So we knew the agentic web was coming, but it really overtook our lives (and feeds) in no time! The evolution of AI agents just skyrocketed in 2024, propelled by the onset of superior AI language models, the demand for better automation via no-code platforms, and the adoption of secure computing environments such as TEE and AVS in the blockchain space. Well, given our expertise & our know-how of no-code DIY platforms, we channeled our in-house system security & infra expertise into the Agentic Web and introduced Autonome to the world. With protocols like Virtuals surpassing the $3B marketcap mark and AI16Z is over 1B, we’re on the edge of our seat and calculating the ever-growing possibilities…But let’s get back to this later.

Rollups, and restaking also got the red carpet treatment it deserved this year with the growing awareness of how it can be used to scale and expand Ethereum’s capabilities. In 2023, we were the only ones with a “rollup day” event at the NFT Factory in Paris but fast-forward to 2024, and it seems everyone got on the bandwagon — from Brussels to Bangkok. This was echoed on CT, headlines, events, community gatherings, podcasts, industry stats and was advocated for by Vitalik himself. Plus, with visionaries like Babylon signing on with us, we found so much untapped opportunity in how rollups can revolutionize crypto even beyond Ethereum! The next step is to now get more rollups to “Stage 2” of decentralization and trustlessness: the final step to maturity where they can be fully managed by smart contracts.

Our team has already begun to push the boundaries to achieve this, given that most rollups today are still in stage 0 or 1. Restaked rollup products like VITAL will contribute to this (scroll down for more…) along with more infrastructure integrations that help make rollups far more permissionless and secure.

Beyond infra, relationships this year were solidified. Long-time partners became pals. Each of our ecosystem partners has our heartfelt thanks in enabling rollup infra adoption. However I must deliver a personal, special thanks here to EigenLayer, whose restaking mechanism underpins our AVS-based restaked rollup products. In recognition of our continuous and on-going value to every part of the Eigen ecosystem, we’ve been the lucky and humbled recipients of a 1M EIGEN token grant from the Eigen Foundation — the entirety of which we trickle down to the AltLayer community this holiday season!

Because beyond all these tech achievements — you guys have been front and centre, and the heartbeat! Stakers, holders, builders, devs, supporters, Ottie lovers — we appreciate each and every one of you driving adoption forward and drawing in people from other ecosystems to show them what we’re all about!

I now recap 2024 so that we can enter the new year — grateful, bullish, motivated.

Milestones & Meteoric Ecosystem Growth

• AltLayer token (ALT) was launched on Binance on January 25, 2024
• We raised $14.4M in a strategic fundraising round co-led by Polychain Capital and Hack VC. Other investors include Breyer Capital, dao5, HashKey Capital, OKX Ventures, Primitive Ventures, Bankless Ventures, IOSG Ventures, SevenX, MASK, TRGC
• Restaking Takes off: The power of Restaked rollups (a set of three vertically integrated AVSs namely MACH, VITAL, and SQUAD) was unleashed this year, offering numerous benefits to all major rollup stacks such as better decentralization, security, liveness and interoperability, all while leveraging Ethereum’s trust network via restaking.

The reALT token was introduced to propel the restaking ecosystem. reALT is an auto-compounding ERC20 share token which captures the ALT staking contribution of a holder & accumulates the compounding rewards earned. This token is issued to users staking ALT in the main staking pool.

We’ve onboarded some fantastic projects this year bringing on a range of new use cases to the restaking world and accelerating its adoption. Cyber, GM Network, BirdLayer, Xterio, Hemera, GoPlus were among these. We now have experience launching AVSs for SocialFi, DeFi, gaming, AI Agent chains, consumer IoT & more..!

• MACH: We launched our faster-finality AVS product earlier this year, enabling support for Arbitrum One and Optimism Mainnet. This was followed by 4 other MACHs. Of the AVSs that we’ve launched this year, AltLayer has recorded an aggregate of $25B in restaked assets, and counting..! It is also noteworthy that the AltLayer-run operator is the second largest operator in terms of number of delegators, serving 18 AVSs. Significantly, AtLayer MACH was named among the AVSs supported by the Coinbase operator network.
• VITAL: The launch of our decentralized verification AVS tool has set sail earlier this year with the goal of helping more rollups reach “Stage 2” of their lifecycles.
• WIZARD: Mega-proud that we brought the first AVS-as-a-Service platform for builders in the EigenLayer ecosystem to the market. Wizard offers builders a simple tool to deploy and manage Actively Validated Services (AVS), drastically reducing the deployment and management time from months to mere minutes! Users are already enjoying a 10x faster and 100x easier experience than they would with a manual AVS deployment pipeline. In fact, GoPlus was the 1st security-focused AVS to be launched via Wizard!
• BLITZ: We introduced BLITZ as the first decentralized network secured by Bitcoin to serve Arbitrum Orbit chains. It provides Orbit chains with fast-finality by utilizing BTC as economic collateral for security via Babylon, providing crypto-economic security to the chains. In fact, our partner BirdLayer (formerly DODOChain) will be leveraging BLITZ to enable rapid cross-chain communication and liquidity transfer.
• AUTONOME: Undoubtedly one of the biggest 2024 reveals was Autonome: a platform that facilitates the building, deployment and discovery of verifiable AI agents. Autonome’s agents are a breed apart. They act with intent — unlike bots. They will be ever-evolving and intelligent, and will make decisions based on values and principles. Autonome will run on a sophisticated security system that guarantees verifiability so that your agents don’t go rogue. Powered by a “tamper-proof” trusted execution environment (TEE) mechanism, all agentic actions will be verified on-chain so that a user is never compromised! Since you don’t have 40 hours in a day, this will be a massive opportunity. Soon, your agents can be an extension of you! As an assistant, portfolio manager, social media content creator, videographer — and so much more!
• Accelerating Ethereum (and beyond): AltLayer joined the Optimism Superchain Collective to enable customization & deployment of application-tailored rollups on its Superchain, minimizing node management for developers. Our RaaS will help devs deploying via Superchain enjoy better performance, scale, and security!

