The Rollup Coaster #25

May 1st, 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, based sequencing/preconfirmations, MEV/PBS/SUAVE, 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 🎢

Vitalik shared a blog post about Binius, a highly efficient proofs over binary fields. Thanks to binary fields, hardware-friendly proofs are now a reality!
Offchain Labs disclosed some vulnerabilities in the OP Stack fault proofs. These vulnerabilities allowed attackers to claim dishonest rewards.

ZK and rollup research 🧙

Irreducible (Ulvetanna rebranded to Irreducible) shared a blog post introducing the FPGA-accelerated Polygon zkEVM prover. 40% faster than previously reported by Polygon’s zkProver.
Andrija Novakovic (Geometry Research) and Liam Eagen (Zeta) shared a paper on how to optimize pairings in snarks and on-chain verifiers, by removing final exponentiation: On Proving Pairs.
Paradigm published an article explaining the roadmap of Reth to scale Ethereum. The article also suggested the term "gas per second" instead of "transaction per second" for performance metrics.
Cysic organized a panel discussion on ZK-ASIC with Justin Drake, Ye Zhang, and more. The recording is available here.
Verifying Nova proofs onchain in Ethereum is now a reality! Sonobe aims to provide a modular library that implements different folding schemes.
Notes on ZK-friendliness of Verkle Trees by Lubarov from Polygon.
New research paper by PSE: “Greco: Fast Zero-Knowledge Proofs for Valid FHE RLWE Ciphertexts Formation”.
Bonsol: Verifiable Compute for Solana. Bonsol allows to create a verifiable executable over private and public data and integrate the results into Solana smart contracts.
Sin7y (the team behind Ola zkVM) shared a detailed study and comparison of the two generations of Poseidon hash functions used in Plonky2 and Plonky3.
Tamatran opened a discussion on the financial market of blobspace. Thanks to this design, rollups can hedge their costs when they are posting blobs.

ZK and rollup updates 🗞️

RiscZero introduced Steel: View call proof library.
Worldcoin announced its own rollup with OP Stack infrastructure.
ICICLE v2 update by Ingonyama.
Matter Labs open-sourced the LLVM Compiler.
Delphinius open-sourced the ZKWASM prover.
Scroll has announced Bernoulli upgrade that pushed blobs on Scroll.
Zama announced the latest updates about its products(tFHE, fhEVM).

Based sequencing and preconfirmations 😎

Primev shared two blog posts in the previous two weeks: The first post examines current models for an Ethereum preconfirmation auction.
The second post focuses on blob posting strategies used by blob producers and provides quantitative analysis for strategy efficiency metrics such as how fast a blob is included in a slot and the priority fee premium paid for that slot inclusion rate.
The LimeChain team shared a new design of based sequencing. This design retains the basic structure of native-based sequencing, but has more detailed explanations of the cold-start problem by providing higher incentives for early participants.