Milkomeda Announces Testnet Integration with Algorand Using Rollup Technology
We are thrilled to announce and share one of our latest developments: Milkomeda integration with Algorand is here via the A1 Rollup (private tesnet). This marks a key moment, with A1 as the first rollup outside of the Ethereum ecosystem.
This milestone is an exciting step which emphasizes the benefits of Milkomeda, a L2 protocol that provides EVM capabilities to non-EVM blockchains, as a multi-chain project which delivers rollup technologies to leading L1 networks.
Why is this important?
As many of you know, Milkomeda was born out of the vision of enhancing technological interoperability between leading blockchain ecosystems at the VM-level. Developing a solution which also supports scalability and leverages many of the underlying benefits of the L1 were core requirements which we aimed for.
As such we optimized our approach to enable developing and deploying rollups quickly while providing the most popular smart contracting language, Solidity, to these new ecosystems. This thereby enhances inter-blockchain interoperability, overall user experience, and developer traction all at the Layer 2 level.
At the end of March 2022, we launched a sidechain for the Cardano blockchain (Milkomeda C1). Today, Milkomeda C1 has more than 80k active wallets and during the first week live it passed 100million in TVL. We expect the Algorand implementation, Milkomeda A1, to garner similar if not better traction, especially as we now move into the rollup era of Milkomeda.
Why Rollups?
Rollups are an L2 solution that take advantage of the L1 blockchain for sequencing and potentially data availability. In other words rollups act as smart-contract powered ledgers on top of the base chain which utilize the base chain’s consensus protocol and validator set for security.
What Milkomeda innovates on compared to existing rollup solutions is the fact that our rollups are considerably more interoperable. Without the hard requirement of fraud or ZK validity proofs, Milkomeda rollups can be developed and released considerably faster which specifically thrive in an environment where the L1 has a different VM than the rollup. With Algorand, this is explicitly the case, which would classically require an order of magnitude of more work to integrate.
As such Milkomeda has a distinct edge when expanding into new ecosystems. This is exemplified by the fact that the A1 rollup will likely be the first EVM rollup deployed in production outside of the Ethereum ecosystem, and specifically on a non-EVM powered L1.
What about data availability?
Data Availability is the concept that if the set of actors in a p2p protocol (like a blockchain) cannot access a piece of data (ex. transaction data), then that transaction cannot be verified and the chain can run into an inconsistent state. In the context of L2 solutions such as rollups, this is extremely important because if any transaction in the rollup history is not available, we run into the problem that we know something took place, however we don’t know what happened.
This means that if we arrive at such a state, even though the underlying L1 finalized the sequencing, no one knows what the latest state of the rollup is. In other words, if this happens the rollup fails; thus making data availability a vital component of any rollup implementation.
Milkomeda A1 will be relying on Algorand itself for data availability, meaning that there will never be a disjoint between sequenced batches and the availability of those batches. In order to support arbitrarily large sized batches, we had to innovate and come up with a novel Merkelized Batching approach that allowed us to take advantage of the design of Algorand while overcoming transaction size constraints.
Conclusion
Achieving this milestone marks the official start of the rollup phase of Milkomeda. Though A1 is currently in private testnet, the fact that it is running live with the ability to move Algo from Algorand Testnet to A1 to interact with the very first EVM contracts ever in the Algorand ecosystem is truly a thrilling experience.
We are hard at work addressing all of the bugs, edge cases, and extra pieces of tooling and infrastructure needed to enable A1 to move from private to public testnet in the coming future.
In the meantime we will keep the community up to date as we make significant steps of progress. We encourage everyone to watch our latest video where Robert Kornacki and Nicolas Arqueros go in depth on what you’ll need to know about the Milkomeda A1 rollup:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1UtxQoEPd_o&t=3s
About Algorand:
Algorand is unleashing scalability, fusing TradFi x DeFi, and accelerating global sustainability.
Check Algorand’s official website and whitepapers.
About Milkomeda:
Milkomeda delivers EVM compatibility to the leading Layer 1 ecosystems by offering the most popular smart contracting language, Solidity, while enhancing inter-blockchain interoperability, user experience, and developer traction, all at the Layer 2 level.
Website: https://www.milkomeda.com
Twitter: https://twitter.com/milkomeda_com
