Weekly Rollup #57
ZK accounts on Celestia | ETH Restaked Security on Cosmos | Base L3s | Citrea unveils Clementine | Hyperlane Yield Routes | Two New Gelato Chains | L2s on Solana | Week ending March 22nd
👋 Welcome to Modular Media! We cover news, updates, educational content, and more within the modular blockchain ecosystem.
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This week’s issue covers:
ZK accounts on Celestia
EigenLayer & Ethos Bring Restaked Security to Cosmos
Base L3s
Citrea unveils Clementine
Hyperlane Yield Routes & New Integrations
Two New Gelato Chains: Raspberry & Playnance
LRTs to the Superchain via Omni
L2s on Solana
More News & Announcements
More Education & Discourse
Before we begin however, we want to thank Fluent for being the title sponsor for Modular March! Fluent is a zkWasm-based Ethereum that is aiming to onboard the 20M developers across the world into web3. They’re live on private testnet today.
📣 News & Announcements
ZK accounts on Celestia
@pumatheuma proposes to add ZK accounts on Celestia.
A quick TLDR of the proposal:
in this newly proposed design, each Celestia rollup will have its own SNARK account “that maintains the balance of TIA on the rollup”
users deposit TIA to the SNARK account (from a user’s perspective, this is just like a normal “send” transaction)
users can withdraw TIA from the rollup by submitting a zk-proof to the SNARK account
Please make sure to visit the full proposal to get a better understanding of all the details!
EigenLayer & Ethos Bring Restaked Security to Cosmos
Check out Ethos, a new EigenLayer AVS that will enable Cosmos appchains to leverage ETH restaked security, out of the box.
While deploying a Cosmos appchain may not be too difficult for developers, making sure its secure and robust enough to securely handle user funds, takes a lot of time, effort, and capital. Sure, the Cosmos Hub already enables shared security, however, you still have to convince governance to approve your chain in the first place.
This is where Ethos comes in.
As shown in the image above:
Ethos is an EigenLayer AVS, meaning Ethos security is derived from Ethereum validators (restakers)
Any Cosmos appchain can tap into this AVS for out-of-the-box restaked ETH security.
Ethos’s guardian chain “fetches updates” from this AVS, then relays them back to the individual chains via IBC.
Check out the full post to learn more.
Base L3s
As you all have heard by now, Ethereum just went through its Dencun upgrade, which brought about a great reduction in DP fees to the network, ultimately reducing end-user fees quite substantially.
This reduction in fees has led to an increase in user demand for Ethereum block space, especially on Base - they’ve seen a huge spike in demand recently - this increase in demand has led to again, an increase in user fees.
So how does Base intend to scale further?
Well, Jesse had a couple of ideas, specifically using onchain gaming as the example. “At a high level, there will be two places that games build on Base”:
directly on the Base L2
as an L3 on Base
He proceeds to show a simple framework teams can use to decide which is best for them:
While this example was specifically used with onchain gaming, the same can apply for popular blockchain apps across different areas, from NFTs, to defi, social, and more.
With the amount of new attention I am seeing on my TL in regards to L3s, we can probably assume that we will be seeing a lot more L3s deploying over the next few years, especially as more & more RaaS enable seamless L3 deployments.
In fact, one L3 we saw launch on Base just this past week was Clique, “an L3 for AI enhanced gaming”.
You can check out the full post to learn more about this new project.
Citrea unveils Clementine
As mentioned in the tweet below, Citrea with Clementine enables trustless execution with trust-minimized two-way peg.
Clementine consists of two core components:
Light client Proof (of Bitcoin and Citrea)
ZKP verifier in BitVM
Put simply, this makes sure every bridge transaction carries a zk-proof before funds can be utilized.
Hyperlane Yield Routes & New Integrations
Hyperlane just introduced “Yield Routes”, essentially allowing any team to enable yield generation for users’ bridged funds - similar to what we have seen with Blast L2.
So,
before: bridged funds remained idle in the smart contract of the bridge (not doing or earning anything)
with yield routes: “assets are deposited into a yield-bearing ERC-4626 vault set by the contract owner”. This could be something like having deposited USDC go to MakerDAO to earn extra yield, or to a Uniswap pool, etc.
