Weekly Rollup #86
Astria Mainnet Launch | OP Succinct w/ Celestia Underneath | Sovereign Worlds on Celestia | Scroll Announces SDK & Gadgets | Nodekit Private Devnet | Week Ending Nov 1st
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This week’s issue covers:
Astria Mainnet Launch
OP Succinct With Celestia Underneath
Dojo Unveils Sovereign Worlds on Celestia
Scroll Announces SDK & Gadgets
Nodekit Launches Private Devnet
Modular Raises
Modular Devcon Events
More News & Announcements
Discourse & Education
📣 News & Announcements
Astria Mainnet Launch
Astria mainnet is finally live!
Astria is a project we’ve been talking about here for a long time now, but for those unaware, Astria is building a decentralized shared sequencer for the Celestia ecosystem.
Generally speaking, a sequencer is responsible for ordering our transactions before they get executed. & because it’s “shared”, it means various rollups can plug in and leverage Astria at the same time.
More specifically, Astria is building a proof of authority network whose main responsibility is to order transactions before they get executed. Any user will be able to participate in Astria’s sequencing network, just as any rollup will be able to leverage these sequencer nodes.
Aside from decentralization benefit that comes with leveraging a shred sequencer, it’ll also provide teams with a certain level of composability between chains, as demonstrated by Nodekit and Radius, for example.
Astria founder, Josh Bowen, talks about this mainnet release, here.
Flame Launch
Shortly after Astria’s mainnet launch, the first Astria chain also went live on mainnet, Flame, which is aiming to become the home for Celestia native defi.
They were added on the Celenium dashboard, for those that would like to explore some of the chain’s stats so far.
OP Succinct With Celestia Underneath
Any OP Stack chain that leverages Celestia can now transition to a zk-rollup. This was previously only available to OP Stack chains that used Ethereum DA, but it looks like alternative DA solutions will now be supported as well, starting here with Celestia.
This was also done in collaboration with Conduit RaaS, so we can expect Conduit chains to be amongst the first to make the transition.
Dojo Unveils Sovereign Worlds on Celestia
Dojo is building a provable game engine that enables the deployment of high-performance onchain games, and now, builders will be able to launch these provable games as sovereign rollups on Celestia (aka Dojo sovereign rollups).
Specifically, a sovereign world with this stack will include:
Katana: Dojo’s Starknet sequencer, which produces the blocks
Saya: Dojo’s proving service, which generates zk proofs for these blocks
Celestia DA, which is where these proofs will be posted & stored
It’s a similar framework to Rollkit.
It looks like the first sovereign world on Celestia, built with the Dojo stack, will be developed by the Cartridge team, one of the first game development teams in the Starknet ecosystem.
Scroll Announces SDK & Gadgets
Scroll announcements just keep coming! Last week, Scroll unveiled the Scroll SDK, and Gadgets. Here’s what we know so far:
Scroll SDK:
The Scroll SDK is essentially a rollup framework that developers will be able to use to deploy their own customized, dedicated sovereign rollup, leveraging Scroll’s ZK tech. This is Scroll’s transition to a multi-chain architecture.
It now takes less than one hour, one engineer, and no zk expertise, to launch a Scroll-based chain. & we can expect this to become even more seamless (one-click deployments), once we see RaaS integrations.
Today, the SDK only offers rollup mode, however, validium mode is soon to come. This means upcoming support for alternative DA providers - the post mentions Celestia, Avail, & EigenDA.
Scroll has already partnered with several core infra and dapp essential integration services, such as block explorers, indexers, proof generation systems, oracles, & more.
Gadgets:
According to the post, gadgets are “opt-in modules crafted to customize and enhance Scroll SDK chains”. In other words, Scroll will be offering shared infrastructure that teams will choose to opt into or not. To me this sounds similar to the OP Stack Superchain initiative (sharing an interop layer, sequencer, etc.), except without the vendor lock-in - it’s optional on Scroll.
The first gadget will focus on interop, but others we can expect in the future relate to block building, shared blob space, and unified fiat rails.
Teams will be able to launch rollups using the Scroll SDK, and have immediate access to several key tools and services, from day one, through these gadgets
Nodekit Launches Private Devnet
Last week, Nodekit launched its private devnet, meaning devs can start leveraging the Javelin Superbuilder. In other words, devs can start building dapps on multiple chains, with the same level of UX as if these were deployed on the same chain.
As a reminder, Javelin is a “superbuilder” that build blocks for multiple chains at once.
Modular Raises
Gelato raises $11M to continue development of their RaaS platform - Read
Termina raises $4M to build a rollup framework that’ll be used to deploy custom SVM rollups. Termina will be leveraging Sovereign SDK to build this platform. - View
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 more free guaranteed tickets for the event for readers of the newsletter! Choose a "guaranteed seat" option and add code MODULARMEDIAWEEK3 in the "add a voucher" field.
