Layer 2 Community Grants Winners

The Privateness & Scaling Explorations staff is happy to announce the winners of the Layer 2 Community Grants 2022.

The Layer 2 Group 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 schooling.

This chart reveals proportion of preliminary candidates by class:

As a result of prime quality of proposals, we raised the price range from an preliminary 750k USD to a complete of 948k USD.

The awarded functions proportion 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 primary greatest practices and transparency for these options to help new builders of those methods and allow the group to evaluate the safety dangers of a selected 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 considerations 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.

👨‍💻 Consumer 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 belongings 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 objective 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 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 selections.

• 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 fuel prices when executing transactions. Layer 1 fuel will 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 customary strategies, we will 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 straightforward instruments. It supplies a straightforward utility that launches your individual Layer 2 with crucial 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 sources (information and logic). It leverages a well-recognized spreadsheet to assist the consumer question and hyperlink on-chain sources. The work is saved on-chain as NFTs and will be queried later-on from every other dApp/contract

• Kristof Gazso – Typescript ERC-4337 Bundler

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

• Soul Wallet – Open-source ERC-4337 pockets

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

📚 Group and Training

• 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 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 spending a dime, whereas supporting the totally different initiatives that innovate on this house, whereas sustaining additionally its core neutrality.

• Bruce Xu – MyFirstLayer2
  
  • This will likely be an open-source, community-driven, and academic venture. This will likely be a web site for individuals inquisitive about Layer2 however with out prior data about Layer2 or Blockchain. We goal 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.

🗄️ 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 initiatives, 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 ignored when discussing rollups. By design, rollups are required to make information out there with a purpose to confirm state transitions or state roots; nonetheless, the strategy for this publication varies, and should embrace compressed information. There’s additionally variability within the compression methods 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 methods which may be used. Second, the venture will survey present rollups to analyze the approaches which are really utilized in observe. Third, the venture will consider approaches proposed or used throughout comparable methods and try to establish why a selected method is used. Lastly, the venture will use the insights collected with a purpose to counsel new approaches for compression of rollup information and pose open issues to the group.

• 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 methods. The primary evaluations in contrast layer 1 blockchains similar to Algorand, Solana and Diem and will likely be revealed 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 this venture, we goal to ship a high-quality set of Dashboards that assist allow information scientists, researchers, and all group members to higher perceive Layer 2 Exercise
  • We’ll combination information throughout Layer 2 networks leveraging sources similar to Dune, L2Beats, Santiment, CoinGecko, Github, Discord, and, in lots of circumstances, instantly from the venture APIs/RPCs.
  • We’ll clear and set up this information to offer a collection of shows that may enable the group to visualise adjustments throughout key L2 metrics (e.g. tps, lease paid to Ethereum, development in TVL, day by day lively addresses, new addresses, complete addresses, charges paid, and developer exercise primarily based on GitHub affiliated repo commits).
  • We goal 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 investigate 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 schooling.

📊 Knowledge Visualization

• Quantstamp – Again-Finish API Commonplace for L2 Block Exporers
  
  • This venture will clearly outline properties {that a} block explorer ought to implement with a purpose to be thought-about feature-complete within the common layer two setting. Moreover, our objective is to suggest and specify a regular 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 may plug-and-play reusable with all of the layer 2 networks that help 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 venture that could possibly be accomplished by an skilled staff throughout a weekend hackathon. Our objective will likely be to additionally outline a regular 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 doubtlessly even decentralized. The venture 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 consumer can visualize and navigate by means of in a straightforward means, offering the mandatory infrastructure to scale Ethereum.

🧮 Cryptography and Zero-knowledge proofs

• Zhe Ye, Ujval Misra, and Daybreak Music (College of California at Berkeley) – Specular
  
  • The most well-liked optimistic rollups (ORUs) right this moment, Arbitrum and Optimism, try to increase present Ethereum shopper software program (Geth) to help 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 method (1) precludes the trust-minimized, permissionless participation of a number of Ethereum shopper packages, magnifying monocolture failure danger; (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 centered 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 help 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 investigate 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 just conjectured. Moreover, we imagine that in some circumstances 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 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 listing or a BLOB of an index is modified); and how one can 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 may have a optimistic affect on the ecosystem. We recommend keeping track of them!