Weekly Rollup #9

EigenLayer Testnet, Astria Shared Sequencer, Trust-minimized bridging, and much more | Week ending April 7th

and

Apr 11, 2023

Welcome to Modular Media! We cover news, updates, educational content, and more within the modular blockchain ecosystem.

Subscribe to get posts sent directly to your email every week, and follow us on Twitter for modular-related updates!

This week’s issue covers:

📣 News & Announcements

Eigen Layer Launches 1st Testnet Stage

https://twitter.com/eigenlayer/status/1644075234176409605

This past week, Eigen Layer officially launched the first phase of their testnet, finally giving us users a chance to test out this new ETH restaking primitive.

Eigen Layer will be launching its testnet in a series of three stages:

Stage 1: Stakers
Stage 2: Operators
Stage 3: Services

During this stage 1 launch, there will be two ways for users to restake their ETH on the Eigen Layer platform:

Liquid Staking: As of now, users can restake their stETH (Lido’s liquid staking token), or rETH (Rocket Pool’s liquid staking token).
Native staking: those running their own home staking setup can set their withdraw credentials to Eigen Layer

This testnet will be launched with a set of guardrails to ensure everything runs smoothly. To be more specific, there are two different multisigs that control the Eigen Layer contracts, both of which will be initially controlled by the Eigen’s “early builders”. Another thing to note is that this testnet will not be incentivized.

How to get started

Here’s a quick guide to help you get started with the liquid staking option on Eigen Layer:

First, you need to make sure you have some gETH. To do so, simply head to the Alchemy faucet and request tokens to your wallet.
Then, you’ll need to swap your gETH for either rETH (Rocket Pool) or stETH (Lido). Here we’ll use Rocket Pool. Simply head to the Rocket Pool testnet platform and deposit your gETH in return for rETH.
Once you have your rETH, simply head to the Eigen layer platform, click on “Rocket Pool Ether”, enter the amount of rETH you wish to restake, and hit deposit. That’s it - now your ETH is restaked.

To learn all about this initial testnet launch, make sure to check out the complete article.

What is Eigen Layer

As many of you already know, anyone can stake their ETH in order to become a validator on Ethereum. These validators of course contribute to the security of the entire Ethereum protocol. Eigen Layer allows these validators to “opt-in” and start validating other dapps and protocols, aside from just Ethereum.

Another way to put it is that Eigen Layer is introducing a marketplace of decentralized trust. On one end, we have the sellers (ETH restakers) who sell their security, and on the other end, we have the buyers who buy this ETH security for their own dapp or protocol. For example, if I’m building an oracle, I can have the same people securing mainnet Ethereum also secure my oracle.

Ultimately, the buyers decide what they’re willing to pay for this shared security, whether it’s through some sort of fee percentage or block rewards. If restakers like what you’re offering, they’ll sell you their security.

Eigen layer is an entirely new primitive in the space, which is why this launch has been highly anticipated for some time now. As of today, there are two well-known projects that will be leveraging Eigen Layer - the Espresso sequencer, and Mantle’s L2 network. We’re looking forward to full mainnet launch (hopefully later this year), and are excited to see what people start building with Eigen Layer.

Astria Shares Details on its Shared Sequencer Network

https://twitter.com/AstriaOrg/status/1643291025325318144

Astria is building a shared sequencer network, adding yet another out-of-the-box component to the modular stack. Last week, the team finally shared some of the details about how this shared sequencer will work along with some of the benefits it will provide.

What even is a sequencer?

A lot of the modular teams today share a common goal - to make deploying a rollup as easy as deploying a smart contract. In order to achieve this goal, there need to be several decentralized, out-of-the-box components that need to be built. One of these components includes a decentralized sequencer, which is what Astria, among others, is working on.

In general, the task of a sequencer is to order our transactions before they actually get executed.

You can imagine the sort of power that comes from being able to choose the way in which transactions are ordered, such as being able to censor transactions or adjust the transaction order in a way that grants the sequencer with the highest amount of MEV possible. This is why one of the biggest milestones for any existing rollup today is to decentralize their sequencer.

Astria Shared Sequencer

Astria is building a proof of stake 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.

There are several benefits that will come with Astria’s decentralized shared sequencer, such as:

decentralization: this will allow rollups to benefit from censorship resistance, as well as liveness (if one sequencer goes down, there are still others who will get your transaction through). Of course, this also means MEV will be spread across a decentralized set of users, rather than just a single sequencer operator who takes all the MEV for his/herself.
Cross Rollup Composability: a shared sequencer will be able to provide you with the guarantee that two different transactions are included within the same block (a bundled block), which opens the door for new types of innovations. Specifically, “this allows users to specify that a transaction on Rollup A can be included in a block if and only if a different transaction on Rollup B is also included in the same block”.

