L2 Planet Issue #14

In this Issue of L2 Planet, we focused on the developments regarding Syscoin, Polygon, Aztec, Arbitrum, Boba, Metis, Optimism, Immutable and StarkNet Ecosystem.

Jun 19, 2022

Syscoin and L2

Syscoin is building an L2 solution called Rollux on top of its PoW network.

Rollux will use PoDA (Proof of Data Availability) to secure off-chain data in Rollups. Syscoin uses NEVM(Network Enhanced Virtual Machine) on the mainnet but plans to use direct EVM equivalent virtual machines like Arbitrum Nitro or Optimism Cannon in L2.

Rollux will be launched as the Optimistic Rollup in the first phase, and then will include different solutions such as zkRollup and Validium.

Polygon Zero Launch

Polygon's tweet "zkRollup, coming soon" on June 14 was a matter of curiosity. It is said that Polygon Zero, one of Polygon's products, will be launched soon.

Although it is announced as zkRollup, but in fact, Polygon Zero will initially work as a Validium system and will become zkRollup in the future. Even possible zkEVM applications are being considered. It is said that the transition from Validium to zkRollup will be after proto-danksharding.

Let's add it for those who don't know. Polygon Zero and Polygon are two different products. So the Polygon Sidechain does not become zkRollup. The Polygon network will continue to operate as Sidechain.

Polygon - MATIC 💚 @0xPolygon

🥁🥁🥁🥁🥁 zk-Rollup Coming soon👀

Aztec Connect

Aztec Connect, which is expected to deploy on the mainnet on June 9, has been postponed to a later date. So why was Connect delayed?

As we explained in our previous issue, Aztec closed new registrations to zk.money on June 7th. Aztec users had to withdraw funds from their zk.money accounts in order to use Aztec Connect and deposit them again after Connect was launched. The team even published a guide showing how to use new zk.money.

However, on June 9, the team announced that Aztec Connect has been postponed to a later date. Although the tests on Goerli were successful, some problems were encountered on the mainnet. This issue was actually related to the Geth client, which is the largest Ethereum client. Aztec zk proofs were larger than 300kb and Geth had a 128kb size limit on transactions. The team attempted to submit larger proofs using Flashbot, a Geth fork, but again problems arose. Aztec wants to use 896kb and above proofs with Open Ethereum by postponing the launch date. In the short term, ways to use smaller proofs are being explored.

If you are wondering how to use Aztec Connect SDK, you can find the document written by Jeremy Sik below.

Jeremy Sik

How to use Aztec Connect's SDK

Today is (6/9) and Aztec connect is meant to be launching (yes, they picked today for the lolz). Last week I spent a few solid days trying to get the SDK to work, it was quite the challenge. The developer docs were a little out of date so that didn’t really help - Don’t worry, I’ve been told they’re working on this…

2 years ago · 1 like · Jeremy Sik

Arbitrum Odyssey

An explanation has come from the official team for the expected Arbitrum Odyssey missions. Arbitrum Odyssey will officially launch on Tuesday, June 21, 2022, at 13:00 EST (20:00 UK time). The team also announced the tasks of the first week.

After the Odyssey starts, we will start to transfer our assets to Arbitrum from the bridges shown in the image below, and when the first week is over, we will be able to request the first NFT. In addition, an additional bonus NFT will be awarded for the most used bridge.

After the bridge missions are over in the first week, 2 more missions from 2 different projects will be announced every week. These missions will be officially announced as Odyssey progresses. There will be 17 different NFTs in total and missions for these NFTs will continue for 7 weeks. As the L2 Planet team, we will continue to publish Odyssey missions on our Youtube channel.

Boba network

Boba Network is on the way to becoming the first multi-chain L2 solution. According to the last announcement, Boba made an agreement with Fantom and Moonbeam to contribute to the scaling of these networks. Well, what does it mean?

Creating an L2 on Fantom and Moonbeam will contribute to increasing transaction per second and help to exceed network congestion on these networks. The structure of these L2s will be the Optimistic Rollup and inherit the security of Fantom and Moonbeam. It is of great importance that Boba will be the first L2 solution working on multiple chains with this agreement. These are the other developments on the Boba Network:

The Tapioca Town NFT project has successfully released gamified dynamic NFTs.
Gin Finance has released its new roadmap.
Tapioca DAO has announced that it will launch its tokens with the help of Duck DAO.
The WAGMI program has ended. Incentives will continue in different ways.
Koyo Finance has released its staking token and will soon add the lending option
Boba Apes mint is live.
OolongSwap has launched its 3rd trading contest.
Gin Finance has opened new pools.
BuildQuest is the winner of the Gitcoin hackathon.
Boba has updated the $BOBA and $veBOBA token economy.

Metis Reputation System

Metis is establishing a reputation system in the Andromeda network in parallel with the idea of the Soulbond token, which Vitalik also supports.