It also looks like Hyperlane is continuing on its own “modular expansion”, as two new teams have announced their integration of the permissionless interop protocol:
Plume x Hyperlane
Particle Network x Hyperlane
Plus, stTIA has now also found its way to the Astria ecosystem, thanks to Hyperlane:
Two New Gelato Chains: Raspberry & Playnance
Raspberry
First, Gelato deployed a public goods testnet on Celestia, called Raspberry.
This allows developers to test out their experiments on Celestia, while also being able to take advantage of some of the several tools and infra Gelato provides builders: Goldsky, dRPC, Blockscout, Thirdweb, Zerodev, Safe, DIA (oracles), and Tenderly.
Playnance
A couple of minutes later, Gelato unveiled Playnance, an Arbitrum Orbit L3 chain with zero gas fees. Playnance is already quite a popular name, as Playblock, their Polygon-based game, boasts about 10% of the network’s total transactions 👀
LRTs to the Superchain via Omni
Omni Network is bringing liquid restaked tokens to Optimism’s Superchain, and it looks like Conduit rollups will be amongst the first to take advantage.
L2s on Solana?
As exemplified by this tweet shown below by @vibhu, there’s been more and more talk recently about Solana L2s.
I mean heck, even the great Mert has talked about it recently:
Imo (Pedro here btw 👋), it’s only a matter of time before we see more of Solana’s components being modularized and used for specific use cases. Eclipse is already bringing the SVM to Ethereum, but I would suspect we see (in the future) teams use Solana specifically for Data Publication, or for sequencing only.
What do you all think? Let us know in the comments! 🤔
More News & Announcements
Dymension just introduced its own fraud proofs, built in collaboration with RollKit & Celestia, which will enable the Hub (which is essentially a settlement layer) to verify its RollApp ecosystem. Fraud proofs are expected to go live in the next network upgrade.
Noble is set to become a Rollchain, meaning the Cosmos chain wil soon be posting its data to Celestia, ensuring greater data availability guarantees. According to Celestia founder, Mustafa, this is “frst step in enabling Celestia rollups to have trust-minimized access to USDC”. This is of course due to the fact that Noble has been chosen by Circle as Cosmos’s home for native USDC.
Fluent unveils its road to mainnet, which will be broken down across 8 total phases, some already completed, while the remaining expected to follow soon.
Looks like stTIA will be heading to Karak Network, which has teased some new “exciting staking use cases”.
Sign up for Avail’s upcoming hackathon during EthGlobal, running from April 5-26.
Yala, an ecosystem of defi apps on Bitcoin, announces that they’ll be building their own rollup using AvailDA as its base layer. Yala’s suite of products includes lending, borrowing, insurance, and a BRC-20 stablecoin “backed by inscriptions or Bitcoin in Collateralized Debt Positions (CDPs) or vaults”.
Nubit, a DA layer for Bitcoin, will be utilizing Babylon’s BTC staking protocol to provide certain security guarantees.
Kinto’s bridge is now live, meaning users can start bridging funds over to the Arbitrum Orbit defi-based chain. Make sure to tune into this space tomorrow between Kinto & Arbitrum, so you can learn more about the L2 before experimenting with it for yourself.
Caldera is now on Farcaster!
Hook Protocol announces that they’ll be building their own Arbitrum Orbit L2, called Hook Chain, which will power Odyssey, their trading platform, and other infrastructure they release in the future. HookChain will be built using Caldera’s RaaS.
AltLayer rollups can now leverage Lagrange’s parallel prover. In short, build your own rollup with AltLayer’s RaaS, and get access zk-proofs generation, via Lagrange.
Zeeve launches Traceye, enabling “cost-effective data indexing”, high uptime percentage, and more.
Madara unveils Sharingan, their new testnet that will be powered by Karnot.
Espresso raises $28M series B round led by a16z: “This round of funding will enable us to scale our team and bring a production-ready implementation of Espresso to the ecosystem”.
