Dear Optimism Badgeholders, here’s what we’ve been up to at L2BEAT over the past 6 months

Krzysztof Urbański
L2BEAT
Published in
12 min readNov 24, 2023

The third round of Retroactive Public Goods Funding is already open, and we’re in it! We wanted to share what we’ve been able to bring you between the last round and now, and with it help you assess our impact. First things first though, so let’s start with some background.

A little history

The previous round of the RPGF was a defining moment for us. At the time, we were deep in thought about the future of L2BEAT — how to sustain its existence on the one hand, and how to expand the team to be able to develop all the cool features we had in mind on the other.

We thought about various commercial products based on the open-source work we’ve been doing that could provide the cash flow we needed to cover our expenses. With already limited resources, any more resources allocated to those commercial ideas meant taking them away from our main thing. Moreover, we felt that what we were building in the public domain was so much more important, needed and impactful that deep down we just wanted to focus on that. But we still had to pay the bills, and if we were going to even think about expanding the team, we had to find a model to fund it.

And then came the RPGF Round 2 results. We were the second biggest recipient and this opened our eyes to what we should do. To be clear, even such a big RPGF allocation does not secure our runway for a long time. But the monetary value of this reward was only one aspect. More important was the signal it sent.

The community values what we do. And if we continue to deliver value to the community it will find ways to reward us for it. So we decided to focus solely on producing public goods that are consistent with our self-defined mission to be an independent and impartial watchdog that provides on-chain transparency.

So if you are a badgeholder, please consider including us in your allocation and on the lists that you create so that others can learn about us and about what we do. And if you want to learn more about what the last RPGF helped us to accomplish, follow on!

What have we achieved since the last round?

In this summary, we decided to focus only on things that we have delivered since the last round of RPGF concluded. If you would like to see what we covered back then, don’t hesitate to check this short video:

https://twitter.com/l2beat/status/1637882570313551873

One thing that is easy to see by comparison, is how much more we were able to deliver in just half a year. That’s because thanks to RPGF and other support we were able to almost double our team. But enough talking, let’s dig into the features.

L2BEAT website

Risk Rosette

Technically speaking, this one is partially in the scope of the last round, as we shipped this feature just before the RPGF2 vote. But since then it turned out to be a huge success and something that was shared all over crypto Twitter. It made it easy to compare the risk profiles of different projects and clearly show where certain projects need to improve. And it works! We know from project teams reaching out to us directly, that some of them have made it their goal to achieve the “L2BEAT green pizza”.

Stages

When Vitalik published his post about “Proposed milestones for rollups taking off “training wheels” on Ethereum Research, we knew that we needed to include this metric on our website.

But easier said than done. In order for this assessment to be meaningful it needed to be accurate. And for that, we needed to re-review almost all the projects to fact-check for some statements related to stages assessment (like the time that users have to exit before the upgrade happens) and make sure that we monitor these parameters so we are notified when they change.

But that’s not all! If you look at the discussion below Vitalik’s post, you’ll see that his proposed framework doesn’t necessarily fit all rollups out of the box. So we had to work on the framework definition itself, consulting with the various parties affected by it. It was not an easy task, to say the least.

It took us almost half a year from the start to the delivery but it was well worth it. Our stage assessment has become the de facto industry standard, and we know for a fact that projects take it into account when discussing priorities for their roadmaps. The work here is far from over as we will need to fine-tune this framework in the future, but it’s a good step toward a more secure rollup-centric future for the Ethereum ecosystem.

TVL Rework

In the old days, when calculating the TVL for any given L2 solution, we only looked at the funds locked in the bridge on Ethereum because we didn’t know how to really treat the L2-originated assets. We made an exception for L2 native project tokens (esp. OP and ARB) as they were simply too significant to ignore, but we did it with some doubts and still not sure how to handle all those assets on L2s. But we knew this was an elephant in the room and that we would have to address it one day.