In December, we also proudly supported top exchange HashKey as they joined the Superchain network. Our rollup infra will accelerate Hashkey Chain’s mainnet, expanding network capacity, and offering their users a superior, seamless experience on chain.

As partners of Solayer Labs, we will apply our expertise in restaking-powered rollups to scale and accelerate the world of Solana dApps.

Infrastructure Proposals

1. Published a proposal for stateless rollup clients, after seeing the rising popularity of app-specific rollups and their reliance on alternative DA layers (instead of Ethereum). It is implemented with our restaked rollup AVS product MACH to achieve optimized performance, security, and scale. Providing higher security and verifiability — this design streamlines rollup performance and security for both ZK and optimistic rollups.
2. We co-published a proposal to bring BTC-security to 1000s of rollups with Babylon. This paper presented the design of a decentralized verification layer for rollups secured by BTC. The design is an extension of AltLayer’s restaked rollups framework. More in the article above if you’re deep into infra building!
3. AltLayer and RISC Zero proposed a mechanism to bring on-demand ZK proofs to optimistic rollups. The idea is to upgrade fraud proofs in optimistic rollups with cryptographic ZK proofs, where proofs are generated only when there is a challenge. Unlike a full ZK rollup, where the operator needs to generate a ZK proof for every single state transition, the on-demand model will only demand a ZK proof when there is a challenge.

Global Branding & Community Engagement

• ALTLAYER ROLLUP DAYS — We co-hosted our flagship Rollup Day event with EigenLayer. We hit hotspots like Brussels, Paris, Hong Kong, Istanbul, Singapore and Bangkok! Drawing a massive and diverse crowd of devs, industry visionaries, C-suite, and ecosystem participants, we took the opportunity to shed light on concepts like restaking, AVSs, popular and upcoming rollup infra and its use cases, the Layer 2 ecosystem, and more! Next stop of our flagship event? The US with ETHDenver (Feb 2025)!

• Eigen Foundation offered AltLayer a grant of 1M EIGEN tokens in recognition of our past & ongoing contributions to the flourishing EigenLayer ecosystem (including Eigen Labs, EigenDA). and… we’ve decided to pay it forward! The entirety of the 1M EIGEN token grant has been committed to our community and will be disbursed to eligible candidates in two tranches. More here.
• Our community of 550,000+ Alters has consistently helped us spread the word on all-going AltLayer milestones, partnerships, developments, and events. We have brilliant ambassadors who drive 19 regional communities and run 9 multi-lingual X accounts.

Looking Ahead

We plan to keep developing and pushing our core product offerings around rollups, AVSs and expand our ecosystem on related products and services. Stay tuned on more partnership announcements.

2025 will undoubtedly be a year of foundation models, agents and related infrastructure. Foundation models are getting better by the day and they will have applications in better blockchain infrastructures as well as consumer facing products. Agents will navigate blockchains, apps, browsers, wallets, bridges and abstract most of these from end users.

Agents will become better programmers than humans, and dominate symbolic space such as mathematics and theoretical physics. Hard and unsolved problems will get solved. Knowledge will become more reachable. O-class models by OpenAI will make inference more important than training.

At the social layer, agents will have a voice in our social circles and some will enjoy KOL status. They will build their own communities, and will need the right communication rails.

As agents become pervasive, we believe a lot of key infrastructure will need to be built tailored for agents:

1. Verifiability of models and agents.
2. Communication rails for agents.
3. Infrastructure to easily compose agents.
4. Failsafe measures for rogue agents.
5. Super-optimized inference chips.

And for these reasons, we plan to work heavily in the AI-infrastructure space and help build some of the missing components.

There is a lot to build and ship in 2025.

See you on the other side!

Cheers,

YQ

AltLayer’s 2024: Hitting New Highs with Verifiable Agents from Restaked Rollups and AVS Wizard was originally published in AltLayer on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Hello all,

By engineering novel rollup infrastructure, forging strategic partnerships, igniting community interest with mega-popular digital campaigns, and traveling the world to educate and network, AltLayer’s team came together as a strong force of nature in 2023. We worked towards a shared vision to build a blockchain world that is friendly to hundreds of thousands of rollups, and we have made massive headway in this goal, I’m proud to say!

Before we wind down for the holiday season, I’d love to share some of our milestones with you.

One of our biggest announcements of 2023 actually came this week. We introduced restaked rollups along with our trusted partner EigenLayer. Designed to combat the gaps within the application-tailored rollups world by leveraging EigenLayer’s restaking mechanism — we are confident that this infra innovation will be revolutionary in promoting decentralization, security, interoperability for Web3 applications. If you’re among those wondering, how do restaked rollups actually work? Well, keep reading!

In other news, I’m proud to say that AltLayer was an instrumental player in enriching the modular ecosystem this year. Within our family, we added numerous infrastructure partners to our roster, as well as clients across DeFi, SocialFi, and gaming who now use our RaaS/restaking-based rollups. We now support key rollup stacks including Polygon CDK, Arbitrum Orbit, and Optimism’s OP Stack among others, and enable user access to these by making this world highly scalable.

Interest and response to rollups has grown significantly. This is evident in the numbers. According to a recent article by The DeFiant, rollup networks “have been a recurring theme this year, attracting more than $16B of assets to their chains.” Even in the case of AltLayer, our Altitude Phases I-IV, and the Dark Forest and Ottie 2048 gaming tournaments and demos, saw cumulative participation of 1M+ people. Across reports by Binance Research to Messari, AltLayer’s name comes up for its innovative RaaS design and contribution to the modular world.

A growing ecosystem

With strategic integrations under our belt, AltLayer’s support ecosystem is providing real-world value to its users. On the infrastructure front, our integration with other providers is playing an instrumental role in creating a sustainable and connected rollup space. These include doublejump.tokyo, Astar Network, Avive, Asmatch, Automata, Arbitrum, Celer, Celestia, Connext, Espresso, Radius, Optimism, Hyperlane, and Shutter.

