Overview and Key Findings of the 2020 R&D
CEL’s wrap-up of 2020, and what’s ahead in 2021
What we have done in 2020
Until last summer, Cryptoeconomics Lab’s R&D team had been researching Plasma and implementing Plasma Cashflow since the team was formed in 2018. At the end of 2019, we were endowed with a grant from the Ethereum Foundation (through Ecosystem Support Program) and Tezos Foundation and received enormous support both financially and non-financially. We would especially like to express our deep gratitude to Tas Dienes from EF and Charlie Wiser and Marco Schurtenberger from TF, who supported us throughout the program.
As a result, in July 2020, we were able to release 1) ‘Gazelle’, L2 dapps framework implementing Plasma Cashflow, 2) ‘Gazelle Wallet’ as a framework’s showcase app, and 3) CEL’s Plasma block explorer on Kovan testnet. To check out the development and detail implementation, see the source code from the following links;
Ethereum
- Gazelle wallet：https://v1.testnet-wallet.gzle.io/
(Source code: https://github.com/cryptoeconomicslab/gazelle-wallet)
- Block explorer: https://explorer-gazelle.netlify.app/
(Source code: https://github.com/cryptoeconomicslab/gazelle-block-explorer)
Tezos
- Source code of smart contract: https://github.com/cryptoeconomicslab/ovm.tz
The vision we had for Plasma:
Through the Gazelle development, we wanted to create a world with a single giant Plasma Network
- that is L1 agnostic
- with CEL being a single operator, yet decentralized as much as the main chain
- in which individual developers can build scalable and secure dapps without hassle.
In order to achieve these qualities, there were particular things we were pursuing in our Plasma research;
- Secure L2 protocol design, first and the foremost
- Reusability between different layer2 constructions using the universal notation
- Standardization of dapps development through a framework
Our next path for R&D:
Without any further Plasma development, what path should we take next? We have been discussing as many expansions as possible. Candidates were naturally narrowed down to the L2 related R&Ds since we wanted to utilize the expertise we had already nurtured.
Now we can confidently announce that our next project will be on zk-rollup. As other teams are convinced of zk-rollup’s potential, we are also in love because zk-rollup offers short finality and higher safety compared to other L2 constructions.
Although zk programs are generally too enigmatic to casually start developing, we believe it would be a highly-demanded technology (if it were less difficult) in the future. Especially for particular applications, the aforementioned advantages over other L2 constructions will be make a huge difference. Therefore, we want to take an initiative to lower the difficulty of zk-rollup development.
Reflecting on the past, we won’t just go straight to developing a dapps-on-zk-rollup framework this time, but instead, we will carefully research its use case applications first this time. This is the most important lesson we have gained from our previous Plasma R&D; you need to have a solid understanding of popular dapps on L1. The crucial question for protocol R&D is which part of application logic could be moved to the new protocol, and what kind of protocol foundation is needed for the relocation. For example, how can you relocate Defi smart contracts, say the AMMs, with lots of token being locked in to Layer2 or ETH2.0? The answer still seems ambiguous. Or first things first, what would be the next popular dapps after DeFi and what are users’ actual “goal” using the dapps? Finding a clear answer to these questions, we can finally start developing the new L2 protocol. Therefore, we will conduct test development of DeFi apps first whether on L1 or L2 this time.
On top of that, we want to apply our L2 expertise to other public blockchains and expand the knowledge to other smart contract language developer communities. We believe Tezos is another great public blockchain that has its ethos solidly held in decentralization. Tezos’ development environment is evolving rapidly with more and more amendments adopted. We see the future of Tezos being a great zk-rollup development environment not so far.
Next action for zk-rollups
We have not yet initiated a concrete project, but have already sketched the rough design of our zk-rollup implementation on Tezos and completed corresponding tasks to lay a foundation. In fact, it’s more possible now to develop zk-rollups on Tezos since BLS12–381 related opcodes were added in the Edo protocol. Accordingly, we created a sample project in LIGO, which enables us to try out the new opcodes. We will inform you when we have a more solid implementation design and evident results of gas cost reduction from our zk-rollup. Of course, we are aiming to export all the deliverables (zk-rollup and its use-case applications) later and enable them to work on Ethereum as well.
We firmly believe that zk-rollup technology is still incredibly underrated. It should, and will gain more attention from dapps developers, hopefully after lines of our R&D releases in 2021, making it less intricate and a more attractive option to dapps developers.
To sum up, enabling more development options available, whether the constructions (Plasma, ORU, zk-rollups), or platform (Ethereum, Tezos), we have a much brighter future of dapps development ahead.