Register here:
Other Side Events During Devcon:
Attention footballers, Avail will be hosting a second edition of their Unification Cup, at Bangkok - Register
Rollup Day, hosted by AltLayer in Bangkok - View
Babylon hacker house, featuring AltLayer - Read
Espresso’s back to the future event - View
& ICYMI, we have highlighted several other side events happening during Devcon, in last week’s issue. Check them out!
More News & Announcements
Five Conduit rollups have officially completed their migration from Ethereum DA to Celestia DA, bringing their operational costs down by 100x, thereby reducing end-user costs by 10x. The five rollups are Aevo, Lyra, Hypr, Orderly, & PGN. - Read
New Initia chain, with Celestia underneath: Rave Trade is an onchain perpetual protocol that allows users to use any token as collateral, even “memes”, which I would assume just means NFTs. The network is expected to launch soon - Read
Check out Astrotrek, a dev-oriented dashboard to keep track of Astria’s activity: network performance (throughput & capacity), performance metrics, trends, and anomalies. Devs can also access Astria accounts & rollup data, and dive into onchain data like blocks and transactions - View
Jackson from Avail, published an Avail Improvement Proposal to allow for Foundation funds to be used for supporting more community validators - Read
FalconX now allows Institutional investors to stake AVAIL, becoming the first custodian to do so - Read
Open Gradient to leverage Nuffle’s DA & Fast Finality Layer for their AI-specific chain - Read
Wanderers becomes the latest game addition to the Treasure ecosystem: Wanderers is an action game with a deck building twist, featuring +25.5K MAUs, and +5500 ETH in NFT volume. As a reminder, Treasure is building their own rollup (L2) using ZK Sync’s rollup framework (ZK Stack), and leveraging EigenDA - Read
Zircuit is distributing 2% of its token supply to EIGEN holders & stakers, with equal rewards for everyone. Zicuit is building a defi chain powered by EigenLayer. Read for more details. - Read
Skate, “the infra for stateless apps” is live on mainnet, “allowing whitelisted apps to interact with Skate’s AVS“. The first app to showcase Skate’s stateless infra is Polymarket, which can now be used on the Ton chain - Read
Corn (defi chain) will be leveraging Babylon’s BTC staking protocol to help secure their L2 network - Read
Conduit RaaS now enables the 1-click integration of native USDC. This was previously only available on testnet, unless the team had direct support from Conduit, however this is now just another simple one-click addition to any mainnet Conduit chain - Read
Intent-based bridging is also now available to Conduit rollups, via Across - Read
Caldera now supports Fast Withdrawals for Arbitrum Orbit chains. The first rollups to leverage this will be Sanko GameCorp, LayerofCheese, & Blessnet - Read
Venn, “the first blockchain native firewall fro dapps and L2s” is live on mainnet - Read
SXT Chain, by Space & Time, is live on testnet: This Caldera Chain is a chain for ZK proven data, and will be home to AI & defi apps - Read
Reya network unveils phase 2, “The Squid” - Read
Gelato also supports 7-day withdrawals for Orbit chains: will be rolling out to 5 Gelato chains - Read
Civitia v2 testnet launches today (this is an Initia gaming based chain) - Read
Over 14M EIGEN tokens were distributed across +142K restakers, during EigenLayer’s first month of “Programmatic Incentives” (weekly rewards for ecosystem participants) - Read
OpenBlock has released a new Restaking dashboard, showcasing EigenLayer stats & insights, such as AVS rewards, stake concentration across AVSs, stake concentration within AVSs, and exploring stats about AVS operators - View
Pirate Nation, a Conduit based gaming rollup, has already hit 300M transactions (recent deployment) - Read
📚 Discourse & Education
Blogs & Threads 📝
Celestia’s first anniversary: some highlights of Celestia’s past year, by Nick White - Read
Dev, from Osmosis, published a post on the Celestia forum, proposing his idea to use DAS to speedup consensus throughput, especially if the network wants to achieve 10GB/s DA throughput - Read
New Redacted Research report: Can Manta revive the EVM L2s narrative? - Read
EigenLayer Research kicks-off a multi-part series, starting with an exploration of intent based dapps and new intent upgrades that are made possible by EL - Read
Audio & Podcasts 🎤
A discussion about Celestia’s roadmap to 1GB blocks, hosted by ZKV - Listen
John Adler & Evan Forbes join the Expansion pod to discuss how Celestia’s 1GB path “changes crypto”. It’s a good episode to learn more about Mammoth Mini, the 27MB/s testnet Celestia launched last week - Watch
Members from Avail & Nodekit join the Chain Abstracted Future pod to talk “rollup clusters” - Watch
New Empire podcast episode, featuring Gelato & Inc founders to talk Kraken’s new L2 - Watch
Is synchronous composability overrated, with Espresso, Taiko, Vitalik, and more - Listen
That's all for this week! Thanks for reading 🧱🎬