Espresso Systems: tools & infrastructure for Ethereum & beyond

We started out two years ago with the mission of making blockchains useful for the mainstream. To us, that meant providing better options for builders and users when it comes to (1) their on-chain privacy and (2) the scale and performance they can expect, without sacrificing on the credible neutrality of the infrastructure.

Espresso Systems began with the idea of building a highly scalable, privacy-focused, decentralized L1 protocol. As we have built, we have become convinced that the world does not need us to build another L1. Rather, as of today, we are best positioned to achieve our mission by building for and within the Ethereum ecosystem. This insight has led us to take on two separate efforts, tackling privacy and performance respectively.

In service of providing better privacy options, we have developed the CAPE application, our smart contract system that enables custom configurations of transaction-level privacy. CAPE can be deployed on any EVM chain. We are in the process of bringing it to mainnet.

When it comes to performance , rollup projects across the Ethereum ecosystem are now solving the scaling problem every day. Where we come in is in helping them avoid trade-offs. We support rollups in decentralizing their sequencer components to deliver on credible neutrality, security, reliability, and interoperability without sacrificing performance.

As a team, we are also glad to build, maintain and contribute to open source developer tools through our Jellyfish cryptography library, as well as share research breakthroughs on privacy and scaling for the benefit of the industry, as we have done with VERI-ZEXE and Hyperplonk.

Espresso Systems is building the tools and infrastructure to provide more safe, open, and performant options for interacting on-chain, starting with issues of privacy and performance in the Ethereum ecosystem.

Look out for updates on CAPE and our privacy efforts soon.

In the meantime, you can learn more today about our efforts on decentralizing rollups. In November, we shared our work on the Espresso Sequencer: a decentralized platform to support rollups in decentralizing. Now, we are sharing more about our goals, design principles, and how the Espresso Sequencer fits into the landscape of L2 components and architectures.

Read more in our post here: https://hackmd.io/@EspressoSystems/EspressoSequencer

And in our docs here: https://docs.espressosys.com/

There is a lot left for us to research and build and we welcome conversation, feedback, and collaboration from the community. You’ll find us discussing all this and more in the replies of Twitter threads and in the comments of forums like ETHResearch. Please join us in our Discord and on Twitter to chat with us about the proposals we have laid out here and the systems we have begun to build.