Layer 2 Group Grants Winners

The Privateness & Scaling Explorations crew is worked up to announce the winners of the Layer 2 Group Grants 2022.

The Layer 2 Group Grants spherical began on October twenty fourth, 2022 and was open for six weeks. In whole we obtained 130+ proposals and thank every mission for taking the time to use.
The wishlist compiled sought purposes from all areas together with Layer 2 explorers, cryptography, and schooling.

This chart exhibits proportion of preliminary candidates by class:

Because of the prime quality of proposals, we raised the funds from an preliminary 750k USD to a complete of 948k USD.

The awarded purposes proportion per class:

Grantees

We congratulate the 22 grantees awarded and current their mission descriptions damaged down by class:

🔒 Cybersecurity

• Candidelabs – ERC-4337 Public Infrastructure

  • An open supply bundler and a paymaster service as public good infrastructure for ERC-4337 sensible contracts wallets, layer 2 targeted.

• Quantstamp – Rollup Safety Framework

  • The mission will create an in depth safety framework for distinctive options of rollups. They wish to set up a basis for primary finest practices and transparency for these options to help new builders of those programs and allow the neighborhood to evaluate the safety dangers of a selected rollup earlier than they use one. Related to those who can be found for sensible contract improvement and the very high-level overviews of rollup safety like L2Beat.com. The framework will focus on considerations and particulars of escape hatch improvement and operational dangers for end-users and builders and set up a constant language for these and different options.

👨‍💻 Person Expertise

• Spiro – zkWallet

  • Multi-party wallets (e.g. Gnosis protected multisigs) are a confirmed manner for a bunch of customers to share management over an account’s digital property and behaviors. Sadly, present implementations of multi-party wallets expose the privateness of their whole variety of operators and their related externally owned accounts. The aim of this mission is to construct a non-public multi-party pockets that shields finish customers by using account abstraction (EIP-4337) and zero-knowledge proofs.

• Kautuk Kundan – Stackr Community

  • Stackr community is an SDK for launching standalone customizable app-specific rollups utilizing acquainted web2-like tooling. It focuses on the core precept of a roll-up, that’s, to run a state machine off-chain and use L1 to retailer transaction particulars. This may be achieved by general-purpose languages that may keep the app-state off-chain and supply an interface to work together with it, thus performing as a standalone L2. It permits constructing a brand new class of purposes that can have extra freedom over their execution decisions.

• ScopeLift – L2 Optimizors

  • Layer 2 networks share safety with main-net by posting transaction name information to Layer 1. Consequently, Layer 2 customers pay their portion of the main-net fuel prices when executing transactions. Layer 1 fuel could be >25,000x costlier than Layer 2 fuel, so paying for name information dominates L2 transaction prices. With customized router contracts that use much less name information than commonplace strategies, we are able to considerably cut back transaction prices to work together with well-liked protocols.

• Testinprod – Layer1.5

  • Layer 1.5 allows anybody to launch their very own Layer 2 by offering straightforward instruments. It gives a straightforward software that launches your individual Layer 2 with vital instruments—for instance, block explorer, token bridge, monitoring instruments, and so on.

• ScopeLift – Layer 2 Governance with Versatile Voting

  • Versatile Voting is an extension of the favored Governor system utilized by many DAOs. It permits new sorts of delegation contracts to be written, making it simpler for governance token holders to take part in on-chain votes. One such use case is the topic of this grant: Layer 2 governance voting. Holders of bridged governance tokens may vote from Layer 2, paying the cheaper fuel costs out there there. These votes can be trustlessly mirrored on L1 the place the DAO’s Governor system is deployed.

• Clement Walter – Starksheet

  • Starksheet goals to democratize the entry and utilization of on-chain assets (information and logic). It leverages a well-known spreadsheet to assist the person question and hyperlink on-chain assets. The work is saved on-chain as NFTs and could be queried later-on from some other dApp/contract

• Kristof Gazso – Typescript ERC-4337 Bundler

  • The mission will embrace the event of an ERC-4337 bundler in Typescript and the related modifications to a Geth node for simulation functions in order that the bundler can run on any straight Geth-compatible chain (which incorporates most L2s) with little modifications. The bundler can even expose the RPC calls outlined within the specification, and keep an inner mempool to be future-proof when P2P propagation might be developed.