We now support explorers such as Blockscout, Dora and SocialScan to ensure data accuracy and real-time availability for users. Our rollups are helping community work smoothly with SocialFi platforms like QuestN, Lemonade, and TaskON and with tooling that enhances and expedite their building experience like Sovereign SDK, Tally, ARPA-Randcast and more.

On the gaming front, we teamed up with game-optimized blockchain Oasys. We’re all set to leverage our RaaS to enable their game developers to rapidly and securely deploy dapps on Verses, their Layer 2 rollup.

Cometh is another one our prized partners in the space. We are supporting with their recently launched optimistic Layer 3 known as Muster, which is among the pioneering projects to utilize Arbitrum Orbit. Muster’s deployment aims to bring cost-effective and faster transactions, enhancing user flexibility, customizability, and overall convenience. We will manage the hosting, administration, and seamless integration of the necessary infrastructure within Cometh’s Muster Network. By harnessing the robust security features of Arbitrum AnyTrust, the rollup solutions spun up via Muster ensures reduced transaction costs without compromising the integrity of the game logic and the gaming experience.

Our rollups are also enhancing performance for other gaming partners like Polychain Monsters and Deri Protocol. 🔜Plus, an exciting new partnership that will offer more possibilities for Web3 gamers is just around the corner!

Introducing our refreshed website

Refreshed to reflect the core of what we do and envision for the future of rollups — we’re so proud to bring you the latest iteration of our website! Get a sense of our key products (Restaked rollups and RaaS), and the underlying infrastructure, explore our ecosystem, and hear what our clients have to say about us!

Bringing Restaked Rollups to all users with EigenLayer

We are delighted to bring to the market “restaked rollups,” built to address the current gaps in the application-tailored rollups world by leveraging EigenLayer’s restaking mechanism.

Restaked rollups in essence consist of three key services for app-specific rollups

⭐VITAL (AVS for decentralized verification of rollup’s state)

⭐MACH (AVS for fast finality)

⭐SQUAD (AVS for decentralized sequencing)

Together, these deliver a high degree of decentralization, better security,and interoperability across rollups deployed via AltLayer. It also leverages Ethereum’s trust network via EigenLayer’s restaking mechanism, making it a secure and optimized way to launch any rollup.

The network architecture driving restaked rollups is on the above doc and our website — give it a read to understand how it works! You can also refer to the below DeFiant article.

Building infra to level up the on-chain world

We are working with RISC Zero team to bring “on-demand” ZK fraud proofs to optimistic rollups. The key idea is to replace fault proofs in optimistic rollups by cryptographic proofs, whereby proofs are generated only when there is a challenge. Unlike a full ZK rollup, where the operator needs to generate a ZK proof for every single state transition, the on-demand model will only require a ZK proof when there is a challenge.

Building on data-availability (DA) and interoperability options

AltLayer now supports Celestia’s DA layer as part of our rollup stack. Designed and optimized for data availability and also offered as an off-chain DA layer, Celestia’s solution is both a scalable and cost-effective alternative to on-chain DA. Users can easily opt for Celestia (among others) as they spin up a rollup using our launcher.

We’ve also added NEAR’s DA Layer to our rollup offering. Known for its strong validator network, this cost-efficient and secure option is sure to be a popular choice for our rollup users. Additionally, EigenDA launched its testnet a few weeks ago and we extended our support for it via our RaaS.

Want to enjoy superior rollup performance? Try out one of these and witness the power of a modular world in a few clicks.

A new world for gaming and immersive experiences

🎮We launched TURBO this year, a rollup stack specially designed to bring the vision of Autonomous Worlds to life. TURBO’s features have been designed to bring the on-chain gaming experience to par, and even exceed what we currently see in existing Web2 infrastructures. Its features (such as near-instant confirmation time zero-gas, horizontal scaling and more..) help build interactive digital experiences that are scalable, low latency and seamless.

Not only that — Turbo was stress-tested in the funnest way possible! Our Altitude campaign leveraged TURBO for three FOCGs, and we saw some fantastic results.

👉Ottie 2048: https://altitude.altlayer.io/

👉Loot Royale: https://rolluproyale.netlify.app/

👉Cellula: https://play.cellula.live/user

Alters on the road

This year, we wanted to increase our presence in key global events for three reasons; (a) to draw awareness to the highly evolving rollup space and the technologies that are powering its way forward; and (b) forge meaningful global connections with key builders, thinkers, academics and VCs that were influencing the L2/modular and rollup space, and © spotlight our in-house technical expertise and speakers.

We hosted three big events across Asia, Europe and the Middle East.

🇫🇷AltLayer Rollup Day — PARIS (on the sidelines of EthCC)

🇸🇬AltLayer Rollup Day — SINGAPORE (on the sidelines of Token 2049)

🇹🇷Rollup Frontier Day — ISTANBUL (on the sidelines of Devconnect)

These widely popular events welcomed 50+ speakers and 1000+ attendees.

Our community has been encouraging as always, watching over and helping promote our milestones through the year. We have surpassed the 500,000 follower mark on X, and have a flourishing, active Discord community of over 700K developers and enthusiasts.

2024 has lots in store!

We roll into 2024 with these priorities in mind:

Restaking all the way: We recently announced our partnership with EigenLayer on a new category of Actively Validated Service (AVS) called “Restaked Rollups”. Restaked rollups are a novel framework that aims to bring restaking to all major rollup stacks to provide several useful auxiliary services to app-specific rollups.

Restaked rollups are essentially a set of three vertically integrated AVS created on-demand for a given rollup that works with any underlying rollup stack. These AVS, in conjunction, will offer three key services to rollups:

✨ Verification of rollups’ state correctness (Product named VITAL)

✨ Faster finality (Product named MACH)

✨ Decentralized sequencing (Product named SQUAD)

2024 will be a year of restaked rollups for us in terms of building out a private testnet, followed by a public testnet that will allow external operators to join and offer their services to rollup builders. If you are an AVS operator or more generally validator in the space, please reach out to us so that you have early access to the code when it becomes ready. We would also appreciate any feedback that can help improve the overall operator journey.

