The Rollup Coaster #31

September 16th, 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, TEEs, MEV/PBS and much more.

This edition is written by Taiko’s Researcher 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 🎢

Max Resnick joined the Bankless episode. Great topics covered by Max like the state of rollups, the future of L2s, based rollups and scale the L1 itself.
Succinct Labs has announced a collaboration with Optimism. Now it's possible to build a ZK rollup with SP1 on top of OP Chain.

ZK and rollup research 🧙

Risc Zero published an article discussing Risc Zero’s zkVM and approaches to existing acceleration initiatives like Jolt, Binius and Circle STARKs.
Ingonyama published a paper on implementation of Mersenne 31 field.
Zellic discovered two vulnerabilities in Groth16 proofs.
Mike Neuder shared his take on Ethereum’ future.
The Rollup hosted Justin Drake. Current rollup landscape and future of L1/L2s were discussed.
Jolt, open-sourced the arithmetization library which based on 256-bit field. Here is the mental model of using big fields on Jolt.
Brecht shared an explanation of Gwyneth, a synchronously composable based rollup.
Cache Timing Leakages in Zero-Knowledge Protocols
Elias wrote an article discussing the challenges that may face Kakarot.
Bottazzi shared his notes on Extractable Witness Encryption for KZG.
Ingonyama introduced zkDL++. This tech allows to hide a watermark in the image thanks to ZK.
SOS blocks in the Decentralized Starknet Protocol
Overcoming Security Risks in zkSharding

ZK and rollup updates 🗞️

The ZKsync governance system went live.
Thanks to Starknet’ last upgrade, L1 cost reduced and L2 throughput increased significantly.
Risc Zero’s ZK proofs can be verified on Starknet now.
Fabric and Polygon announced their collaboration to build real time proof for Agglayer.
Lurk (zkVM) announced the new version.
Polygon announced Miden v4.
Ingonyama announced ICICLE v3

Based sequencing and preconfirmations 😎

The Rollup hosted Cecilia and Brecht from Taiko for the new initiative Booster Rollup.
The Rollup hosted Based Rollups AMA.
Spire(based appchain stack) announced the whitepaper.
Pricing Ethereum Blocks with Vol Markets with Implications for Preconfirmations
Cochran touched to based rollups in context of monetization of ETH.

TEEs (Trusted Execution Environments) 🫣

Zero Knowledge Podcast hosted Andrew Miller in the last episode. Andrew's background, his evolution into TEEs, and the current status of TEEs were discussed.
Applying TEEs to consensus, joint work by Livshits and Miller; “Rorqual: Speeding up Narwhal with TEEs”