• Soul Pockets – Open-source ERC-4337 pockets

  • Straightforward-to-use browser pockets implementation powered by ERC-4337.

📚 Group and Schooling

• Jose Figueroa – L2 en Español
  
  • L2 en Español is an open neighborhood that goals to analysis, educate and drive the adoption in all these Ethereum’s scaling options. They concentrate on each builders and new customers of their quest to remain updated with these applied sciences and their utility. We create content material and perform completely different actions from publications to workshops free of charge, whereas supporting the completely different tasks that innovate on this house, whereas sustaining additionally its core neutrality.

• Bruce Xu – MyFirstLayer2
  
  • This might be an open-source, community-driven, and academic mission. This might be a web site for folks interested by Layer2 however with out prior information about Layer2 or Blockchain. We goal to make use of well-designed diagrams and interactive animation to assist folks get the thought behind Layer2 in 30mins. Afterward, we’ll information folks to some real-world Layer2 apps step-by-step and allow them to really feel the advantages of Layer2.

🗄️ Knowledge Evaluation

• Blockscout – Blockscout Block Explorer
  
  • An open-source block explorer is presently wanted for the L2 ecosystem. Blockscout is already utilized by many L2 tasks, and extra customizations particular to L2 information necessities will enhance usability. As well as, a brand new interface, options, analytics and developer pleasant enhancements will assist create a extra clear and usable neighborhood explorer.

• Quantstamp – Evaluating Rollup Compression
  
  • Compression is usually ignored when discussing rollups. By design, rollups are required to make information out there so as to confirm state transitions or state roots; nevertheless, the strategy for this publication varies, and will embrace compressed information. There may be additionally variability within the compression methods used. This mission will discover the usage of compression within the rollup setting. First, the mission will explicate locations the place compression is used and doc the methods that could be used. Second, the mission will survey current rollups to research the approaches which might be really utilized in apply. Third, the mission will consider approaches proposed or used throughout related programs and try to determine why a selected strategy is used. Lastly, the mission will use the insights collected so as to counsel new approaches for compression of rollup information and pose open issues to the neighborhood.

• Diablobench – Efficiency and Safety Analysis of Layer 2 Blockchain Methods
  
  • The College of Sydney and the EPFL have designed a benchmark suite to guage the safety and efficiency of blockchain programs. The primary evaluations in contrast layer 1 blockchains equivalent to Algorand, Solana and Diem and might be printed quickly in a peer reviewed worldwide convention (Eurosys). This mission goals at including layer 2 blockchain programs to the Diablo benchmark and to make use of it to provide the primary in depth and reasonable benchmark analysis of layer 2 blockchain programs on a worldwide deployment.

• Web3-data – Layer 2 Exercise Monitoring & Comparability Suite
  
  • By means of this mission, we goal to ship a high-quality set of Dashboards that assist allow information scientists, researchers, and all neighborhood members to raised perceive Layer 2 Exercise
  • We are going to mixture information throughout Layer 2 networks leveraging sources equivalent to Dune, L2Beats, Santiment, CoinGecko, Github, Discord, and, in lots of instances, straight from the mission APIs/RPCs.
  • We are going to clear and manage this information to supply a set of shows that can permit the neighborhood to visualise modifications throughout key L2 metrics (e.g. tps, lease paid to Ethereum, progress in TVL, every day lively addresses, new addresses, whole addresses, charges paid, and developer exercise based mostly on GitHub affiliated repo commits).
  • We goal to label sensible contracts (and in the end allow the neighborhood to label sensible contracts) by utilization classes (Native switch, DeFi DEX, DeFi different, NFT, CEX, Stablecoin, ERC20 different, L2 lease, Bridge, Arbitrage/MEV, Utility). This labeling will permit us to research and visualize the utilization patterns on a excessive stage and in addition present the “hottest” sensible contracts within the completely different utilization classes. We’re leveraging recognized labels from Dune, Arbiscan, Etherscan, and others.

• L2 Beat – L2 Beat
  
  • Proceed to work on clear and verifiable insights into rising layer two (L2) applied sciences with expanded metrics and schooling.