More stacks and more modularity: We also plan to support non-EVM rollup stacks such as WASM/Move rollups or Bitcoin rollups in 2024. This will be in addition to integrating other modular stacks, for example, EigenDA with Arbitrum Orbit, Celestia with Arbitrum Orbit, Avail with Op stack and others. One of our goals for 2024 is to integrate with as many modular components as possible to give developers flexibility and open opportunities to build useful consumer-grade products.

Collaborations, Collaborations & Collaborations: We have been closely collaborating with several dev teams in the space for example OP Labs, RISC Zero, EigenLayer. Some of the work has been made publicly while others are still a WIP. We hope to make some of these collaborations public in 2024. We firmly believe that collaborations creates net good for the space and helps developers solve problems with wide impact. We also plan to engage with newer teams that are building dev tools, infrastructure and other solutions that target developers or improve the existing protocols in meaningful ways.

Team Growth: We also plan to grow the team on both technical and non-technical fronts. We plan to hire several devops, BD and growth people to help expand our capabilities. So, if you have the passion to work in a fast-paced environment and would like to leave a mark in the space, come and join us.

Events & Outreach: We plan to have a presence at Devcon SEA and select ETH Global events. You can count on another Rollup Frontier Day as well, given the lightning-fast pace of the industry and research!

To close off, your support gives all of us at AltLayer great encouragement to keep going the extra mile in innovating, sharing, and learning. We couldn’t have done it without you. After all that’s been achieved — it’s no wonder that I am filled with gratitude and excitement for what is yet to come as the L2 and modular market picks up further in 2024.

Happy holidays to you and your families, and see you next year!

Cheers,

YQ

Founder, AltLayer

AltLayer’s 2023 in Review: from RaaS to Restaked Rollups was originally published in AltLayer on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

It was an eventful summer for AltLayer and the modular blockchain world. Our rollup launchpad has facilitated the launch of 400,000+ flash layers to date, and counting. Growth is continuing on this trajectory!

The surging interest is evident in just how much more airtime concepts like “rollups,” “scalability,” “layer 2,” and “modular” have gotten in the last 12 months. During this time, links to the world of rollups have been solidified and welcomed more people than ever before. VCs, incubators, and other blockchain firms have understood the value that rollups will unlock for web3 builders.

A case in point is Binance Labs, which announced a strategic investment in AltLayer this month. We’re thrilled that Binance Labs sees the potential of game-changing innovation at the deepest infrastructure level. Given persistent issues around centralized sequencers and the fragmented liquidity and userbase in most rollups, they found our application-tailored rollups, powered by our Beacon Layer, to be a very promising solution.

Given the prevalence of age-old issues in monolithic blockchain models, there is much appetite for change, and the modular movement is on track to big success! In fact, we’re thrilled to share that Automata Network has teamed up with us to build Automata 2.0, the first modular attestation layer 2 for the Ethereum ecosystem. Our RaaS offers a simple and convenient pathway to deploy Automata 2.0. The modular design of AltLayer’s optimistic rollups is perfect for aggregating machine attestations. What’s more — Automata Network enables restaking for verifiers via our integration with @EigenLayer! With our RaaS platform, Automata will minimize its operating costs, while enjoying security, scalability, and extensibility.

And speaking of EigenLayer, Altitude Phase III welcomed thousands of users, inviting them to launch a Flash Layer and secure it with EigenLayer’s restaking mechanism. This integration enables the decentralization of the sequencers that operate a Flash Layer. This level of customization is a great illustration of what rollups offer in terms of options and scalability in comparison to sidechains or other add-ons. 380,000+ flash layers were created just in this phase of the campaign.

It’s clear that the foundational core of AltLayer — i.e: our home-grown infrastructure has impressed most devs in the space. This summer, we also took the opportunity to strengthen our pillars, i.e: the features that would make RaaS usable, even more modular, convenient and fast. These pillars prioritize interoperability, the inclusion of SDK/API toolkits with SDKs/APIs, and other integrations that make rollups user-friendly for a range of products and use cases- be it gaming, DeFi, socialFi or NFTs.

As part of this focus, we teamed up with Hyperlane to bring permissionless interoperability to our ecosystem. Apart from native rollup bridges, projects using the AltLayer stack can also choose Hyperlane for bridge services and inter-rollup communication. AltLayer is actually one of the first to directly integrate Hyperlane within our platform! Thanks to this, developers can easily build and deploy “Interchain Applications” — dApps that span multiple blockchains. More adoption, more usability!

We also made a splash announcing AltLayer has extended support for the OP stack, the Optimism Collective’s open-source, modular codebase, within its rollups suite. This enables dApps to spin up a customized OP Stack through our no-code rollup platform in just a few clicks, enjoying a hassle-free deployment experience. AltLayer will manage all node infrastructure for projects so that developers can focus on their core business and technical operations. The OP Stack integration opens up tremendous possibilities within the Ethereum space — and beyond. This fits like a glove into our interoperability focus, and will contribute to the creation of a cohesive and accessible Layer 2 ecosystem.

Via our integration with Singularity, the end-to-end payment solution for appchains, we are enabling a smooth user onboarding & payments experience for appchains and rollup-based dApps. With ARPA , the powerhouse behind Randcast, a secure on-chain verifiable random number generator (RNG). We will integrate ready-to-use RNG tools within our rollups to speed up the builder journey.

We upgraded our rollup stack to include SDK/APIs, which will reduce the complexity of working directly with low-level blockchain protocols dramatically. Unlike the traditional approach, which requires deep expertise across subjects like consensus mechanisms, fraud proofs, and more — SDKs enable devs to focus their efforts on application logic while still fully customizing the underlying execution environment.

To this end, we also integrated Sovereign SDK into our RaaS, their toolkit is a developer treasure trove. Providing customizability; trustless bridging; amazing sequencer performance; and seamless portability between optimistic/ZK, DA layers, an ZK proof system choices — Sovereign helps devs code in familiar languages in a secure way without any worries! All this within the deployment framework offered by our rollup launchpad promises to take applications to the market (and the moon!) faster than ever before.

