The Rollup Coaster #20

February 19th, 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 🎢

Ethereum’s rollup-centric approach has resulted in multiple independent chains. There is an ongoing debate among researchers regarding whether the shared sequencer and shared prover can resolve this divergence. The main point of discussion is whether the shared sequencer enables synchronous composability. Dankrad argued that using a shared sequencer and prover can achieve this, as stated in his tweet. Furthermore, Justin Drake clarified this matter in his detailed Q&A article, which can be found here.
Justin Drake shared a photo of the first-ever SNARK proving with ASIC. The chip is made by Accseal.

ZK and rollup research 🧙

Herodotus announced Cairo verifier to scale Starknet via L3s
Ed Felten from OffchainLabs discussed the importance of EIP-4844 for L2s.
FRIDA: New data availability sampling scheme with FRI.
A blog post from LambdaClass provides an overview of the history and development of Zero-Knowledge Proofs (ZKPs), focusing on their origins, key milestones, and the evolution of various proof systems.
Simple and concretely efficient witness encryption for KZG commitments: Extractable Witness Encryption for KZG Commitments and Efficient Laconic OT.

ZK and rollup updates 🗞️

Polygon released a Type-1 Prover, which allows any EVM chain to become a ZK L2 and join their AggLayer. You can find more information about this release here.
SuccinctLabs has announced SuccinctProcessor1 (SP1), which is a zkVM that can verify arbitrary Rust programs, similar to Risc0 zkVM. It is fully open source.
PolygonLabs is working on speeding up Plonky3 in CPU architectures.
A proposal to improve transaction fee mechanism on Ethereum & Solana from Eclipse

MEV/PBS/staking research and updates 🔍

Multidimensional Blockchain Fees are (Esentially) Optimal by Guille Angeris et al.
The first MEV-capturing AMM: CoW AMM.
Auctions have too many use cases in crypto. New auction design: Leaderless Auction, a decentralized auction with no auctioneer.