L2 report vol. 15

Paradigm

Published in

Paradigm

10 min readFeb 6, 2023

A biweekly update on Layer 2 protocols, 23rd January — 6th February

TL;DR

The sum of all funds locked on Ethereum converted to USD is $5.76 B at the time of writing.
Building Bedrock: The design philosophy behind the first release of the OP stack. Optimism’s Bedrock upgrade explainer. The proposal to upgrade Optimism Mainnet to Bedrock was put to the Token House. Voting will go live on February 16th, resolving on March 1st. If it passes, the upgrade will go live within the month. In governance-related news, the Optimism Grants Council is up, running, and open for business, with over 70 grant applications already received for review. OP Radio #17: Metaverse Hackathon Winners.
Good news for Arbitrum developers, you can now simulate transactions with Alchemy’s API. Bankless: Arbitrum is Mooning: It’s L2 season, and they are analyzing Arbitrum’s market dominance. Twitter spaces: Arbitrum x Alchemy, Arbitrum x Numoen, Arbitrum x Flair, Arbitrum x Metagates, Arbitrum x Lavanet, DeFinds Ep1: GMX & Dopex. Lyra is now live on Arbitrum. Prime Protocol is now supporting Arbitrum on Prime Testnet. Welcome to the Arbitrum ecosystem IVX.
January in Metis Andromeda: December was a month in which Metis Andromeda surpassed all prior expectations: Layer Zero was integrated, Onto Wallet was integrated, Aave’s Temp. Check Vote was passed, the proposal for a Stargate deployment passed, and the team has got multiple projects going through CEG. DACs as a Public Good. Twitter Space: Metis — SupraOracles: Solving the Blockchain & Oracle Trilemma. Metis aims to simplify crypto adoption with Banxa integration.
All Boba testnets have been upgraded to accommodate new changes in the BOBA codebase. Upgrade from v0.3.1 to release v0.4.2 (Damascus Goat). There were also updates to release v0.4.0. The Uniswap community has voted to launch Uniswap v3 on Boba Network. You can review the voting results here.
Pricing Gas in Polygon zkEVM: Why is figuring out how to price gas in zkEVMs an interesting problem? Because gas is supposed to reflect resource consumption for nodes (bandwidth/storage/compute), but when generating zkEVM proofs, some EVM opcodes are relatively more expensive to prove than to re-execute on a CPU. The team walks through each of the options to translate gas pricing into zkEVM for opcodes and explains the best design choice for Polygon zkEVM. Who’s #1? How to Read Chain Analytics Like a Pro. The Year of the Dev | Kicking It Off at the Pit with Jump Crypto. Twitter Spaces: zkEVM: Road to Mainnet, Polygon at The Pit, Navigating the future of Cross Chain Solutions.
Scroll systems are being set up and prepped for future deployment on Goerli. More details soon. The team has also made progress on an improved v2 bridge design which should result in a smoother experience. The team made a lot of improvements to the ZK architecture, lowering the prover memory requirement from 870GB to 275GB, nearly a 68% improvement. Scroll documentation has had a refresh. Scroll deployed Uniswap v3 onto the testnet. Graph protocol support is on the way.
Open-sourcing the Starknet prover: Entire Starknet stack is now announced to be open-sourced. StarkNet’s new sequencer: New open-source sequencer, designed to improve performance and decentralization. Cairo 1.0-Alpha.2 — new release is coming: It is now possible to implement an ERC20 contract. Those new linguistic features will be applicable in the upcoming StarkNet-v0.11.0 version.
Immutable Passport — Your Passport to the Future of Gaming: Immutable Passport is a non-custodial wallet and authentication solution that streamlines user onboarding through passwordless sign-on and automated wallet creation. Through Passport, game studios can drive adoption across mainstream audiences, maintain enterprise-grade security, and achieve global scalability. On the other side, gamers get access to a secure digital wallet, protection against fraud, and seamless authentication across web3 games and marketplaces as they discover and explore new digital worlds. Resurgence and ImmutableX: An Entertainment-First AAA Web3 Survival Game: Resurgence is a AAA free-to-play post-apocalyptic open-world survival crafting game (MMORPG) designed to take players on a journey from a present-day disaster to a post-apocalyptic future. ImmutableX and Illuvium: Beyond, Launching Illuvium’s Customizable NFT Adventure.
Devs on zkSync 2.0 testnet, the system will undergo a regenesis on Wed., Feb. 8 to prepare for Fair Onboarding Alpha. The regenesis will reset transaction history, token balances & require teams to redeploy contracts. This only applies to zkSync 2.0 testnet & not zkSync 1.0. The results of zkSync 2.0’s latest Open Zeppelin security audits. Twitter Space: Get to Know zkSync’s Developer Relations Team. Web3 domains are coming to zkSync.
dYdX Foundation shared the inaugural ecosystem annual report: Despite the challenging market conditions in 2022, stakeholders in the dYdX ecosystem persevered and continued to build toward the future of finance — one block at a time.
ZKSpace Monthly Dev & Operation Report for January 2023.
Rhino.fi hits the 80k registered users milestone.
zkEVM as execution framework for Baseline Protocol applications.
zkLLVM compiler: circuit compiler for languages such as C/C++.
Patrick McCorry: rollup permissive vs permissioned licensing.
ZK MOOCs: modern zk cryptography and zk proofs.
Pudgy Penguins Lil Pudgys go cross-chain — bridge to Polygon, Arbitrum and BNB.
L2 stats. Check out how much it costs to use Layer 2.
And more!

