The Rollup Coaster #21

March 5th, 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 🎢

Dencun will activate on the Ethereum mainnet at epoch 269568 on March 13, 2024 at 13:55 UTC.
Economic security flippening! Ethereum is presently secured with $105B.

ZK and rollup research 🧙

Starkware and Polygon announce a new mathematical approach to improve the performance of STARKs: Circle STARK. Using elliptic curves and special primes, this approach can process data points faster and more efficiently, offering significant improvements, especially for architectures processing large-scale data sets.
Stwo: Circle-STARK-based prover announced by Starkware.
Computer systems split into two categories: those that can run DOOM, and those that can’t. RISC Zero’s zkVM has joined the pantheon of systems that can run DOOM. A fun project by the RISC Zero team.
Kakarot, a Cairo-based zkEVM, published a blog post describing its vision and technical details.
Nethermind published a detailed paper comparing zkSync and Starknet in terms of on-chain proof verification, compression efficiency, L2 fees, user operation distributions, etc.
SNARK implementations are not mature yet. The new paper revealed the potential vulnerabilites in SNARKs. “SoK: What don’t we know? Understanding Security Vulnerabilities in SNARKs”
A new Zero Knowledge Podcast episode is out. In this episode, with Ingonyama, ZK hardware was discussed.
Remainder: A new ZKML prover announced by Modulus Labs.

ZK and rollup updates 🗞️

Succinct Labs announced SP1 Reth.
Polygon released an update to their zkEVM with ROM optimization.
Avail Nexus: A ZK-Rollup Built for cross-rollup and cross-ecosystem settlement.
Reducing operation cost on Optimism.

MEV/PBS/staking research and updates 🔍

Primev uncovered the role of preconfirmations in EIP-4844: Censorship, Latency, and Preconfirmations in the Blob Market.
Discussions about how sequencers could hand over sequencing rights to SUAVE: Integrating SUAVE with Astria Rollups.

Education and events 🎫

Learn & Share schedule for March and April. Don't miss these tutorials where many cryptography papers can be discussed in an educational way.
PSE announced Acceleration Program for ZK, MPC, and FHE ideas.
The Ethereum Foundation is sponsoring a 4844 data analysis and visualization blog post. Check it out.
EVM From Stratch.