Layer 2 Neighborhood Grants Winners

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

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

This chart reveals share of preliminary candidates by class:

Because of the top quality of proposals, we raised the price range 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 venture 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 centered.

• Quantstamp – Rollup Safety Framework

  • The venture will create an in depth safety framework for distinctive options of rollups. They wish to set up a basis for fundamental finest practices and transparency for these options to help new builders of those methods and allow the group to evaluate the safety dangers of a specific rollup earlier than they use one. Related to people who can be found for good contract growth and the very high-level overviews of rollup safety like L2Beat.com. The framework will focus on issues and particulars of escape hatch growth 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 secure multisigs) are a confirmed means for a gaggle 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 complete variety of operators and their related externally owned accounts. The aim of this venture is to construct a personal 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 preserve 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 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 gasoline prices when executing transactions. Layer 1 gasoline may 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 are able to considerably scale back transaction prices to work together with well-liked protocols.

• Testinprod – Layer1.5

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

• 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 obtainable there. These votes could 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-recognized spreadsheet to assist the person question and hyperlink on-chain assets. The work is saved on-chain as NFTs and may be queried later-on from another dApp/contract

• Kristof Gazso – Typescript ERC-4337 Bundler

  • The venture 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 immediately Geth-compatible chain (which incorporates most L2s) with little modifications. The bundler may also expose the RPC calls outlined within the specification, and preserve an inner mempool to be future-proof when P2P propagation can be developed.

• Soul Pockets – Open-source ERC-4337 pockets

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

📚 Neighborhood and Schooling

• Jose Figueroa – L2 en Español
  
  • L2 en Español is an open group 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 at no cost, whereas supporting the totally different tasks that innovate on this area, whereas sustaining additionally its core neutrality.

• Bruce Xu – MyFirstLayer2
  
  • This can be an open-source, community-driven, and academic venture. This can be an internet site for individuals interested in 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 thought 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.

🗄️ 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 improve usability. As well as, a brand new interface, options, analytics and developer pleasant enhancements will assist create a extra clear and usable group explorer.

• Quantstamp – Evaluating Rollup Compression
  
  • Compression is usually missed when discussing rollups. By design, rollups are required to make information obtainable 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 venture will discover using compression within the rollup setting. First, the venture will explicate locations the place compression is used and doc the strategies that could be used. Second, the venture will survey current rollups to analyze the approaches which can be truly utilized in apply. Third, the venture will consider approaches proposed or used throughout comparable methods and try and determine why a specific strategy is used. Lastly, the venture will use the insights collected with a view to recommend new approaches for compression of rollup information and pose open issues to the group.

• Diablobench – Efficiency and Safety Analysis of Layer 2 Blockchain Techniques
  
  • The College of Sydney and the EPFL have designed a benchmark suite to judge the safety and efficiency of blockchain methods. The primary evaluations in contrast layer 1 blockchains akin to Algorand, Solana and Diem and can be printed quickly in a peer reviewed worldwide convention (Eurosys). This venture goals at including layer 2 blockchain methods to the Diablo benchmark and to make use of it to provide the primary intensive and life like benchmark analysis of layer 2 blockchain methods on a worldwide deployment.

• Web3-data – Layer 2 Exercise Monitoring & Comparability Suite
  
  • By way of this venture, we purpose to ship a high-quality set of Dashboards that assist allow information scientists, researchers, and all group members to raised perceive Layer 2 Exercise
  • We’ll mixture information throughout Layer 2 networks leveraging sources akin to Dune, L2Beats, Santiment, CoinGecko, Github, Discord, and, in lots of instances, immediately from the venture APIs/RPCs.
  • We’ll clear and manage this information to supply a set of shows that can enable the group to visualise adjustments throughout key L2 metrics (e.g. tps, lease paid to Ethereum, progress in TVL, each day lively addresses, new addresses, complete addresses, charges paid, and developer exercise primarily based on GitHub affiliated repo commits).
  • We purpose to label good contracts (and in the end allow the group to label good contracts) by utilization classes (Native switch, DeFi DEX, DeFi different, NFT, CEX, Stablecoin, ERC20 different, L2 lease, Bridge, Arbitrage/MEV, Utility). This labeling will enable us to research and visualize the utilization patterns on a excessive degree and in addition present the “hottest” good contracts within the totally 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 training.

📊 Knowledge Visualization

• Quantstamp – Again-Finish API Customary for L2 Block Exporers
  
  • This venture will clearly outline properties {that a} block explorer ought to implement with a view to be thought of 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 enormously 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 ideally suited situation, the usual would flip the event of the core of a brand new block explorer right into a venture that might be accomplished by an skilled staff throughout a weekend hackathon. Our aim can be to additionally outline a typical that’s consumer-agnostic. As such, it won’t matter whether or not it’s consumed by a block explorer that’s supplied commercially, is open supply, or probably even decentralized. The venture 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 in a simple means, offering the required infrastructure to scale Ethereum.

🧮 Cryptography and Zero-knowledge proofs

• Zhe Ye, Ujval Misra, and Daybreak Music (College of California at Berkeley) – Specular
  
  • The preferred optimistic rollups (ORUs) as we speak, Arbitrum and Optimism, attempt to increase current Ethereum consumer software program (Geth) to assist interactive fraud proof (IFP) development, 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 particular consumer program binary—oblivious to its higher-level semantics. This strategy (1) precludes the trust-minimized, permissionless participation of a number of Ethereum consumer packages, 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 due to this fact centered on constructing a safe, trust-minimized ORU that addresses these issues, whereas preserving scalability and dispute decision effectivity. To take action, now we have 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 development—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 Techniques
  
  • We suggest to research the concrete safety of the proof methods (SNARKs, STARKs) that safe -rollups. We observe that some proof methods have safety analyzed within the interactive setting, whereas their safety after making use of the Fiat—Shamir transformation is barely conjectured. Moreover, we consider that in some instances extra environment friendly assaults are attainable 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 venture is to review 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 and reply the questions of find out how to construct the proof/verification system if the BLOBs and the commitments are consistently modified (e.g., new BLOBs are appended to the checklist or a BLOB of an index is modified); and find out how to construct incentivized/fee system to make sure desired replication issue utilizing ETH as fee; it’s attainable to ask a storage node to retailer partial BLOBs whereas sustaining the identical degree 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 constructive influence on the ecosystem. We recommend maintaining a tally of them!