And then Circle announced that they were going to natively mint USDC on L2 chains. So that was it, from now on it was impossible to push it further, and we had to rethink how we count L2 TVL, especially L2 assets.

And we did. We have come up with our definitions of different L2 token types and we explained our thinking thoroughly in this article (https://medium.com/l2beat/redefining-total-value-locked-for-l2s-756160602747). We have added a separate page detailing the composition of L2 value locked and we expanded the product details page to include this breakdown. Now you can understand much better what the L2 TVL really means and where it comes from.

Filters

When we started, there were just a few projects listed on our website, as there weren’t that many L2 projects to cover. Since that time our list grew to almost 60 scaling solutions and 80 bridges. It became quite overwhelming and sometimes hard to distill the information needed. That’s why we added filtering that allows us to not only narrow down the list but also adapt the TVL displayed. You want to check the TVL of all the OP Stack chains? No problem! Only the Stage 1 ones? We got you covered!

Little thing on the front, quite some work on the back, but gives a lot of joy!

State derivation

One of the requirements for Stage 0 rollup is the existence of node software capable of reconstructing state from L1 data. For a while, we just assumed that every project had such software and that everyone could use it. But then we realized that we shouldn’t just trust that they do, we should actually verify it and describe how it works to make sure that if there’s an actual need to do it, you can do it.

Now, on our detailed project pages, you can read about node software, data format, genesis state, and more. And for those projects that have node software available, you’ll be able to navigate directly to its source code. As you should be able to do.

Liveness

Last but not least, something that we’ve been ideating on for a long time as well and we’re super proud to finally release it. Liveness check.

Liveness is one of the most important properties of distributed systems — it guarantees that the system is actually processing transactions. For L2s liveness means that the sequencer and the prover are online and functioning and that there are mechanisms in place that allow the user to exit with their funds.

On our website you can check both Batch submission and State updates. So you’ll be able to see how often L2 transaction data or state roots make their way to the L1. On top of that, we’re showing a list of anomalies for the past 30 days.

Enough talking, simply go have a look at it!

Governance section

Okay, that wasn’t the last thing, there’s a little cherry on top. As we become more and more involved in various governance systems, we decided to make public what drives our involvement, what are the values we hold, and what are the goals we seek to achieve through our involvement.

You can read all of this and more on our Governance subpage. We’ll be updating this page with more content and our activity threads so you can always see what we’re up to.

Tooling

Project discovery

One of the most important parts of our backend infrastructure, not visible to most, is our project discovery tool. It’s a fully open-source & free software that allows us to stay up to date with all changes in each L2 smart contract system. It starts with a single smart contract and explores all its components and dependencies, retrieving their configuration parameters. That’s how we make sure the information on our website is up to date. It’s also highly configurable, so you don’t end up browsing the entire blockchain.

Having said that, it should come as no surprise that we put a lot of sweat and tears into it.

  • we recently extended our tool with sophisticated Safe multisig modules tracking, which is essential to understand who can do what in terms of multisig protected systems
  • we’ve added history tracking that we store for later use (stay tuned, as this lays the groundwork for a big feature sometime in the near future)
  • and soon-ish our tool will start tracking not only the L1 contracts but also L2 contracts so you will have the whole overview in one place

As you can see, this is a beast with a huge potential to be used in different contexts. And we haven’t said our last word on it.

Update monitor

One of the most obvious examples of our discovery tool’s usage is the update monitor. If you head to the #contracts-monitoring channel on our public discord, you can see that each hour we are running our discovery tool against the configuration currently displayed on our website to see if it hasn’t changed. You should monitor this channel if you want to be almost instantly informed when your L2-of-choice upgrades its contracts or updates the exit delay parameters for example.

BYOR

While we focus a lot on analyzing existing projects, nailing the basics down is also important. BYOR, which stands for Build Your Own Rollup, is our educational initiative to create a minimal implementation of a (currently sovereign) rollup with contracts, node software and a frontend. And because the code is small and easy to understand it is perfect for someone to go over in a weekend to understand the basics of how to build it yourself.

