Layer 2 Community Grants Winners

The Privateness & Scaling Explorations staff is happy to announce the winners of the Layer 2 Community Grants 2022.

The Layer 2 Group Grants spherical began on October twenty fourth, 2022 and was open for six weeks. In whole we acquired 130+ proposals and thank every challenge for taking the time to use.
The wishlist compiled sought purposes from all areas together with Layer 2 explorers, cryptography, and schooling.

This chart reveals proportion of preliminary candidates by class:

Because of the prime quality of proposals, we raised the price range from an preliminary 750k USD to a complete of 948k USD.

The awarded purposes proportion per class:

Grantees

We congratulate the 22 grantees awarded and current their challenge descriptions damaged down by class:

🔒 Cybersecurity

• Candidelabs – ERC-4337 Public Infrastructure

  • An open supply bundler and a paymaster service as public good infrastructure for ERC-4337 good contracts wallets, layer 2 centered.

• Quantstamp – Rollup Safety Framework

  • The challenge will create an in depth safety framework for distinctive options of rollups. They wish to set up a basis for fundamental finest practices and transparency for these options to help new builders of those techniques and allow the group to evaluate the safety dangers of a specific rollup earlier than they use one. Related to people who can be found for good contract improvement and the very high-level overviews of rollup safety like L2Beat.com. The framework will focus on issues and particulars of escape hatch improvement and operational dangers for end-users and builders and set up a constant language for these and different options.

👨‍💻 Consumer Expertise

• Spiro – zkWallet

  • Multi-party wallets (e.g. Gnosis protected multisigs) are a confirmed means for a gaggle of customers to share management over an account’s digital property and behaviors. Sadly, present implementations of multi-party wallets expose the privateness of their whole variety of operators and their related externally owned accounts. The purpose of this challenge is to construct a non-public multi-party pockets that shields finish customers by using account abstraction (EIP-4337) and zero-knowledge proofs.

• Kautak Kundan – Stackr Community

  • The challenge focuses on the core precept of a roll-up that runs a state machine off-chain – managing transactions in an off-chain state after which intimating the ultimate states and the inputs that modified the preliminary state to the bottom layer. Following these guidelines, you should utilize any instrument to construct a rollup. It might be general-purpose languages that preserve the app state and supply an execution setting to alter that, or it may very well be a fork of an present EVM rollup wherein present contracts could be deployed. It will possibly even be an excel sheet that information transactions!

• ScopeLift – L2 Optimizors

  • Layer 2 networks share safety with main-net by posting transaction name information to Layer 1. In consequence, Layer 2 customers pay their portion of the main-net fuel prices when executing transactions. Layer 1 fuel could be >25,000x costlier than Layer 2 fuel, so paying for name information dominates L2 transaction prices. With customized router contracts that use much less name information than customary strategies, we will considerably cut back transaction prices to work together with in style protocols.

• Testinprod – Layer1.5

  • Layer 1.5 allows anybody to launch their very own Layer 2 by offering straightforward instruments. It gives a straightforward software that launches your personal Layer 2 with essential instruments—for instance, block explorer, token bridge, monitoring instruments, and so forth.

• ScopeLift – Layer 2 Governance with Versatile Voting

  • Versatile Voting is an extension of the favored Governor system utilized by many DAOs. It permits new sorts of delegation contracts to be written, making it simpler for governance token holders to take part in on-chain votes. One such use case is the topic of this grant: Layer 2 governance voting. Holders of bridged governance tokens may vote from Layer 2, paying the cheaper fuel costs out there there. These votes can be trustlessly mirrored on L1 the place the DAO’s Governor system is deployed.

• Clement Walter – Starksheet

  • Starksheet goals to democratize the entry and utilization of on-chain assets (information and logic). It leverages a well-known spreadsheet to assist the consumer question and hyperlink on-chain assets. The work is saved on-chain as NFTs and could be queried later-on from another dApp/contract

• Kristof Gazso – Typescript ERC-4337 Bundler

  • The challenge will embrace the event of an ERC-4337 bundler in Typescript and the related modifications to a Geth node for simulation functions in order that the bundler can run on any immediately Geth-compatible chain (which incorporates most L2s) with little modifications. The bundler may also expose the RPC calls outlined within the specification, and preserve an inner mempool to be future-proof when P2P propagation will likely be developed.

• Soul Wallet – Open-source ERC-4337 pockets

  • Simple-to-use browser pockets implementation powered by ERC-4337.

📚 Group and Training

• Jose Figueroa – L2 en Español
  
  • L2 en Español is an open group that goals to analysis, educate and drive the adoption in all these Ethereum’s scaling options. They deal with each builders and new customers of their quest to remain updated with these applied sciences and their utility. We create content material and perform totally different actions from publications to workshops at no cost, whereas supporting the totally different initiatives that innovate on this house, whereas sustaining additionally its core neutrality.

• Bruce Xu – MyFirstLayer2
  

  • This will likely be an open-source, community-driven, and academic challenge. This will likely be a web site for individuals interested in Layer2 however with out prior data about Layer2 or Blockchain. We intention to make use of well-designed diagrams and interactive animation to assist individuals get the thought behind Layer2 in 30mins. Afterward, we’ll information individuals to some real-world Layer2 apps step-by-step and allow them to really feel the advantages of Layer2.

🗄️ Knowledge Evaluation

• Blockscout – Blockscout Block Explorer
  
  • An open-source block explorer is at the moment wanted for the L2 ecosystem. Blockscout is already utilized by many L2 initiatives, and extra customizations particular to L2 information necessities will enhance usability. As well as, a brand new interface, options, analytics and developer pleasant enhancements will assist create a extra clear and usable group explorer.

• Quantstamp – Evaluating Rollup Compression
  
  • Compression is usually ignored when discussing rollups. By design, rollups are required to make information out there with a view to confirm state transitions or state roots; nonetheless, the strategy for this publication varies, and will embrace compressed information. There’s additionally variability within the compression strategies used. This challenge will discover the usage of compression within the rollup setting. First, the challenge will explicate locations the place compression is used and doc the strategies that could be used. Second, the challenge will survey present rollups to analyze the approaches which might be truly utilized in apply. Third, the challenge will consider approaches proposed or used throughout comparable techniques and try and establish why a specific strategy is used. Lastly, the challenge will use the insights collected with a view to counsel new approaches for compression of rollup information and pose open issues to the group.

• Diablobench – