Weekly Rollup #85
Celestia Scaling Throughput With Mammoth & Ginger | Kraken Launches L2 | Avail x Sophon | Catalyst CoolCats: an AltVM Bridge | Dymension's Initial Rollup Offerings | Week Ending Oct 25th
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This week’s issue covers:
Celestia Releases Mammoth Mini
The Doubling: Celestia v3, Ginger
Kraken Launches L2: Inc Chain
Avail x Sophon
Arbitrum 7-Day Withdrawals
Initial Rollup Offerings on Dymension
Twine, The Multichain Settlement Network
Catalyst CrossCats, an AltVM Bridge
Modular Devcon Events
More News & Announcements
Discourse & Education
📣 News & Announcements
Celestia Releases Mammoth Mini
Celestia unveiled Mammoth Mini, a testnet that implements some of the latest components the team has been working on, on their route to 1 GB blocks.
Celestia mainnet today: 2MB blocks with an average of .167MB/s, with 12-second block times
Mammoth throughput: 88MB blocks with an average of 27MB/s, with 3s block times
Celestia’s goal of 1GB blocks: data throughput would be 83MB/s
While Celestia’s goal of 1GB blocks is still some time away, Mammoth itself brings a 160x increase in throughput, compared to today’s mainnet deployment. For context, Mammoth’s performance is “akin to many VISA networks running in parallel”.
The performance enhancements showcased in this Mammoth mini testnet will ultimately be proposed and implemented on testnet, and then mainnet, sometime in 2025.
The Doubling: Celestia v3, Ginger
Shortly after the Mammoth release, Celestia unveiled its v3 upgrade, “Ginger”, the team’s second consensus-level upgrade (Lemongrass being the first).
Ginger is known as “The Doubling” because it’ll decrease block times from 12s to 6s, ultimately enabling faster finality and throughout, and thus improved UX.
Similar to the Lemongrass upgrade, Ginger involves the launch of five new Celestia Improvement Proposals (CIPs):
CIP-21: Introduce blob type with verified signer
CIP-24: Versioned gas scheduler variables
CIP-26: Versioned timeouts
CIP-27: Block limits for number of PFBs and non-PFBs
CIP-28: Transaction size limit
Ginger is expected to activate on Arabica testnet on November 5th, Mocha testnet later that month, and mainnet sometime in December. Check out the full announcement to learn more.
Kraken Launches L2: Inc Chain
Kraken announced Ink, becoming the latest exchange to announce their own L2 deployment.
There’s not much info released about Inc yet, other than:
Ink will provide an environment for builders to launch defi apps on top of, which will be able to access Kraken’s 10M+ user base.
Ink will be am OP Stack chain, joining the Superchain Collective
To learn more, check out this Bankless interview.
Avail x Sophon
Sophon chooses AvailDA to help scale their consumer based chain.
One of the unique aspects of this partnership is that Sophon will be leveraging branded light clients from Avail, allowing users to directly verify onchain results and activities themselves.
& it also looks like stAVAIL is coming to Sephon.
Arbitrum 7-Day Withdrawals
The Arbitrum Orbit rollup framework now supports fast withdrawals, perfect for social, gaming, or any other consumer-based app that requires a fast UX.
Teams that opt to use this fast withdraw, will essentially be trusting a set of entities that attest to the validity of state transitions.
This will be a phased rollout, starting with a few selected Orbit chains and RaaS providers, but we can expect this to become fully permissionless in the near future. The first 5 RaaS to support this new feature include: Caldera, AltLayer, Conduit, Gelato, and Ankr.
Initial Rollup Offerings on Dymension
Dymension announced Initial RollApp Offerings, which are essentially token futures that eventually turn into the a RollApp native token.
Team launches token (before RollApp goes live): they get to choose allocation, target raise, and determine pricing
IRO funds are used to bootstrap liquidity
Once RollApp[ deploys, users can exchange their IRO otkens for RollApp native tokens
Twine, The Multichain Settlement Network
New project announcement: Twine.
Twine aims to solve the issue of ecosystem fragmentation: In other words, we are fully aware of chain fragmentation happening across L2s. This has led to rollup ecosystems launching their own internal interoperability protocol (Optimism has the Superchain, Polygon has the agglayer, etc.).
Twine aims to offer a solution to this, by offering a “non opt in” platform that connects these multiple ecosystems together
Twine aims to solve this by offering a settlement network across multiple rollup ecosystems, without requiring teams to opt in. To learn how they are enabling this, check out the full post.
Catalyst CrossCats
Catalyst unveils CrossCats, a lightweight bridge built for the altVM ecosystem. While CrossCats will eventually connect to various altVM rollup ecosystems, such as Fuel, Fluent, Eclipse, Movement, and Ton, the bridge will start with Bitcoin.
CrossCats will start by connecting to the Bitcoin, before expanding to the next VM, SVM, in Q4.
Specifically, CrossCats is an intent-based bridge with a permissionless solver network - to learn more about intent-based bridging and solving, check our our recent chain abstraction-focused article, here.
Modular Devcon Events:
L2con Reminder
L2con is the largest conference during Devcon about L2s, modularity and infrastructure for Web3 developers and founders.
Expect speakers from Celestia, Offchain Labs, Scroll, Matter Labs, Monad Labs, Espresso Systems & many more!