Astria EVM

On the same day, Astria announced the Astria EVM, which will be the first rollup to adopt Astria’s sequencing network.

Astria EVM will leverage “the shared sequencer network for fast, censorship-resistant transaction ordering, and Celestia for data availability”. The goal is to help bootstrap Celestia’s rollup ecosystem by bringing in the most popular virtual machine in the space, the EVM. At the same time, Astria EVM will provide us all with a first-hand look at “a test case for how to best integrate rollups with our shared sequencer network”.

What’s Next

Astria also announced a $5.5M raise, in a seed round that was led by Maven11, and featured other participants like Delphi Digital.

It looks like Astria is approaching its devnet launch soon, with more updates expected to be announced over the coming weeks.

More News & Announcements

It looks like a privacy-enabled rollup is coming to Scroll
Arbitrum’s first governance proposal, AIP-1, which involved sending $750M to the Arbitrum Foundation, failed to pass due to concerns from the DAO after they realized the Foundation had already taken the funds prior to the proposal. Following the failed proposal, the Arbitrum Foundation proposed two new AIPs, which were meant to incorporate community feedback. To learn all about how this unfolded, we left a link to a Twitter Space about this event down below.
“10M OP was awarded through RetroPGF Round 2 to the builders and educators whose impact is essential to growing the Optimism Ecosystem”
“10M OP was awarded through RetroPGF Round 2 to the builders and educators whose impact is essential to growing the Optimism Ecosystem” Eligible projects were placed into three categories: education, infrastructure, and tooling. Here are the top 10 recipients from the education category. Here are the top 10 recipients from the tooling and utilities category, & here are the top 10 from the infrastructure category
Speaking of Optimism, it looks like their proposal to upgrade mainnet to the Bedrock release has officially passed.
For anyone looking for a job in the modular field, Scroll is now looking to hire a protocol researcher
Here are the two winners from Fuel Labs’ recent hackathon event.
Here’s a thread that details MicroChain, a trading platform native to Fuel
SwaySwap is now live on Fuel’s Beta-3 testnet
Mantle published their Q1 journey report last week, outlining some of their recent milestone achievements, as well as their future outlook. Mantle is an L2 network built on top of Eigen DA.
It looks like “Space Falcon” will be building a web3 gaming hub on Mantle.
Here’s a “mega thread” about the 33 hackathon winners from the recent zkHack event.
Taiko just published “zk-Roller-Coaster #2”, a thread that dives into the biggest updates from the world of zk over the past two weeks
Here are the winners from the recent ETHGlobal hackathon, that built on Taiko.
Here’s an update on Taiko’s alpha-2 testnet. “It covers highlights like 126 unique provers and counting, and issues like protocol economics design flaws”.
“Announcing the first ever Injective Global Hackathon and Grant DAO Round 1”
Polymer, who are helping expand IBC across more than just the Cosmos ecosystem, just published an article introducing zkTree, “a structure to optimize recursive proofing of zk proofs.”
Users can now start joining the Eigen Layer Discord server!
Connext just published this thread highlighting their modular interoperability design.
Dovish AMM, DeBank’s portfolio tracking platform, and the Rhinofi bridge are now all live on Polygon zkEVM.
Aave on StarkNet reaches phase 2!
StarkNet Social announces their launch will take place on April 25th
Start contributing to Madara, the Rust-based sequencer built on StarkNet
Here are five new projects that have launched on zkSync Era, including Ramp Network, Omnisea, and more.

📚 Discourse & Education

Are trust-minimized bridges real?

https://twitter.com/jon_charb/status/1643836337349328896?s=20

CT cannot seem to reach consensus on key terminology. We have simply shifted the battlefield from trustless to trust-minimized 😅

Wat do?

Words are hard, but they should have meaning. Otherwise, debates get circular and no progress is made. For this exploration, we are going to use what we believe is the most useful framework for identifying trust-minimized designs. It is borrowed from Mustafa from Celestia, originally seen in his “clusters” article.

Definition: “trust-minimized bridging specifically means bridges that do not require an honest majority assumption for state validity.”

Let’s overlay this definition onto the week’s discourse.

*Takes deep breath*

Bridging between L1s

Anatoly from Solana suggests a design for L1-to-L1 bridging that is “pretty close to 1/N security”. This sounds similar to rollups, which have 1/N security AKA rely on an honest minority assumption.

According to Anatoly, this would work by having some period of time (T) where the local chain (receiving tokens) remains open to fraud proofs. If fraud is observed coming from the remote chain (chain sending tokens) and a proof is posted, then “the right to update the remote chains state root on the local chain is auctioned off on the local chain”.

So, should this design be considered trust-minimized bridging?

