L2 Planet Issue #8

In this Issue of L2 Planet, we focused on the developments regarding OVM 2.0, Celestia, Polygon, Cardano and StarkNet.

Feb 19, 2022

Critical Bug on OVM 2.0

In the past few days, Jay Freeman who is also know as Saurik found an important bug on OVM 2.0

This bug made it possible to generate ETH on Optimisim by triggering the SELFDESTRUCT OPCODE on a contract which held an ETH balance. Saurik quickly got in touch with the team and warned them about this bug. After a detailed examination the team realized that this bug was only triggered by a single Etherscan employee, once. It was deducted that this instance did not generate much usable ETH.

The team took quick action and applied required fixes. In addition to that, other Optimism forks like Boba and Metis were alerted in order to prevent any further bugs. All OVM 2.0 are now safe with thanks to the latest bug fixes. Optimism will be rewarding saurik with 2,000,042$ regarding Official Immunefi Bug Bounty Program. For further information on the details of the bug, you can check out the report published by Saurik.

Celestia Introduces Quantum Gravity Bridge and the Celestiums

Celestia is a L1 blockchain optimized to enable data storage and provides constant accessibility to this data. It intends to provide solutions regarding problems Rollups might face with Ethereum's limited data capacity and the cost of sending data to Ethereum.

The reason why Rollups have the same level of security as the Ethereum Mainnet is that not only the proofs generated by executions are sent to the mainnet but the data itself is sent too. But with solutions like Validium and Volition used by zkSync and Starkwave the data is not sent to the mainnet. This is where Celestia comes in.

On the Celestia model, the L2 chain operators gather executions and compress them in order to generate proofs and send these to the L2 smart contract on the Ethereum Mainnet. And, the data is sent to Celestia's data usability layer. Celestia's PoS verifiers place these data onto Celestia blocks. Following this, the verifiers sign a Merkle root which shows that these data are indeed usable. Quantum Gravity Bridge (DA Bridge) smart contract verifies these signatures. This way, the only thing the L2 smart contract on the Ethereum mainnet has to do in order to check data usability is to raise a query on the DA bridge smart contract.

This model is especially efficient for Volition solutions which also contains Validium solutions and Validium solutions itself. We are waiting for and looking forward to see the first Layer 2 solution which will be using Celestia. For more information you can check out this blog post by Celestia.

A New Consensus Mechanism by Polygon Hermez: PoE

Polygon's Hermez Team which have been working on zkEVM for a while, announced a new consensus mechanism: PoE (Proof of Efficiency) to be used on Layer 2.

PoE (Proof of Efficiency) is created based on the formerly designed PoD (Proof of Donation) model. PoE is designed to provide a solution for some of the problems of decentralized and permissionless validators on L2 for zkRollups. A two-step model is used for this. On the first step there are sequencers, and on the second step there are Aggregators. The sequencers collect L2 transactions from users, so they select and pre-process a new L2 batch on the network by sending a Layer 1 TX accompanied by the data from Layer TXs. The PoE Contract accepts the first most profitable validity proof generated by the Aggregatorr which updates the current state.

It looks like this consensus mechanism which is based on an economic model highlighting the importance of the profit and loss balance, is going to be a new refresher for Layer 2. For more information you can check out this blog post by davidsrz.

zkRollup on Cardano: Orbis

There has been a working progress on Cardano regarding scaling on State Channel. While this was going on another scaling solution has started to work on zkRollups aswell.

The Orbis project intends to alleviate the problematic work-load of Cardano. It aims to do this by relying on its zero-proof based fast-transaction abilities. This project is currently only at its ideation stage, so there is not much information to it. Its publishing date is TBA. We will see together if Orbis is going to be able to fix the problematic sides of Cardano or not.

StarkNet Ecosystem

StarkNet published the article “On to the Next Challenge”.
zkPad which is the first launchpad project of StarkNet, announced.
Aave Protocol has started voting to release V3 on Starknet. If this voting pass, the Aave3 Protocol will be integrated into the StarkNet.
StarkSwap announced.
Dopewars's new detailed roadmap announced.
Briq's the 1.0 update announced.
Influence's grant program for content developers announced.
Nurstar.eth updated his guide to using JediSwap, an upcoming AMM, on testnet. You can now add liquidity to pools.
Starknet's first web3 DAO validation protocol, Zorro, has opened apps for the testnet.
Argent X v2.2.2 on Github released.
Eykar's transition to StarkNet has begun.