📅 13 November, Devcon
We have 10 free guaranteed tickets for the event for readers of the newsletter! Choose a "guaranteed seat" option and add code MODULARMEDIAWEEK2 in the "add a voucher" field.
Register here:
Other Side Events During Devcon:
Nov. 10th: Modular Day, co-hosted by Celestia, Movement, & ContributionDAO, focusing on new builders going modular. - Register
Nov. 10th: Proof of Summit, hosted by Lagrange, EigenLayer, AltLayer, & Polymer, to talk the future of onchain scalability - Register
Nov. 10-11: Aggregation Summit, hosted by Polygon - Register
Nov. 11th: Rejected, co-hosted by Celestia, Catalyst, & Spicenet, with talks that were rejected for Devcon - Register
Nov. 11th: ZK Connect, hosted by Brevis, AltLayer, EZKL, Scroll, & Succinct - Register
Nov. 13th: Intents & Chain Abstracted Summit, hosted by OneBalance & Anoma - Register
Nov. 14th: AVS Day, hosted by Consensys, EigenLayer & AltLayer - Register
Nov. 14th: Proof of Play, hosted by Proof of Play, Conduit, and Privy. Join them for discussions & drinks - Register
Nov 15-16: SVM at Devcon, hosted by Eclipse: Bangkok - Register
Nov. 15th: Modular Acceleration, hosted by Manta - Register
Nov. 16th: Ethereum Interop Forum, “the first ever gathering of L2 leaders”, as they discuss the unification of L2s across Ethereum - Register
More News & Announcements
Rome Protocol, “Solana on Ethereum”, integrates Celestia DA, meaning every rollup using Rome will now be leveraging Celestia. Access to Solana consensus, without compromising on data availability security - Read
New Celenium upgrade brings Leap wallet support, adds rollup categories, indications of activity, and more - Read
RedStone oracles builds an AVS using EigenLayer to make sure they have a secure oracle network that can adapt to meet current needs. This AVS was built using Othentic, which is essentially an AVS framework, allowing for quick and custom deployments. This AVS also enables data to be verified offchain, rather than onchain, which leads to reduced gas consumption and, thus, price. - Read
AltLayer will now be leveraging ERC-7683, developed by the Across team, to power cross-chain intents, within the AltLayer rollup ecosystem- Read
Here’s a list of the five RaaS providers who now support zk-rollup deployments via Succinct - View
Results for Optimism’s recent grant round, which distributed 8M OP tokens between 79 teams - View
Pragma v2, the first open source Starknet appchain - Read
Ankr x TON - Read
Astria partners with Drop to make TIA & dTIA (a liquid staked derivative of TIA), the primary asset on Astria rollups, such as Flame - Read
Renzo’s LRT, ezETH, is now on Sei as redETH, via Hyperlane - Read
110 projects across the EigenLayer ecosystem now, and growing! - View
zkMove: Move based zk rollups using Succinct SP1 - Read
Initia powered gaming rollup, Kamigatchi, launches testnet 2 over the weekend - View
Initia powered gaming chain, Civitia, unveils v2 plans - Read
Initia x Aeori - Read
Movement opts to adopt ERC-3643 for RWA tokenization - Read
Fluid protocol raises $3.9M - View
Lending protocol, Swaylend, is live on Fuel' mainnet - Read
Scroll airdrop is here! - Read
Scroll also announces their biggest rewards program to date - Read
Here’s everything you missed from the Cartesi ecosystem this past week, including a new Grants Council Proposal, nw governance proposal for a “validator marketplace”, and more - Read
Aztec network opens applications for the sequencer and prover testnet - Read
Mantis x Everclear - Read
Chainless Defi: Kinto x Socket Protocol - Read
Noble raises $3.3M - View
📚 Discourse & Education
Blogs & Threads 📝
Conduit published a DA cost research report, analyzing price differences for posting data on Ethereum blobs vs. Celestia vs Celestia Superblobs. TLDT: Superblobs are extremely cheaper. - Read
Learn to build a predictions market on Rollkit, with Josh Stein & others. Happening November 4th - View
NashQ provides a great breakdown of how Celestia’s recent Shwapp upgrade has made light node sampling more efficient. - Read
EigenLayer vs EigenDA misconceptions - Read
A great breakdown of restaked rollups, which leverage both EigenLayer & AltLayer - Read
Conduit’s latest newsletter issue, featuring their latest milestones and advancements - Read
PBS unpacked: Radius (shared sequencer network) will be launching a series of resarch articles breaking down Proposer Builder Separation (PBS). The series kicks off with this post about “Tracing the Evolution of PBS” - Read
Here’s a great breakdown of atomic composability & cross-chain interop, and how Nodekit is enabling this - Read
Symbiotic Research also published an article diving into “Superbuilders” (i.e. Nodekit’s Javelin), and how they are the solution to solving Ethereum’s composability issues amongst L2s - Read
Learn how Hyperlane’s recently unveiled “Superlane” accelerates the Superchain - Read
Vitalik writes about the Verge - Read
Audio & Podcasts 🎤
The latest Expansion pod episode discusses Superchain interop, rollup costs, and more - Watch
Interesting debate about whether or not L2s are extensions of Ethereum - Watch
Members from Fluent, Catalyst, and Initia join Tabasco for Particle’s latest Chain Abstracted Future pod to talk altVMs - Watch
That's all for this week! Thanks for reading 🧱🎬