📊 Knowledge Visualization

• Quantstamp – Again-Finish API Normal for L2 Block Exporers
  
  • This mission will clearly outline properties {that a} block explorer ought to implement so as to be thought-about feature-complete within the common layer two setting. Moreover, our aim is to suggest and specify a typical API interface that the layer two networks ought to expose to common block explorers. We envision that such a standardized interface will allow and vastly simplify the event of a number of block explorers that can plug-and-play reusable with all of the layer 2 networks that assist the usual. Within the preferrred state of affairs, the usual would flip the event of the core of a brand new block explorer right into a mission that could possibly be accomplished by an skilled crew throughout a weekend hackathon. Our aim might be to additionally outline a typical that’s consumer-agnostic. As such, it is not going to matter whether or not it’s consumed by a block explorer that’s supplied commercially, is open supply, or doubtlessly even decentralized. The mission can pay particular consideration to what distinctive layer two information a block explorer ought to present, with an emphasis on these associated to safety of the chains monitored by it.

• Blossom Labs – Blobscan
  
  • The primary explorer for the EIP-4844 shard blob transactions. It indexes and presents them in a searchable format that the person can visualize and navigate via in a straightforward manner, offering the mandatory infrastructure to scale Ethereum.

🧮 Cryptography and Zero-knowledge proofs

• Zhe Ye, Ujval Misra, and Daybreak Tune (College of California at Berkeley) – Specular
  
  • The preferred optimistic rollups (ORUs) in the present day, Arbitrum and Optimism, attempt to increase current Ethereum shopper software program (Geth) to assist interactive fraud proof (IFP) building, aiming to reuse prior L1 engineering efforts and replicate EVM semantics at L2. Sadly, to take action they tightly couple their on-chain IFP verifier with a selected shopper program binary—oblivious to its higher-level semantics. This strategy (1) precludes the trust-minimized, permissionless participation of a number of Ethereum shopper applications, magnifying monocolture failure threat; (2) results in an unnecessarily massive and sophisticated trusted computing base (TCB) that’s troublesome to independently audit; and, (3) suffers from a frequently-triggered, but opaque improve course of—each additional growing auditing overhead, and complicating on-chain entry management within the long-term.
  • We’re due to this fact targeted on constructing a safe, trust-minimized ORU that addresses these issues, whereas preserving scalability and dispute decision effectivity. To take action, we have now designed an IFP system native to the EVM, that enforces Ethereum’s semi-formally specified semantics [5] exactly on the stage of a single EVM instruction. As part of this work, we constructed Specular, an ORU which leverages Geth—modified minimally with solely 99 lines-of-code to assist IFP building—demonstrating the practicality, extensibility and trust-minimal nature of our strategy.

• Nethermind, Justin Thaler (Georgetown College), Matthew Inexperienced (Johns Hopkins College), and Pratyush Tiwari (Georgetown College) – Concrete Safety Evaluation for L2 Deployed Proof Methods
  
  • We suggest to research the concrete safety of the proof programs (SNARKs, STARKs) that safe -rollups. We observe that some proof programs have safety analyzed within the interactive setting, whereas their safety after making use of the Fiat—Shamir transformation is barely conjectured. Moreover, we imagine that in some instances extra environment friendly assaults are attainable than the claimed safety stage asserts.

• Ethstorage – Proof of Storage on L2 Dynamic Datasets with an Ethereum L1 Contract
  
  • Given an inventory of commitments of BLOBs (e.g., KZG commitments from EIP-4844/Danksharding, listed from 0…n-1) in an L1 contract, the mission is to check an environment friendly proof system to effectively confirm on L1 that the BLOBs are saved off-chain with the specified redundancy (e.g., 30~50 bodily replicas). By placing these storage nodes in an L2 community and assuming 1/m of nodes is trustworthy, we may construct an L2 storage community that reuses mainnet safety whereas extending Ethereum scalability dramatically.
  • Additional analysis will try to reply the questions of how one can construct the proof/verification system if the BLOBs and the commitments are continually modified (e.g., new BLOBs are appended to the record or a BLOB of an index is modified); and how one can construct incentivized/cost system to make sure desired replication issue utilizing ETH as cost; it’s attainable to ask a storage node to retailer partial BLOBs whereas sustaining the identical stage of safety of Mainnet?

We have been extraordinarily pleased with the standard of candidates for this grants spherical. The analysis and work they produce can have a optimistic affect on the ecosystem. We advise keeping track of them!