Another gadget within our “toolkits” pillar? This comes by way of an integration with Tally, the on-chain DAO Governance Tool. This plug-and-play UI and API helps users add voting protocols, treasuries, and public goods to their application via our rollups. If you want to create autonomy among your users, this is a great addition!

Of course — technical upgrades and additions will be constant! We continue to find ways to fortify our rollups-as-a-service products using not just home-grown modular tools, but via partnerships that better our products. An example of this is our work with Radius.

Radius’ expertise in encryption-based sequencing provides a financially sustainable design for rollups, while helping rollups communicate within ecosystems easily!

To provide more DA options, we’re integrating Avail as a Data availability (DA) provider for our RaaS solutions. As blockchain goes modular, Avail’s DA layer is a great addition to our #rollup stack — enabling more decentralization and reliability for rollup users.

As I said — a summer to remember indeed! And we have a long way to go.

AltLayer’s Summer Highlights was originally published in AltLayer on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Hi Alters,

It’s the time of the year again where we take stock. We consider what we’ve learnt, extend gratitude, examine our accomplishments and wins — and then carefully place it in the rear view mirror so that we may focus on our future goals with a fresh energy, understanding and optimism.

It wasn’t just any year for me. It was Altlayer’s maiden voyage into the competitive L2 space. I’d put everything into this. Building Altlayer was a dream come true, but to realize this dream we had to weather just about everything from massive macro-economic shifts, unprecedented lows in the global crypto landscape, and as a result — a somewhat forbidding fundraising climate. But with my wonderful team — we managed it all and have a lot to be proud of.

I learnt that this ecosystem is not welcoming to plans that are set in stone. One needs to leave room for the unexpected, for the almost-instantaneous shifts in sentiment or demand. Plans and products needed to evolve, to be flexible.

So, we stayed flexible on the details but fixed on the vision to build an elastic execution layer that empowers Web3, and I think it was a good move. Notably — we successfully completed our seed fundraise in early 2022, during which we raised $7.2M from the best in the industry — including Polychain Capital, Breyer Capital, Jump Crypto, Balaji Srinivasan, Ryan Selkis, Gavin Wood and others.

Over the course of the year, we grew the team from 6 people to over 25 people. We onboarded experts with a range of technical and commercial skills. With a roster of impressive experience under their belt, these experts come to us from companies like Epic Games, Gemalto, Huobi, Parity, Bilibili, Standard Chartered Bank among others. Among the notable leadership hires, we recently announced blockchain veteran Dr. Amrit Kumar as Chief Operating Officer, who previously co-founded Zilliqa Research with me.

Technical Developments

We launched our devnet in Q3 2022, an EVM-compatible chain with fast finality (1–2sec) and high throughput (2,500 TPS) with bridging options available with Ethereum, Polygon and BNB testnets. Currently, the devnet receives an average of about 35,000 transactions a day from developers and users testing the network.

We also developed the first iteration of our dashboard that allows developers to have a no-code framework to spin flash layers. Developers can use this to deploy an execution layer for their businesses, and can do so via simple clicks as opposed to using low-level SDKs.

Stress-testing Altlayer’s Tech

We have been regularly testing our products in the wild in real world settings by running on-chain campaigns. The objective of these campaigns were two fold: a) dogfooding our products before we start doing active sales, b) as a marketing and proof point for our products. To this effect, we’ve organized several such events over the last few months.

1. The first event was organized to demonstrate the viability of our flash layer technology for NFT mint events. The event was set up as a free mint of POAP-style NFTs. We had a total of about 20,000 registered users for the event out of which 12,742 addresses were whitelisted to participate in the final mint event. Flash layer minting of NFTs worked like a charm and it was great to see that the execution was flawless.
2. We hosted a game called Dark Forest on a game-dedicated execution layer. Dark Forest is an on-chain MMO space-oriented game that makes use of zkSNARKs. The goal with this event was to showcase AltLayer’s capabilities in hosting a large-scale blockchain game that runs all its core game logic on-chain. We hosted the game for 2 days and we had over 300 players playing the game. The flash layer setup for the game seamlessly handled over 94,000 txns per day; txns equivalent to over 90% of daily txns on Optimism and over 60% of daily txns on Arbitrum. More details can be found in this blog post.
3. In Q4, AltLayer launched Oh Ottie! — an NFT collection featuring 2000 avatars of our cherished crypto mascot — the ever-loving, curious and engaging Ottie. The collection was designed to showcase how AltLayer’s superior flash layer functionality can boost a blockchain’s processing capacity on demand. Additionally, owners of these NFTs can benefit from future VIP token airdrops, premium access to merchandise and exclusive events, priority access to testnet validator program and a chance to contribute to social impact initiatives supporting otters in global zoos.

The month-long call-to-action campaign finished with the mint event, which recorded fantastic results.

• 35,000+ people whitelisted for the private sale.
• 1,200 avatars of Ottie were up for grabs and they sold out within 100 seconds!
• Seamless minting with native assets from Ethereum, BNB Chain and Polygon.
• Gasless Minting: The Ottie Flash Layer was designed to eliminate gas war. We pre-funded each whitelisted address with 1 ALT token (valueless gas token) for the mint event, and all the NFTs were minted on a ‘first-come, first-serve’ basis without any gas costs.
• This event also showcased the customized Flash Layer’s high throughput.The network peaked to about 55 TPS during the mint.

Oh Ottie! was not designed to be a revenue generation exercise, but rather an educational demo and community mobilization effort. Given that congestion during mint events and gas wars have been a common issue in crypto — this initiative presents a viable alternative to developers, the research community, Web3 enthusiasts and crypto natives. The collection has now settled on OpenSea — take a look!

Community Expansion

Thanks to various campaigns, we have bootstrapped a strong community centered around Twitter and Discord. Our Discord has grown through the year to 65,000 members. We have 16 language-based community groups and 24 ambassadors. Twitter is recording 77,000+ followers. Usage of other platforms like Telegram, Reddit and Instagram was also initiated.

