - Read
HAM Chain has been added to the Celenium developer dashboard - View
New Celenium update has been released, linking blobs to related rollups with Celestia underneath, and improved bookmarks - Check Out
Catalyst “eggs” will be dropped to eligible Wormhole Discord members - Read - Catalyst also announced Round 3 of its “eggdrop” campaign, rewarding LPs with eggs - Read
Pragma (in a permissionless manner) has brought Hyperlane to the Starknet ecosystem, meaning Hyperlane-connected chains can now interoperate with Starknet & Madara (a Starknet sequencer) appchains - Read
“Aperture is live on Base with over $772M in Intents Volume processed in 2024” - Read
Check out zkSync’s newly announced community governance model - Read
Polygon ID spins out to form its own entity, Privado ID, Spanish for “private ID”. Sounds like their new aim is to tackle the issue of “AI-driven misinformation”. This new brand will be multi-chain, compatible with any EVM chain, and is integrated with Linea’s zkEVM already - Learn More
Speaking of onchain identity, the Optimism team just introduced the “Superchain Identity”, developed by 3DNS. “Your Superchain domain works as an ENS, allows you to display NFTs, add arbitrary data to our domain, set up a website, and more”. Get your super.box & chain.box subdomains! - Read
An official proposal is being discussed on the Polygon forum, to connect Polygon Proof of Stake chain to the agglayer - Read
An update on the number of proposers and provers live on Taiko, now that we’re one week removed from it becoming permissionless - View
Uniswap is now live on zkSync - Read
Several teams have started a new cohort called, “The Fellowship of OneBalance”, which aims to bring credible accounts to web3 in order to abstract fragmentation (“Credible Chain Abstraction Stack”). Participating members include Everclear, Wallet Connect, Privy, Arbitrum, Across, ChainSafe, Wevm, Movement, Near, & several others. Check out the full thread to learn more - Read
Informal Systems has just proposed a new Interchain Security feature for the Cosmos ecosystem, which will allow “validators outside the Hub’s active set to validate consumer chains” - Read
Here’s everything you missed across the Optimism ecosystem last week, including new Superchain members, Xterio Games (onchain gaming), and Allo (RWAs) - Read
📚 Discourse & Education
Blogs, Threads, & More 📝
What’s the difference between live forced transaction mechanisms and based sequencing? Check out this short blog post to learn - Read
LongHash Ventures publishes a paper about the emerging landscape of preconfirmations, potentially enabling “Solana like UX on Ethereum” - Read
Four Pillars research team has published a new deep dive, about Mantle (Eth L2), titled: “The 3 pillars to building a successful rollup”, and dives into the success of the Manlt ecosystem - Read
Vance shares the point that we may see more corporate L2s soon, considering Base’s tremendous revenue success - Read
Kairos Research published a paper breaking down why Everclear’s Cearing Layer is a big deal - Read
Cami writes a piece breaking down Berachain’s “Proof of Liquidity” mechanism “that systemically rewards participants with new revenue streams“ - Read
Aligned Network publishes its manifesto - Read
Babylon proposes “Forkless Rollups with Bitcoin Staking”, enhancing rollup security, reducing latency, and addressing centralization - Read
Audio & Podcasts 🎤
Nebra co-founders make an appearance on the Zero Knowledge Podcast, where they break down the “unified future” - Listen
Members from Succinct, Somm, & Celestia, join the Expansion Pod to dive into ZK accounts - Watch
Toghrul & Luca join the Fluent crew, as they look under the hood, and break down the idea of “blended execution” - Watch
Taiko co-founder makes an appearance on the Bankless podcast to talk, based rollups - Watch
Omni tech talks. In this first episode, Omni CTO breaks down the tech behind their EVM rollup framework, Octane - Watch
Kain from Infinex joins Socket protocol crew to discuss chain abstraction - Listen
Stacks founder joins The Rollup crew to break down the core mission of their Bitcoin L2 solution - Watch
Lightlink hosted a Twitter Space about the modular future of L2s, featuring - Listen
The recent Bell Curve podcast episode featured a convo about “How AVSs enable scalable, secure, and customizable execution - Listen
The recent Empire podcast featured a convo about “how ZK will shatter social media monopolies - Listen
We’d like to thank our other sponsor for today’s post, Fluent.
Fluent is the first blended execution network. Fluent blends Wasm, EVM and SVM apps into a unified execution environment.
Visit Fluent’s website to learn more.
That's all for this week! Thanks for reading 🧱🎬