With this system, which Metis calls Matrix, users will be rewarded with NFTs by both Metis and projects based on their on-chain activities. Users will earn RP (Reputation Power) by completing certain activities that projects predetermined, and will be entitled to mint non-transferable NFTs by reaching milestones. Thus, projects can increase users' sense of belonging to the project by rewarding their users with non-transferable NFTs. Additionally, NFTs earned by users allow users to create a decentralized profile.

The Matrix can be used not only for rewarding but also for many different purposes. For example, a metaverse can be created with NFTs earned by users through on-chain activities. Similarly, decentralized profiles of users can help to employers for deciding the competence of applicants more than their LinkedIn profiles.

Metis is organizing the RP NFT design competition between June 14-28. It invites artists to contribute to the design of the first RP NFTs to be published. If your designs are selected in the competition, you can be rewarded with the $METIS token and Metis Mosaic NFT, which will be one of the first RP NFTs.

$OP Hack

The news about the theft of 20m $OP on June 8 shocked all of us. According to rumors, 20m $OP tokens were stolen. So what happened behind the scenes of this event?

The Optimism team made an agreement with Wintermute for market-making and providing liquidity for $OP trading pairs. As a result of this agreement, the Optimism team sent $20m of $OP from the Foundation's fund to Wintermute.

However, Wintermute realized that they could not access the $OP tokens sent by the Optimism team. Because the address given was a multi-signature wallet contract on the Ethereum mainnet, this address was unfortunately not deployed on Optimism. Then, studies were started to deploy the multi-signature contract on L1 as the same address on L2. That's exactly when the hack took place.

The attacker take action early and deployed the contract into L2 by using different parameters. So, this is how the attacker became the owner of the 20m $OP token sent to Wintermute by the Optimism team for market-making and providing liquidity. The attacker quickly sold 1m $OP, greatly accelerating the news of this attack. In this process, Wintermute stated that he would make up for his mistake by promising to buy the tokens sold by the attacker.

While the events were happening in this way, the Optimism team stated that they could publish a network upgrade to stop the transfer of stolen tokens that have not yet been sold, but stated that the Optimism network is a permissionless network and they can not take action.

This crisis ended with the attacker returning most of the $OP tokens. The 20m OP$ token was last distributed as follows:

1m $OP token quickly sold by the attacker
1m $OP token sent to Vitalik by the attacker
1m $OP tokens left in the attacker’s account
17m $OP tokens returned by the attacker to the Optimism multi-signature contract.

Optimism (✨🔴_🔴✨) @optimismPBC

Hey folks—in the interest of transparency (😉,😅), the address has returned a majority of the OP, and @wintermute_t has committed to reimbursing the Optimism Foundation for the remaining 2mm OP, which was kept as a bounty.

Optimism (✨🔴_🔴✨) @optimismPBC

Hey folks--in the interest of transparency, we'd like to share some details about an ongoing situation: https://t.co/915vIgRIJG Summary below 🧵👇

Immutable X

Recently, Immutable X announced Arch v1.0, the bridge that will be used to transfer NFTs from Ethereum L1 to Starknet.

The team made its first call to the community to try contracts that are open source. While Arch v1.0 currently only allows us to transfer NFTs from Ethereum L1 to Starknet, it will support L2 to L1 transfer and more in the future. For example, you will be able to transfer your NFTs from Optimism to StarkNet or from StarkNet to Ethereum. For now, only NFTs in the ERC721 standard can use the bridge. The team later announced that the design will be extended to NFTs in the ERC1155 standard, the whitelist will be removed, and the system will be decentralized.

So how does Arch v1.0 work? Initially, project owners have to apply to Immutable to transfer their NFT projects to L2. On the Goerli testnet, it is possible to record bridges without permission. After registering the L1 and L2 contract pairs in the bridge registry, users can freely deposit and withdraw their corresponding ERC721 NFTs between Ethereum/StarkNet.

In the last issue, we talked about the proposal that Immutable published on the Apecoin forum. On the Apecoin side, there has been a development that supports the idea of this proposal. According to ASEC's proposal, it was suggested that moving Ape to a different L1 or Sidechain would be costly, risky, and complex and that Ape should stay on Ethereum. AIP-41 was accepted with 53.62% support in the six-day voting period. This means Ape will continue in the Ethereum ecosystem and explore scaling alternatives like Immutable. Maybe in the future, we can see Immutable's offer accepted and Ape using the Immutable infrastructure.

StarkNet Ecosystem

LayerSwap, supporting StarkNet now.
StarkNet Alpha v0.9.0, released on the testnet.
Dimahledba is building a reputation system on StarkNet.
StarkNet block explorer Voyager has released its new UI.
A new DAO, Adeptus Digitale, has been announced on StarkNet. Adeptus announced its first product, The Commercium.
zkPad was rebranded to become the Astraly.
The MatchboxDAO hackathon starts on July 3.
Due to the launch of StarkGate, Suez has closed the StarkNet<>Ethereum testnet bridge.
LambdaClass Hobby Club has announced Cleopatra VM, the Rust implementation of the Cairo virtual machine.