Earl.js

Not all our work can center around rollups. Some work is one level detached, because it is the infrastructure that allows us to analyze the rollups, like the discovery tool. And some work is two levels detached, because it is the infrastructure that allows us to write better software. Earl falls into that category as a library we have built that makes writing assertions in TypeScript easier. Similarly to everything else that we do it’s open source and available for anyone to use.

Governance

We’re still in the “wandering around” phase of DAO governance, especially L2 governance, and we’re striving to “figure out” how L2 DAO governance should work. What does it mean to be a delegate in the L2 DAO? What should such a delegate do? What should we expect from them? How can we hold delegates accountable? How can delegates know if they’re doing the right things on behalf of those who have delegated tokens to them?

We don’t know all the answers to these questions, but we’re sure that the only way to search for them is to have regular open discussions with those most involved — community members. That’s why we’ve set up regular Office Hours for each DAO we’re involved in and we’re available every week for at least an hour to discuss DAO-related stuff. For Optimism we are available every Tuesday at 3pm UTC on Google Meet.

These discussions have already proven to be very insightful, covering topics ranging from specific grant programs we are involved in, to the delegate compensation framework, to deep dives into the Law of Chains and The Future of Optimism Governance.

We’re committed to continuing them, so don’t hesitate to join us! Every week on Tuesday, no preparation needed, no stupid questions, and even if you don’t have any, just come by and let’s have a casual discussion about Optimism.

Conferences and meetups

L2DAYS Istanbul

We co-hosted the biggest event of Devconnect Istanbul! Around 2k attendees enjoyed 44 sessions of talks and panels touching the most important topics of the L2 space. From MEV to shared sequencing, from sovereign rollups to cross-chain governance, from data availability solutions to the road to decentralization. It was the most challenging event we have hosted so far, but the end result was equally satisfying. And all the sessions will be available on our youtube soon!

L2 Warsaw

As a prequel to L2DAYS we hosted L2Warsaw — one day L2-focused conference, preceding ETHWarsaw. Almost 400 attendees, 12 insightful sessions packed with L2 knowledge.

Governance meetups

It all started at EDCON in Montenegro. We were having a casual conversation with Dennison Bertram from Tally about governance topics and figured out that we should get other governance nerds together for a beer to discuss DAO-related stuff.

Then, during ETHPrague, we figured out we should do it again, but this time in a breakfast setting to give us more time for productive discussion and not compete with other evening activities. This turned out to be fun and enlightening, so we decided to keep doing this at every major conference we attend.

In Paris we expanded the formula to a Hyde Park style idea sharing session and it was a blast! We were hoping for at least 2 or 3 brave individuals to stand up and share their ideas for how DAOs could improve in terms of governance, but in the end it turned out that almost everyone had something to share and we actually had to cut the discussion short to allow others to take the stage. This is definitely something we will build on!

Governance workshops

Following the success of the governance meetups, we’ve decided to take it to the next level and run full-day governance workshops during the L2DAYS conference we’re co-organizing in Istanbul during Devconnect week. The idea is to gather governance folks from different ecosystems and have some insightful conversations. No strict agenda, no planned outcomes, just the free flow of ideas and sharing of experiences with the challenges we face in different governance setups. We’ll cover DAO tooling, grant programs, DAO power distribution, sybil protection, delegate compensation and expectations, cross-chain governance, and much, much more.

Call to Action

That’s it. We’ve put a lot of work into all of this, nearly doubling the team in the process. We hope you find our work valuable and effective. If so, please consider including us in your RPGF3 allocation, as well as in the lists you create as part of the review process. We’ll be more than grateful, and we promise to continue the great work and push even harder!

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L2BEAT
L2BEAT

Published in L2BEAT

L2BEAT is a analytics and research website about Ethereum layer two (L2) scaling. We provide a comparison of the various Ethereum L2 systems available today.