The Rollup Coaster #18

January 25th, 2024

The Rollup Coaster is a bi-weekly newsletter that dives into the fascinating world of Ethereum, exploring the latest in rollups, zero-knowledge proofs, MEV-PBS, and much more.

This edition is written by Taiko’s Community Advocate Jünger.

Hold on tight! 🎢

Disclaimer: This newsletter is neither financial advice, nor is indicative of Taiko’s position on any of the material presented. Please do your own research.

Highlights 🎢

Taiko’s Katla Testnet (Alpha-6) is now live! In this testnet, Taiko integrated the Based Contestable Rollup (BCR) design, multi-proofs, and SGX. Check the details in this article.
Dencun upgrade is coming! The upgrade includes several changes, most notably protodanksharding, which will help reduce L2 transaction fees.
Vitalik in his article, advocated for a return to Ethereum's core principles of openness and decentralization. He criticized the current trend toward centralization and financialization, which had been fueled by high transaction fees and a gambling culture.

Vitalik highlighted the potential of rollups, privacy enhancements, and zero-knowledge proofs to reinvigorate Ethereum's original vision. He saw a future where Ethereum could contribute significantly to a technologically integrated society, prioritizing security and decentralization.
Discussions about increasing the gas limits of Ethereum. Dankrad pointed out that it’s important to increase the CALLDATA fee while increasing the GASLIMIT.

ZK and rollup research 🧙

Andrew Miller wrote a post with significant points about the use of TEEs in the crypto space.
Eclipse (Solana VM on Ethereum) shared a blog post about their bridge and proving system.
New episode of Zero Knowledge Podcast Prediction: ZK in 2024.
LambdaClass shared a blog post Comparing Provers: Starknet and Polygon.
Noam Nisan shared a paper about tokenomics.
L2s can horizontally scale only without compromising trust-minimization. Wei Dai argued in favor of trust-minimized systems that can horizontally scale.
Elliptic curves have made their way into all kinds of modern cryptography. Here is the Developer's Guide to Application-Specific Elliptic Curves.
MolochDAO shared a figure about the pros and cons of private voting mechanisms.

ZK and rollup updates 🗞️

Arbitrum passed 1B daily volume.
A well-written article about Merkle Tree by Sovereign Labs.
Some updates on o1js (library for cryptography).

MEV/PBS/staking research and updates 🔍

Tarun Chitra explained the differences between PBS and Jito (MEV on Solana).
Celsius (ETH staking service) will unstake their existing ETH holdings. 16,000 validators entered to queue for unstaking.
A new approach to transaction ordering in a modular world by Maven11 Research.
How restaking acts as a shared security layer, Bell Curve explained with Sreeram Kannan.

Education and events 🎫

A high-level Introduction to ZK and SNARKS course.
ZKHack IV has started! This virtual hackathon includes various tutorials and puzzles.
ZK auditing fellowship has been started by yAcademy.