Stats

The sum of all funds locked on Ethereum converted to USD is $5.76 B at the time of writing.

How much does it cost to use Layer 2?

Optimistic rollups

Arbitrum One

Good news for Arbitrum developers, you can now simulate transactions with Alchemy’s API.
Bankless: Arbitrum is Mooning : It’s L2 season, and they are analyzing Arbitrum’s market dominance.
Twitter spaces: Arbitrum x Alchemy, Arbitrum x Numoen, Arbitrum x Flair, Arbitrum x Metagates, Arbitrum x Lavanet, DeFinds Ep1: GMX & Dopex.

🚀Live on Arbitrum:

Lyra is now live on Arbitrum.
Prime Protocol is now supporting Arbitrum on Prime Testnet.
Welcome to the Arbitrum ecosystem IVX.
VestExchange is now a part of the Arbitrum ecosystem.
Welcome to Arbitrum & Smolverse.
GemPad integrated Arbitrum on its launchpad.
Nuon Protocol is now live on Arbitrum.
4EVERLAND is launching on Arbitrum.
Cryptex Finance is migrating to Arbitrum soon.

Projects based on Optimism’s codebase

Optimism

Building Bedrock: The design philosophy behind the first release of the OP stack.
Optimism’s Bedrock upgrade explainer.
The proposal to upgrade Optimism Mainnet to Bedrock was put to the Token House. Voting will go live on February 16th, resolving on March 1st. If it passes, the upgrade will go live within the month.
In governance-related news, the Optimism Grants Council is up, running, and open for business, with over 70 grant applications already received for review.
OP Radio #17: Metaverse Hackathon Winners.

Metis Andromeda

January in Metis Andromeda: December was a month in which Metis Andromeda surpassed all prior expectations: Layer Zero was integrated, Onto Wallet was integrated, Aave’s Temp. Check Vote was passed, the proposal for a Stargate deployment passed, and the team has got multiple projects going through CEG.
DACs as a Public Good.
Twitter Space: Metis — SupraOracles: Solving the Blockchain & Oracle Trilemma.

🚀Live on Metis:

Metis aims to simplify crypto adoption with Banxa integration.

Boba Network

All Boba testnets have been upgraded to accommodate new changes in the BOBA codebase. Upgrade from v0.3.1 to release v0.4.2 (Damascus Goat).
There were also updates to release v0.4.0.
The Uniswap community has voted to launch Uniswap v3 on Boba Network. You can review the voting results here.

Zero-knowledge rollups

Aztec

Aztec Connect has crossed the $20 million mark for DAI deposited since launch.
UPA Privacy Summit @ BUIDLweek · Luma.

Polygon

Pricing Gas in Polygon zkEVM: Why is figuring out how to price gas in zkEVMs an interesting problem? Because gas is supposed to reflect resource consumption for nodes (bandwidth/storage/compute), but when generating zkEVM proofs, some EVM opcodes are relatively more expensive to prove than to re-execute on a CPU. The team walks through each of options to translate gas pricing into zkEVM for opcodes and explain the best design choice for Polygon zkEVM.
Who’s #1? How to Read Chain Analytics Like a Pro.
The Year of the Dev | Kicking It Off at the Pit with Jump Crypto.
Twitter Spaces: zkEVM: Road to Mainnet, Polygon at The Pit, Navigating the future of Cross Chain Solutions.

