Layer 2 Neighborhood Grants Winners

The Privateness & Scaling Explorations group is happy 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 mission for taking the time to use.
The wishlist compiled sought purposes from all areas together with Layer 2 explorers, cryptography, and training.

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 good 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 greatest practices and transparency for these options to help new builders of those programs and allow the neighborhood to evaluate the safety dangers of a specific rollup earlier than they use one. Comparable to people 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 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 secure multisigs) are a confirmed manner 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 purpose of this mission 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 purposes 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. In consequence, Layer 2 customers pay their portion of the main-net gasoline prices when executing transactions. Layer 1 gasoline might 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 commonplace strategies, we will considerably cut back transaction prices to work together with widespread 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 mandatory 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 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 might be queried later-on from some other dApp/contract

• Kristof Gazso – Typescript ERC-4337 Bundler

  • The mission 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 will even expose the RPC calls outlined within the specification, and preserve an inside mempool to be future-proof when P2P propagation might be developed.

• Soul Pockets – 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 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 totally different actions from publications to workshops without cost, whereas supporting the totally 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 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 are going to 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 at present 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 commonly ignored when discussing rollups. By design, rollups are required to make information out there with a view to confirm state transitions or state roots; nonetheless, the strategy for this publication varies, and should embody compressed information. There’s additionally variability within the compression methods used. This mission will discover using 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 can be really utilized in observe. Third, the mission will consider approaches proposed or used throughout related programs and try to determine why a specific method is used. Lastly, the mission will use the insights collected with a view to recommend 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 corresponding to Algorand, Solana and Diem and might be revealed 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 lifelike 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 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’ll combination information throughout Layer 2 networks leveraging sources corresponding to Dune, L2Beats, Santiment, CoinGecko, Github, Discord, and, in lots of circumstances, instantly from the mission APIs/RPCs.
  • We’ll clear and arrange this information to supply a collection of shows that may permit the neighborhood to visualise modifications throughout key L2 metrics (e.g. tps, lease paid to Ethereum, development in TVL, every day lively addresses, new addresses, complete addresses, charges paid, and developer exercise based mostly on GitHub affiliated repo commits).
  • We purpose to label good contracts (and in the end allow the neighborhood 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 permit us to research and visualize the utilization patterns on a excessive stage and in addition 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 training.

📊 Knowledge Visualization

• Quantstamp – Again-Finish API Customary for L2 Block Exporers
  
  • This mission will clearly outline properties {that a} block explorer ought to implement with a view to be thought-about feature-complete within the normal layer two setting. Moreover, our purpose is to suggest and specify a normal API interface that the layer two networks ought to expose to normal block explorers. We envision that such a standardized interface will allow and vastly 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 supreme state of affairs, the usual would flip the event of the core of a brand new block explorer right into a mission that might be accomplished by an skilled group throughout a weekend hackathon. Our purpose might be to additionally outline a normal 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 probably even decentralized. The mission 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 way of in a simple 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 most well-liked optimistic rollups (ORUs) at the moment, Arbitrum and Optimism, try 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 method (1) precludes the trust-minimized, permissionless participation of a number of Ethereum consumer packages, magnifying monocolture failure danger; (2) results in an unnecessarily massive and complicated trusted computing base (TCB) that’s tough 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’ve 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 development—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 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 circumstances 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 methods to construct the proof/verification system if the BLOBs and the commitments are always modified (e.g., new BLOBs are appended to the listing or a BLOB of an index is modified); and methods 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 stage of safety of Mainnet?

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