Layer 2 Neighborhood Grants Winners

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

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

This chart reveals share of preliminary candidates by class:

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

The awarded functions share per class:

Grantees

We congratulate the 22 grantees awarded and current their undertaking 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 good contracts wallets, layer 2 targeted.

• Quantstamp – Rollup Safety Framework

  • The undertaking will create an in depth safety framework for distinctive options of rollups. They need to set up a basis for fundamental finest practices and transparency for these options to help new builders of those techniques and allow the neighborhood to evaluate the safety dangers of a specific rollup earlier than they use one. Comparable to those who can be found for good contract improvement and the very high-level overviews of rollup safety like L2Beat.com. The framework will focus on issues 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 means for a gaggle of customers to share management over an account’s digital belongings 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 undertaking 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 appearing as a standalone L2. It permits constructing a brand new class of functions that may 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. Because of this, Layer 2 customers pay their portion of the main-net gasoline prices when executing transactions. Layer 1 gasoline will be >25,000x dearer than Layer 2 gasoline, so paying for name information dominates L2 transaction prices. With customized router contracts that use much less name information than customary strategies, we will considerably cut back transaction prices to work together with fashionable protocols.

• Testinprod – Layer1.5

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

• 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 gasoline costs accessible 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 sources (information and logic). It leverages a well-known spreadsheet to assist the person question and hyperlink on-chain sources. The work is saved on-chain as NFTs and will be queried later-on from another dApp/contract

• Kristof Gazso – Typescript ERC-4337 Bundler

  • The undertaking will embody 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 instantly Geth-compatible chain (which incorporates most L2s) with little modifications. The bundler may also expose the RPC calls outlined within the specification, and keep an inside mempool to be future-proof when P2P propagation will probably be developed.

• Soul Wallet – Open-source ERC-4337 pockets

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

📚 Neighborhood 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 give attention to each builders and new customers of their quest to remain updated with these applied sciences and their utility. We create content material and perform totally different actions from publications to workshops free of charge, whereas supporting the totally different tasks that innovate on this area, whereas sustaining additionally its core neutrality.

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

🗄️ Information 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 improve 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 accessible with a view to confirm state transitions or state roots; nonetheless, the strategy for this publication varies, and will embody compressed information. There’s additionally variability within the compression strategies used. This undertaking will discover using compression within the rollup setting. First, the undertaking will explicate locations the place compression is used and doc the strategies that could be used. Second, the undertaking will survey present rollups to research the approaches which can be truly utilized in follow. Third, the undertaking will consider approaches proposed or used throughout comparable techniques and try to determine why a specific method is used. Lastly, the undertaking will use the insights collected with a view 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 Programs
  
  • The College of Sydney and the EPFL have designed a benchmark suite to guage the safety and efficiency of blockchain techniques. The primary evaluations in contrast layer 1 blockchains comparable to Algorand, Solana and Diem and will probably be revealed quickly in a peer reviewed worldwide convention (Eurosys). This undertaking goals at including layer 2 blockchain techniques to the Diablo benchmark and to make use of it to supply the primary in depth and real looking benchmark analysis of layer 2 blockchain techniques on a worldwide deployment.

• Web3-data – Layer 2 Exercise Monitoring & Comparability Suite
  
  • By this undertaking, we purpose to ship a high-quality set of Dashboards that assist allow information scientists, researchers, and all neighborhood members to higher perceive Layer 2 Exercise
  • We are going to combination information throughout Layer 2 networks leveraging sources comparable to Dune, L2Beats, Santiment, CoinGecko, Github, Discord, and, in lots of circumstances, instantly from the undertaking APIs/RPCs.
  • We are going to clear and set up this information to supply a set of shows that may enable the neighborhood to visualise modifications throughout key L2 metrics (e.g. tps, hire paid to Ethereum, progress in TVL, each day energetic addresses, new addresses, whole addresses, charges paid, and developer exercise primarily based on GitHub affiliated repo commits).
  • We purpose to label good contracts (and finally allow the neighborhood to label good contracts) by utilization classes (Native switch, DeFi DEX, DeFi different, NFT, CEX, Stablecoin, ERC20 different, L2 hire, Bridge, Arbitrage/MEV, Utility). This labeling will enable us to research and visualize the utilization patterns on a excessive degree and likewise present the “hottest” good contracts within the totally different utilization classes. We’re leveraging identified 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.

📊 Information Visualization

• Quantstamp – Again-Finish API Customary for L2 Block Exporers
  
  • This undertaking will clearly outline properties {that a} block explorer ought to implement with a view to be thought-about feature-complete within the basic layer two setting. Moreover, our aim is to suggest and specify a typical API interface that the layer two networks ought to expose to basic block explorers. We envision that such a standardized interface will allow and significantly simplify the event of a number of block explorers that may plug-and-play reusable with all of the layer 2 networks that assist the usual. Within the very best situation, the usual would flip the event of the core of a brand new block explorer right into a undertaking that could possibly be accomplished by an skilled group throughout a weekend hackathon. Our aim will probably 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 offered commercially, is open supply, or doubtlessly even decentralized. The undertaking pays 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 by means of in a simple means, offering the mandatory infrastructure to scale Ethereum.

🧮 Cryptography and Zero-knowledge proofs

• Zhe Ye, Ujval Misra, and Daybreak Track (College of California at Berkeley) – Specular
  
  • The preferred optimistic rollups (ORUs) right now, Arbitrum and Optimism, try to increase present Ethereum consumer 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 consumer program binary—oblivious to its higher-level semantics. This method (1) precludes the trust-minimized, permissionless participation of a number of Ethereum consumer applications, magnifying monocolture failure threat; (2) results in an unnecessarily giant and complicated trusted computing base (TCB) that’s troublesome to independently audit; and, (3) suffers from a frequently-triggered, but opaque improve course of—each additional rising auditing overhead, and complicating on-chain entry management within the long-term.
  • We’re subsequently targeted on constructing a safe, trust-minimized ORU that addresses these issues, whereas preserving scalability and dispute decision effectivity. To take action, we’ve designed an IFP system native to the EVM, that enforces Ethereum’s semi-formally specified semantics [5] exactly on the degree 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 method.

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

• Ethstorage – Proof of Storage on L2 Dynamic Datasets with an Ethereum L1 Contract
  
  • Given a listing of commitments of BLOBs (e.g., KZG commitments from EIP-4844/Danksharding, listed from 0…n-1) in an L1 contract, the undertaking 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 sincere, 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 you can construct the proof/verification system if the BLOBs and the commitments are continuously modified (e.g., new BLOBs are appended to the listing or a BLOB of an index is modified); and how you can construct incentivized/cost system to make sure desired replication issue utilizing ETH as cost; it’s potential to ask a storage node to retailer partial BLOBs whereas sustaining the identical degree of safety of Mainnet?

We had been extraordinarily proud of the standard of candidates for this grants spherical. The analysis and work they produce can have a constructive influence on the ecosystem. We advise maintaining a tally of them!