Ecosystem Growth

We announced collaborations and partnerships with several projects of the likes of Automata, SkyArk, StraitsX, Chirpley, RNS.ID, 3UP, Fobo.club and Evolv among others. These projects would be able to benefit from the use of tailor-made scalability solutions and act as use cases for Altlayer’s layer-2 solutions . We look forward to seeing those results in 2023.

Marketing Milestones

Over the year, part of our goal was to educate people on the importance of execution layer-solutions such as ours and the jargon that comes with it. We want to impress upon people that something customizable, disposable and affordable can fuel the adoption of Web3 applications across gaming, NFTs, metaverse, etc. We are perpetuating these messages across Tier-1 blockchain press and key industry events. You’ll find examples of this in Forkast News, Crypto Coin Show, and Cointelegraph. We were also able to capture headlines of big announcements in Coindesk and The Block.

We decided to supplement this with educational and insight-driven content on blockchain architectures, zk proofs, appchains, security and decentralization in Layer 2 and more through our new Youtube show — Alt View. We will combine this with thought leadership, partnership announcements and technical updates and more. We’re far from done and will continue on this path in 2023.

Establishing our brand globally

Altlayer team were invited to give talks and share in panel discussions in top developer and trade crypto conferences this year. Ethereum’s Devcon in Bogota, EthCC, ETH Berlin, ETH Lisbon, ETH Vietnam and Messari Mainnet in NYC were among them.

As you might have gathered, developer education and engagement has been a priority for us, and one of the ways we’ve approached this is tailored events. In addition to connecting with devs at larger events, we chose to partner with Encode Club to organize bootcamps and hackathons to encourage projects to build on AltLayer.

Growing Recognition

Altlayer’s technology is slowly being recognized in industry circles for the value it brings to Web3. In fact, we have been invited to be an honorary fellow to the Celestia Modular Fellowship Programme. We were also selected as a winner in BNB Chain’s European Incubation Programme, where we were lauded for our innovation in infrastructure.

2023: What’s on the horizon?

We plan to release a public testnet early next year with the ability to stake test ALT tokens and provide economic security to the network. In order to achieve this, we are building a network called Beacon layer (inspired by ETH 2.0’s Beacon chain) that registers requests to provision different types of execution layers. The beacon layer instantiates an execution layer that meets the VM, security, decentralization and other requirements proposed in the request.

We also plan to build an easy-to-use, no-code framework to spin application-dedicated execution layers that remain highly customizable. We’ll do this through an intuitive dashboard that project owners can use to customize their execution layer and later instantiate it via simple clicks.

We will also be finishing our WASM-based single instruction fraud proof that can be executed on EVM chains. This will make AltLayer one of the very few optimistic rollup implementations today with a full-blown fraud-proof system.

Commercially, we will continue to foster meaningful ecosystem partnerships and collaborations to test and observe our flash layer and rollups in action. We will continue to support and educate developers who want to build using customizable execution layers. In the coming months, we will supplement our content pillars with thought leadership, educational and insight-driven content on blockchain architectures, zk proofs, appchains, security and decentralization in Layer 2 and more.

As we seek potential new Web3 applications of our product across gaming, social, prediction and derivatives market, the metaverse, and more — we welcome our global community of alters to reach out to us with suggestions, feedback, ideas and more. Our platforms are always open to you!

And finally — as we wrap up the year, we’d love to invite you to an AMA hosted by our leadership, planned for Wednesday — 21 December, 12 PM UTC (8 PM SGT). Please use this opportunity to ask us your questions and better understand what Altlayer is all about.

Until then — Happy holidays to you and your families, and may you have a wonderful start to 2023!

Cheers,

Dr. Yaoqi Jia, Founder, Altlayer

Altlayer Year-end Roundup: 2022 was originally published in AltLayer on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

It’s been a great pleasure to speak at EthCC and EthVC to talk about AltLayer and meet old friends. Compared to commercial events including a lot of sponsored talks, EthCC has a lot of decent tech talks with good quality from top projects to cover the latest progress and updates from Ethereum, Optimism, and etc. I’ve summarized the gists of talks from Layer 2s(Rollups).

EthCC invited four hot rollup projects to present, i.e., Polygon Hermez , Optimism, StarkNet, and Arbitrum. For Polygon Hermez, Jordi announced they open sourced the zkEVM. Apart from the source code, Hermez team also released some preliminary benchmark results. For an AWS machine with 64 cores, one 500k gas proof takes about 5 mins to be generated. Regarding the Ethereum test suit: Polygon Hermez can pass 3,881 out of 13,434(29%). Roadmap wise, the public testnet will be launched in Q3, 2022 and mainnet is scheduled around end of this year(TBH, it’s very ambitious.) There can be multiple places to improve, e.g., coding, math, GPU/FPGA and design. Overall, I think it’s a big move for zkEVM.

For Optimism, Karl is as energetic as always. He mainly shared about the rationale behind the Optimistic Vision(https://www.optimism.io/vision), and how the vision was formed from the DAO discussion in 2014, to Plasma group in 2017–2019, then Optimism Collective in 2019–2022. Scalability is still an issue and priority, so Optimism is built tosolve it. At the same time, they’re trying hard to build and sustain public goods.

For StarkNet, the founder Eli Ben-Sasson shared a lot on the token economics of the upcoming StarkNet tokens. The status of StarkNet today is that functionality is good, throughput is so-so, and decentralization has not much progress. The centralized parts are sequencer, prover, StarkNet software, Cairo VM, OS, etc. To fully embrace decentralization, StarkNet will issue tokens to community, investors, devs, and foundation(50.1%). The token utility includes governance, voting on OS upgrades, transaction fees, staking to be elected as prover, sequencer, etc. Fraction of L2 fees and minting will be rewarded to developers. To be dev-first, the tokens will be distributed to devs first.