🚀Live on Polygon:

Check out the latest Polygon integrations here.
Dopex, the decentralized options protocol, has launched on Polygon.

Scroll

Scroll systems are being set up and prepped for future deployment on Goerli. More details soon.
The team has also made progress on an improved v2 bridge design which should result in a smoother experience.
The team made a lot of improvements to the ZK architecture, lowering the prover memory requirement from 870GB to 275GB, nearly a 68% improvement.
Scroll documentation has had a refresh.

🚀Live on Scroll:

Scroll deployed Uniswap v3 onto the testnet.
Graph protocol support is on the way.
MUX protocol, leveraged trading platform, launches on the Scroll Pre-Alpha testnet.

StarkWare

Open-sourcing the Starknet prover: Entire Starknet stack is now announced to be open-sourced.
StarkNet’s new sequencer: New open-source sequencer, designed to improve performance and decentralization.
Cairo 1.0-Alpha.2 — new release is coming: It is now possible to implement an ERC20 contract. Those new linguistic features will be applicable in the upcoming StarkNet-v0.11.0 version.
Stark Ware Sessions are here.

🚀Powered by StarkWare:

A continually updated list of projects building on StarkNet.

zkSync

Devs on zkSync 2.0 testnet, the system will undergo a regenesis on Wed., Feb. 8 to prepare for Fair Onboarding Alpha. The regenesis will reset transaction history, token balances & require teams to redeploy contracts. This only applies to zkSync 2.0 testnet & not zkSync 1.0.
The results of zkSync 2.0’s latest Open Zeppelin security audits.
Twitter Space: Get to Know zkSync’s Developer Relations Team.

🚀Live on zkSync

Web3 domains are coming to zkSync.

ZKSpace

ZKSpace Monthly Dev & Operation Report for January 2023.
Crypto 101 Series: NO. 28 What is a Liquidity Pool in Crypto?

Projects build using StarkEx

dYdX

dYdX Foundation shared the inaugural ecosystem annual report: Despite the challenging market conditions in 2022, stakeholders in the dYdX ecosystem persevered and continued to build toward the future of finance — one block at a time.
Shop dYdX & Hedgies: Unleash your trading potential with high quality apparel, hats, and accessories from dYdX.

Validium

Projects build using StarkEx

rhino.fi (previously DeversiFi)

rhino.fi hits the 80k registered users milestone.
Why DeFi Needs RWAs To Stay Relevant: Real World Assets (RWAs) will help crypto avoid the speculative bubbles that have drained confidence up to now, and allow DeFi aggregators like rhino.fi to display the most useful assets in existence.

Immutable X

Immutable Passport — Your Passport to the Future of Gaming: Immutable Passport is a non-custodial wallet and authentication solution that streamlines user onboarding through passwordless sign-on and automated wallet creation. Through Passport, game studios can drive adoption across mainstream audiences, maintain enterprise-grade security, and achieve global scalability. On the other side, gamers get access to a secure digital wallet, protection against fraud, and seamless authentication across web3 games and marketplaces as they discover and explore new digital worlds.
Resurgence and ImmutableX: An Entertainment-First AAA Web3 Survival Game: Resurgence is a AAA free-to-play post-apocalyptic open world survival crafting game (MMORPG) designed to take players on a journey from a present day disaster to a post-apocalyptic future. Set 1000 years after an ecological disaster, the game empowers players to craft their own destinies, developing skills in survival, crafting, collaboration, trade, weaponry, and technology.
ImmutableX and Illuvium: Beyond, Launching Illuvium’s Customizable NFT Adventure: Over the last two years, Illuvium has been developing the world’s first interoperable blockchain game universe on ImmutableX. Using Immutable’s zk-rollup developer platform, Illuvium has built the IlluviDex marketplace, expanded into new games, and sold over ~20,000 virtual plots ($72 million worth!) of Illuvium land. ImmutableX enables gamers to enjoy unparalleled security with lightning-fast, gas-free NFT minting and trading experience.‍ Today, they’re announcing the launch of Illuvium: Beyond, one of the most exciting Illuvium initiatives to date.