Karnot partners with Gevulot: “Karnot L2s such as KakarotZkEVM, will be able to utilize free, decentralized compute for proving and verification in Gevulot's devnet, launching on March 25th”.
Optimism introduces the Superchain Development Console, a set of tools that developers can leverage to build their Superchain app, from development support, to funding and marketing. Members of the console include Gelato, Mode, Alchemy, Quicknode, and more.
Here’s everything else you missed across the Optimism ecosystem this past week, including a new bounty up for artists, and the biggest news from the ecosystem last week, which was “the first open source, permissionless, feature-complete fault proof system in the Ethereum ecosystem.”
Introducing Everyworld, a content network that will be built on Base (also backed by Coinbase ventures and others). There’s a commemorative NFT that is claimable today, and is expected to come with points.
Particle Network debuts its “universal settlement layer”.
Arbitrum delegates have until the 29th to elect candidates as nominees for the security council. Cehck out the full thread to learn more.
Immutable partners with OKX to bring a Gamefi launchpad: “This partnership will integrate OKX Wallet and OKX NFT Marketplace into Immutable Passport and Immutable Orderbook, all on Immutable zkEVM.”. This partnership of course made p[ossible by Polygon’s aggregation layer.
Thala Labs, a Move-based defi app on Aptos, announces that it will be deploying on Movement Network, helping onboard the app to the modular ecosystem.
Here’s everything you missed across the Scroll ecosystem last week, including Hacker House builders, and some new app integrations, such as Beoble (privacy wallet).
We missed this one last week, but Mantle network just upgraded to v2, “Tectonic”, which introduced a new set of benefits to the L2.
On March 28th, Mantle will be conducting its first community town hall on Discord, where users will be able to learn more about MNT, vote for favorite projects, and earn prizes. You also have until the 25th to vote for who you want to hear speak during the event.
Succinct raises $55M round led by Paradigm, to continue development and growth of their prover network.
Etherfi commits $500M of restaked capital to help secure Lagrange’s AVS.
New ecosystem bounty challenges for users to complete on Lumio.
📚 Discourse & Education
Some highlights from another great week of Modular March ✅
Our good friends and partners The Rollup dropped an updated map of the modular ecosystem, building off the OG work of Stephy. It’s clear that the space has grown significantly in the past half year!
There were also insightful discussions around Bitcoin’s Modular Future, Dymension, Near, Movement as well as a refreshed deep dive on what modular blockchains are - factoring in learnings, observations and developments over the past couple of years.
Of course, the month is not yet over. Stay tuned next week for more (Modular) March Madness.
More Discourse & Education
🎙️ Empire discusses Berachain Proof of Liquidity, value accrual, origin story and more with Smokey from Berachain 🔥
🎙️ Uncommon Core 2.0 discusses the Ethereum staking endgame covering PoS economics, LSTs, restaking, economic security & more with Ansgar and Caspar from the Ethereum Foundation 🧠
🎙️ Lightspeed discusses the evolution of Polygon, building the AggLayer, liquidity fragmentation and more with Brendan from Polygon
🎥 @yuxiao_deng summarizes talks on Restaked Modularity from SevenX Research Day 💎
✍️ EigenLayer unpacks liquid restaking risks and concerns
🎙️ @LoganJastremski discusses integrated vs. modular chains, high vs. low throughput, low latency systems and more with Brendan from Polygon
✍️ Bitcoin Layers releases an initial framework on how to define and analyze risk for Bitcoin scaling protocols 🔥
💬 @masonnystrom outlines a few core reasons why an app would want to launch as it’s own L3 blockchain 💎
🎙️ Bankless discusses Cartesi’s new solutions for dapp developers with Felipe and Erick from Cartesi
🎙️ Hyperlane hosts an AMA with Plume
🎙️ EigenDA discusses hyperscaling Ethereum with Layer N
💬 @0xSalazar breaks down the unique value of Movement Labs
🎥 @abruzuc explains the problems with centralized sequencers and Morph L2s architecture
That's all for this week! Thanks for reading 🧱🎬
& thank you to all of our Modular March sponsors!