L2 Planet Issue #18
In this Issue of L2 Planet, we focused on the developments regarding Arbitrum, Fuel Network, Tusima, Spectular, Nitro, and StarkNet Ecosystem.
Arbitrum Nitro
Arbitrum Nitro migration has been successfully completed. After the migration, Arbitrum became the cheapest Optimistic Rollup, according to L2Fees.info
The results of the Nitro update are truly impressive:
7x increase in throughput capacity
minimum 30% more average daily txns
Fuel Network
Fuel Network announced its "beta-1" developer-facing testnet.
The testnet will be a single shared network which means developers can deploy contracts and users can then interact with those contracts. There is no whitelist. Developers do not have to permission for deploying their contracts. Also, The Fuel Core node uses GraphQL instead of JSON RPC. Here is a playground for the public GraphQL endpoint.
You can use the faucet to get some ETH to deploy contracts or interact with contracts and use early design Fuel Explorer to see block details. Since this is the launch of a new network, there will be no applications to start, but you can track the list of applications in development maintained here. Reminder, the team clarified that beta-1 is not an incentivized testnet. There will be no direct rewards for participation in this network.
That’s not all. Fuel Network announced that it raised $80m, led by Blockchain Capital and Stratos. It looks like Fuel Network will heat up!
Tusima Network
Day after day, the number of Layer-2 solutions increases on Ethereum. Looks like we have a new zkRollup whose name is Tusima.
Tusima is a zk-rollup-based multi-chain privacy financial network that integrates zero-knowledge proof and multi-chain interoperability. Its goal is to become a privacy financial infrastructure for Web 3.0.
Currently, we don’t have much information about Tusima but it comes with a DAO-driven approach that calls MVD (Minimum Viable DAO). MVD is a modular design method where the community proposes conceptions, reaches consensus from the bottom up, and drives the improvement of the privacy financial network. We'll see if this system will work or suffer the slowness of DAOs.
Specular Network
We all heard the EVM-equivalent and EVM-native terms on zkEVM wars. But have you ever heard of the term EVM-native used in Optimistic Rollups?
Specular describes itself as the first "EVM-native" Optimistic Rollup on Ethereum. The team claims that Specular provides stronger security and decentralization features than existing EVM-equivalent ORUs.
Specular thinks that recent work has focused on adapting an existing Ethereum client to the inter-active fraud-proof setting, to try to achieve compliance with the Ethereum specification and reuse prior developer efforts at L2. Also, they think this approach ensures the correct execution of a specific client implementation, rather than verifying the implementation respects the minimum necessary Ethereum semantics. They argue that this leads to an unnecessarily large trusted computing base (TCB), creates challenges in perform- ing upgrades and audits, and precludes the permissionless participation of multiple Ethereum clients—creating a mono-culture with pronounced failure risk.
So, the team aims to design a more secure and resilient ORU that achieves:
A minimal TCB, improving security, auditability, and upgradeability
Support for permissionless participation of multiple Ethereum clients, enabling client diversity
Sufficiently efficient dispute resolution
To fulfill these requirements, they propose an interactive fraud-proof system native to the EVM, that verifies Ethereum semantics and nothing more. Check out the whitepaper for further details.
Nitro
Solana and Layer-2? Sei Labs announced Nitro, which combines Solana’s powerful execution environment and developer community with the thriving Cosmos and IBC ecosystem.
Not much is known yet, but Nitro will serve as a gateway between Solana and Cosmos. For more details on Nitro, check out their recent feature in Blockworks.
StarkNet Ecosystem
A double-spend bug found on StarkEx 4.5 by Vlad Bochok and Ihor Barenblat.
Empiric Network has ported over the @compoundfinance and @coinbase Open Oracle standard to StarkNet.
Myria has partnered with @StarkWareLtd to create their ZK STARKs-based Ethereum Layer 2 scaling solution, which powers our gaming platform, marketplace, and wallet.
Twitter Corner
Spectating Corner
Reading Corner
Ethereum Scalability: Why Everyone Should Be Thinking About Fuel, Cami
A non-mathematical Introduction to Zero Knowledge Proofs, Errol Drummond
Formal Verification of ZK Constraint Systems, Delendum Research
Does the Ethereum Merge Mean the End of L2 Development?, Coincodex
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