Arbitrum’s A.J. Warner updated to the public with a lot of data points. On Arbitrum, the total bridge value is over 2.3B, its rollup market share is higher than 53%, over 35k contracts are deployed and the number of unique addresses is more than 1mil. Liquidity wise, the top3 tokens are 1.04B USD of Eth, 730mil USD of USDC, 230mil USD of USDT. They’re trying to help DAO migration to benefit from cheaper fees and instant confirmation, easy vote on chain and conduct treasury management. Meanwhile, they provide various finality choices based on the trust level of users and devs. Roadmap wise, Arbitrum is actively working on interactive fraud proof over WASM, running geth, advanced compression to reduce costs, less l1 call data, lower storage costs, etc.

Overall, it’s great to see so much progress on these rollup projects, no matter ZK approach or optimistic approach. To build a much more scalable Web3, we absolutely need more scaling solutions to scale the infrastructure for devs. In addition to general-purpose rollups, at EthCC I presented a new elastic and app-specific rollup approach at AltLayer, feel free to check it out how to provide burstable scaling solutions for dApps like NFT at https://medium.com/altlayer/nft-minting-made-scalable-part-ii-60ed39bbf419.

Substrate Delivery Partners. Delivery partner teams will provide their expertise to deliver blockchain solutions based on Parity’s Substrate blockchain framework. They are provided with training and technical help directly from the Parity team. This equips them with all the knowledge needed to build Substrate solutions.

Polkadot lightpaper. It includes more information on Heterogeneous Sharding, Transparent Governance, Cross-Chain Composability, etc.

Sub0 Online: the Substrate developer community conference on 28 April, 2020.

Centrifuge team is building Centrifuge chain on Substrate with zero-knowledge verifiers, non-fungible tokens and a financial supply chain network that can scale.

Nodel team launched a new Substrate-based blockchain, Arcadia, which is used to test new features for Nodle’s forthcoming blockchain for a global network of connected IoT devices.

Shyft Network to Build FATF-Compliant ‘Identity Layer’ for Polkadot. Shyft chain will enable Polkadot users to bridge identities from other networks, and from DApps built on other networks, to all Polkadot parachains.

Ink! Playground. It allows developers to compile Ink! contracts easily just by writing the code into the browser.

Web3MOOC, a “Blockchain Course for Beginners”. The course is entirely free and teaches blockchain from the very basics all the way up to building your own blockchain.

Polkadot Launch Announcement: COVID-19 Considerations. “While the next weeks and months are difficult to predict, we will continue to push forward with the immediate task of launching the decentralized Polkadot network. We wish you all the best in these trying times.”

T-Systems, a division of Deutsche Telekom, announced its blockchain Validation as a Service for Polkadot.

SendNodes Contest, a social media competition for spinning up Kusama nodes.

The path to Web 3.0 twists and turns, may our persistence pay off. — Yaoqi

Follow me on Twitter @jiayaoqi, to keep you posted on the latest information around Web 3.0.

This disclaimer informs readers that the views, thoughts, and opinions expressed in the text belong solely to the author, and not necessarily to the author’s employer, organization, committee or other group or individual.

Web3 Foundation is launching Web3MOOC: Web3 Foundation’s “Blockchain for Beginners” course on April 8 — a completely free course that teaches blockchain from the very basics all the way up to building your own blockchain.

Web3 Foundation Grants Program has reached the milestone of 100 signed grant contracts from 250 total applications throughout 2019. In the latest Wave 5, receipts are building bridges from Substrate to other networks, deployment & monitoring tools, developer tooling, wallets and new runtime modules, smart contracts & improvements.

The Polkadot Tech Stack is a subset of the Web 3.0 Tech Stack, which consists of the open-source technologies contributing to and relying on Polkadot, Kusama and Substrate. It is meant to be used for decentralized application (Dapp) development within many possible verticals including DeFi, Gaming, Provenance and many others.

The Thousand Validators Programme helps validators receive nominations from Web3 Foundation and Parity. Nominations will begin shortly. Kusama currently has 378 nodes running, with 180 validators producing and finalizing blocks.

Kusama has adopted “Lazy Payouts”. Lazy payouts requires 1 transaction per staker per era to claim rewards, where a staker can be either a validator or a nominator .The reason Kusama requires this is to avoid an attack where someone has several thousand accounts nominating a single validator.

The Berkeley Blockchain Xcelerator has announced its third cohort of startups, including four projects from the Polkadot ecosystem, i.e., Acala, Finoa, Nodle.io and Stake Technologies, who will join the 14 other startups in the spring 2020 program, selected from more than 140 applicants to the Xcelerator.

Kilt is building a self-sovereign credentialing system for Web 3.0 using Substrate. “Building on Substrate gives KILT the freedom to design this system in precisely the best way for the desired functionality while speeding up development by taking more general blockchain components from Substate’s ready-made modules.”

Ink! 2.0: a Rust-based eDSL for writing Wasm smart contracts, of which all structures and syntax are now pure Rust.

The path to Web 3.0 twists and turns, may our persistence pay off. — Yaoqi

Follow me on Twitter @jiayaoqi, to keep you posted on the latest information around Web 3.0.

This disclaimer informs readers that the views, thoughts, and opinions expressed in the text belong solely to the author, and not necessarily to the author’s employer, organization, committee or other group or individual.

Web3 Foundation joined the Cross-Chain Group as an initial steering committee member. “Cross-Chain Group (CCG) is a developer-focused working group dedicated to furthering the research, design, and implementation of cross-chain architecture throughout the blockchain ecosystem. As part of its involvement, Web3 Foundation will help oversee strategy for CCG initiatives.”

Web 3.0 Bootcamp: In addition to tech guidance from Parity/W3F, Web 3.0 Bootcamp also provides opportunities to access Wanxiang Blockchain Lab’s extensive suite of enterprise portfolios and partners in automobile, supply chain finance, etc, as well as investor network in China.

1st wave of Substrate Builders Program participants: “The Substrate Builders Program started the first cohort with 17 total teams already joining the program. The Builders Program identifies, supports and mentors select teams that are building Substrate-based blockchains.”

ink! 2.0: Write WebAssembly smart contracts with Rust-based eDSL.