We’d argue no. There is 1/N security for detecting fraud, which is great, but there’s formal governance needed to decide where the coins should go. This introduces an honest majority assumption.

https://twitter.com/aeyakovenko/status/1531625253637566465?s=20

IBC bridging

Henry from Penumbra suggests that we’ve had trust-minimized bridging in the form of IBC for two years. The logic is as follows:

https://twitter.com/hdevalence/status/1643826579150340096?s=20

As a refresher, IBC works by running light clients of the remote chain(s) on your local chain. In their current state, IBC clients are consensus verifiers, which as the name suggests, verify consensus of remote chains. They make sure ordering and state transitions are what the remote chain’s validator set agrees on.

So, should IBC be considered trust-minimized bridging?

We’d argue no. In the IBC design, you are still relying on an honest majority assumption of the chain where your assets are bridged to. IBC does not validate state transitions, and the remote chain’s validators can steal your funds - even if you run nodes for both chains.

Turbocharged IBC bridging

Zaki from Sommelier Finance suggests that IBC, once turbocharged with fraud and validity proofs for state transition correctness (being developed) closes the above gap.

So, should turbocharged IBC be considered trust-minimized bridging?

Unfortunately, we’d still argue no. This gets to the core of both Mustafa’s and Vitalik’s articles on cross-chain bridging. There are fundamental challenges when dealing with multiple validator sets. Toghrul from Scroll explains it well:

https://twitter.com/toghrulmaharram/status/1643870434796994561?s=20

Even if state transitions are SNARKed, you still need an honest majority assumption to decide on the canonical state. Sigh.

Turbocharged IBC bridging between sovereign rollups

C-node from Celestia suggests that there is hope for trust-minimized IBC. If the fundamental challenge is regarding multiple validator sets, what if we apply turbocharged IBC to sovereign rollups sharing a DA layer, where there’s one validator set?

*Another deep breath* Can turbocharged IBC between sovereign rollups be considered trust-minimized bridging?

We’d argue yes! The problem with multiple validator sets is that they can each rewrite history independently from one another. Shared data layer = shared history = shared security!

Of course, it’s not QUITE that simple. There are still challenges that make this hard in practice, but we’ll save that for another day.

More Discourse & Education

@karsenthil walks through a “Middleware Thesis”, covering why middleware will the unexpected star of the modular design
0xResearch releases an episode “The Cosmos SDK of Rollups” discussing sovereign rollups, decentralized sequencers, composable DA layers and more with Preston from Sovereign Labs
@donnoh_eth writes an article explaining different types of data rollups can post to the DA layer (transaction data vs. state diffs)
@VirtualElena writes an article on machine learning and ZK proofs 🔥
Espresso Systems writes an article explaining “Sequencing Decentralization and Liveness”
@sunnydece frames the OP Stack and Superchain architecture in useful ways, including core concepts and tradeoffs, as part of a deep dive article
@divine_economy explains why shared sequencers are great business opportunities, covering their network effects and key players 🤔
@_bfarmer explains why “Polygon zkEVM is the closest thing to Ethereum blockspace”
Injective hosts a Twitter Space discussing Cascade, the first interchain Solana SVM rollup
Bell Curve releases an episode “Shining A Light on MEV” with Tarun from Gauntlet and Justin Drake from the Ethereum Foundation
Mantle writes an article explaining how fraud proofs and verifiers secure L2 rollups
Finality Capital Partners illustrates the value of EigenLayer using assumptions from web2 SaaS - here’s their full report
@Louround_ and @expctchaos host a Twitter Space discussing the launch of Polygon zkEVM with the Polygon team
@LoganJastremski releases an episode discussing how to measure decentralization, light clients in depth and Celestia with Mustafa from Celestia
@johnrising_ breaks down EIP-4337 components and relevant solutions
Maven11 explains the basics of shared sequencers and their investment in Astria
Dymension writes an article breaking down their views on “RollApp Economics and Governance”
@hudsonjameson explains hashing in simple terms
Chainstack hosts a Twitter Space discussing Cartesi’s Linux OS with the Cartesi team
The Defiant releases an episode “KZG Duo Summons the Ethereum Roadmap” with Trent and Carl from the Ethereum Foundation
Chris Blec hosts a Twitter Space debating Arbitrum decentralization - let’s play devil’s advocate
Empire releases an episode “ETH L2s Have The Same Flaws as Alt L1s”
@ArtCatDAO summarizes a recent article by @dlubarov titled “A comparison of zkEVMs”
@colludingnode offers a simple definition for “node”
@jon_charb, @colludingnode, @CantelopePeel and others explore the implications of many enshrined vs. independent rollups
Saga hosts a Twitter Spacing discussing “The ultimate blockchain toolkit” with Jim from Saga and Kevin from Uniblock
Starknet hosts a Twitter Space discussing “The rise of web3 gaming”
@colludingnode highlights how rollups without sequencers work
@expctchaos breaks down account abstraction, covering example functionality and associated transaction flows