Layer 2 Group Grants Winners

The Privateness & Scaling Explorations group is happy 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 acquired 130+ proposals and thank every challenge for taking the time to use.
The wishlist compiled sought purposes 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 funds from an preliminary 750k USD to a complete of 948k USD.

The awarded purposes share per class:

Grantees

We congratulate the 22 grantees awarded and current their challenge 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 challenge will create an in depth safety framework for distinctive options of rollups. They need to set up a basis for fundamental greatest 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 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 method for a bunch 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 objective of this challenge 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 purposes 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. In consequence, Layer 2 customers pay their portion of the main-net gasoline prices when executing transactions. Layer 1 gasoline will be >25,000x costlier 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 scale back transaction prices to work together with in style protocols.

• Testinprod – Layer1.5

  • Layer 1.5 permits anybody to launch their very own Layer 2 by offering simple instruments. It offers a straightforward software that launches your personal Layer 2 with essential 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 gasoline costs obtainable 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 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 challenge 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 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 Training

• 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 deal with 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 at no cost, whereas supporting the completely different initiatives that innovate on this house, whereas sustaining additionally its core neutrality.

• Bruce Xu – MyFirstLayer2
  
  • This might be an open-source, community-driven, and academic challenge. This might be a web site for folks interested in 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.

🗄️ Information Evaluation

• Blockscout – Blockscout Block Explorer
  
  • An open-source block explorer is at the moment wanted for the L2 ecosystem. Blockscout is already utilized by many L2 initiatives, 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 commonly missed when discussing rollups. By design, rollups are required to make information obtainable with the intention to confirm state transitions or state roots; nevertheless, the tactic for this publication varies, and should embrace compressed information. There’s additionally variability within the compression methods used. This challenge will discover using compression within the rollup setting. First, the challenge will explicate locations the place compression is used and doc the methods that could be used. Second, the challenge will survey current rollups to analyze the approaches which are really utilized in follow. Third, the challenge will consider approaches proposed or used throughout related techniques and try to determine why a specific strategy is used. Lastly, the challenge will use the insights collected with the intention 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 techniques. The primary evaluations in contrast layer 1 blockchains akin to Algorand, Solana and Diem and might be revealed quickly in a peer reviewed worldwide convention (Eurosys). This challenge goals at including layer 2 blockchain techniques to the Diablo benchmark and to make use of it to supply the primary intensive and reasonable benchmark analysis of layer 2 blockchain techniques on a worldwide deployment.

• Web3-data – Layer 2 Exercise Monitoring & Comparability Suite
  
  • By way of this challenge, we goal 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 akin to Dune, L2Beats, Santiment, CoinGecko, Github, Discord, and, in lots of circumstances, instantly from the challenge APIs/RPCs.
  • We are going to clear and arrange this information to supply a collection of shows that may permit the neighborhood to visualise adjustments 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 based mostly on GitHub affiliated repo commits).
  • We goal 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 permit us to research and visualize the utilization patterns on a excessive stage and likewise present the “hottest” good contracts within the completely 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 challenge will clearly outline properties {that a} block explorer ought to implement with the intention 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 best situation, the usual would flip the event of the core of a brand new block explorer right into a challenge that may very well be accomplished by an skilled group throughout a weekend hackathon. Our objective might be to additionally outline a regular 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 challenge 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 consumer can visualize and navigate by means of in a straightforward method, 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 preferred optimistic rollups (ORUs) at the moment, Arbitrum and Optimism, try to increase current Ethereum consumer software program (Geth) to help 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 selected 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 massive and sophisticated trusted computing base (TCB) that’s tough 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 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 help 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 Methods
  
  • 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 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 challenge 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 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 easy methods to construct the proof/verification system if the BLOBs and the commitments are continually modified (e.g., new BLOBs are appended to the checklist or a BLOB of an index is modified); and easy 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 proud of the standard of candidates for this grants spherical. The analysis and work they produce could have a constructive affect on the ecosystem. We advise keeping track of them!