Interlay will build PoC for Bitcoin-parachain to Polkadot. Interlay has been developing an in-depth technical specification for Bicoin-backed assets on Polkadot.

OAX Foundation is building it’s own Substrate-based chain to connect to Polkadot, aiming to remedy the limited utility of OAX ERC20 tokens. The parachain will support DeFi APIs and allow for the creation of UX friendly DApps. The current development of the OAX Parachain is focusing on four key features: ERC20 functionality, atomic swap, fee delegation and MultiTransfer.

Figment Networks got grant from Web3 Foundation and started to build Dot Hub, a staking explorer tool for Polkadot and Kusama networks. Dot Hub will include validator analytics, nominator events and alerts, and rewards reporting.

Polkassembly, an open-source platform to vote and discuss governance proposals, motions, and referenda for Kusama and Polkadot.

Web3 Sustainability: Survey of Ecosystem Funding Programs: Grants and non-foundation programs or on-chain funding are the present ways.

The path to Web 3.0 twists and turns, may our persistence pay off. — Yaoqi

Follow me on Twitter @jiayaoqi, to keep you posted on the latest information around Web 3.0.

This disclaimer informs readers that the views, thoughts, and opinions expressed in the text belong solely to the author, and not necessarily to the author’s employer, organization, committee or other group or individual.

Chainlink is set to become the first and primary oracle provider for all Substrate-based chains and eventually the entire Polkadot network. It has completed an initial integration with a Substrate-based blockchain.

ChainSafe is building Gossamer to provide Go framework for Substrate/Polkadot. Gossamer can create more secure networks by building additional Polkadot & Kusama node implementations and allow others to do the same for blockchains built with Substrate.

Celer Network will build its advanced State Channel Network technology on Polkadot, enabling nearly instantaneous, low-cost and trust-free transactions for Substrate-based chains.

Second State is building extensions to its WebAssembly virtual machine on Polkadot, the Second State VM (SSVM). With SSVM, Ethereum developers have more choices in deploying Dapps, and the Polkadot ecosystem can benefit from the Ethereum developer and tooling communities.

BisonTrails, Libra member and a blockchain infrastructure provider, will support node operators on Polkadot. It has been running validators on Kusama.

February Tech and Research Update from Web3 Foundation: Research work on “Availability and Validity” and “Assessing or incentivising correct mixing without authorities” was presented. Polkadot Wiki was updated, especially Learning Phragmén, Polkadot Builders Starter’s Guide, and the Treasury Guide.

Substrate Recipes is a cookbook of working examples that demonstrate best practices when building blockchains with Substrate.

Totem launched Meccano, an accounting blockchain built on Substrate.

Edgeware, a high-performance, self-upgrading WASM smart contract platform, launched its Substrate-based mainnet.

Acala Network will power cross-chain capable multi-collateralized and decentralized stablecoin, and serve as a DeFi building block for the Polkadot Ecosystem.”

One Thousand Validators Program: Web3 Foundation launches this program to bring more validators for Kusama.

The path to Web 3.0 twists and turns, may our persistence pay off. — Yaoqi

Follow me on Twitter @jiayaoqi, to keep you posted on the latest information around Web 3.0.

This disclaimer informs readers that the views, thoughts, and opinions expressed in the text belong solely to the author, and not necessarily to the author’s employer, organization, committee or other group or individual.

1. Web 3.0 Bootcamp. Web3 Foundation teamed up with Parity, Wanxiang Blockchain Labs and New Chainbase to launch Web 3.0 Bootcamp, a joint venture to accelerate Substrate blockchain projects in China and put them on the fast track to global adoption & viability.
   Web3.0 Bootcamp takes place over six months in two phases: a three-month acceleration phase followed by a three-month PoC phase. During the acceleration phase, Parity Asia will enhance teams’ expertise in Substrate architecture, parachain/parathread knowledge and architecture, product design, fundraising techniques, China and global legal compliance, and ecosystem development, as well as provide local talent bank access via monthly mentorship events.
   The PoC phase will be tightly focused on developing and pitching a PoC to Wanxiang Blockchain Lab’s network of corporate partners and entities primed for blockchain adoption.
   Teams to apply: Teams interested in using Substrate to build impactful solutions, e.g., independent chains, parachains, parathreads and bridged chains. Global teams who want to access the Chinese market and top-level corporations.
2. New Parity Ethereum release: v2.7.2-stable. Parity Ethereum v2.7.2-stable is a patch version release of parity-ethereum.
   Starting in the 2.7.x series of releases, parity-ethereum is switching to a single stable release track. As a result, any clients that currently receive updates from the beta track should switch to the stable track.
3. Individuals and entities can start to claim Dots. Polkadot Partnered with Coinbase to provide Dot claim via Coinbase Custody, too. The claim website is https://claims.polkadot.network/.
4. Web 3.0 needs a permissionless common standard for managing credentials in a way that respects user privacy and data sovereignty. Kilt protocol is making this necessity a reality building on Substrate.
5. Polkadot’s cross-chain message passing (XCMP) scheme allows parachains (aka shards) to send messages between each other with security guarantees in a trust-free way.
6. Web 3.0 is a worldwide digital factory: The evolution of the web is based on the user role. The scheme is simple: in Web 1.0, users could only view content, in Web 2.0, which includes social networks, users create content.
7. Over 10 teams joined the first OpenEthereum workshop, including Gnosis, Ethereum Foundation, ETCLabs, DappNode, POA network, Lab10 Collective, ETC Cooperative, OST, Lukso, Brave, Neufund, and several other independent developers and researchers.
8. A key-management startup Torus offering one-click logins for Web 3.0 decentralized apps (dapps).

The path to Web 3.0 twists and turns, may our persistence pay off. — Yaoqi

Follow me on Twitter @jiayaoqi, to keep you posted on the latest information around Web 3.0.

This disclaimer informs readers that the views, thoughts, and opinions expressed in the text belong solely to the author, and not necessarily to the author’s employer, organization, committee or other group or individual.