The Rollup Coaster #28

August 6th, 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 🎢

Preconfirmation demo day is over. L2 preconfers can give preconfirmation to based rollup users at 20ms. Faster than centralised sequencers.

ZK and rollup research 🧙

Ingonyama and Starknet announced strategic partnership. This partnership covers accelerating the Stwo prover with Ingonyama’s GPU-accelerator library ICICLE.
Aztec announced Provernet. ZK providers should join to permissioned testnet for proof generation.
Alberto(from Anoma) shared two articles;
- SuperSPARTAN by Hand. SuperSPARTAN is a ZK protocol that improves upon SPARTAN by utilizing polynomial commitments and efficient multi-opening techniques. Alberto dives into deep math of SuperSPARTAN in this post.
- HyperNova by Hand. Hypernova is ZKP that combines the efficiency of NOVA with the flexibility of Halo2, allowing for recursive proofs with dynamic circuit sizes. Alberto dives into deep math again in this post.
Paul Gafni published a blog post on verifiable computation. The first in a series of 5 posts, this piece goes into the basics of verifiable computation and explains why we need it.
Lita released a video explaining the architectural details of the Valida zkVM.
LambdaClass shared a blog post on Circle STARKs.
Starknet Exploration Team announced zkRamp, a P2P on/off-ramp protocol.
Mo(from Brevis) shared a comparison between generalised and specialized ZK.
Starkware shared their first Bitcoin research post: The Path to General Computation on Bitcoin.
“zkRollup Landscape - It’s Supply Chain and Future” by Four Pillar Research.
Kroma integrated Ingonyama’s ICICLE for accelerated proof generation.

Based sequencing and preconfirmations 😎

Taiko published a blog post explaining in detail why based rollups need preconfirmations.
Primev published the testnet results of mev-commit where it implemented preconfirmations.
Mempirate(from Chainbound) published a blog post on the interaction of MCP with FOCIL and preconfirmations(proposer commitments.).

TEE (Trusted Execution Environments) 🫣

Building dark pools with TEEs. Privacy Tech for Building a Dark Pool in DeFi

MEV/PBS🔍

Max Resnick proposed Braid, an implementation of multiple concurrent block proposers. Based on the simple idea of running many instances of Ethereum consensus in parallel.
Robust Incentive Group(EF) published the block construction session notes. This session includes a detailed discussion of current block building methods and a roadmap.
Terence(from Offchain Labs) shared a reserach called Inclusion List Timing Constraints. This research discussed the time constraints of IL such as verification, propagation, preperaton.
Terence shared ePBS Breakout #5 notes.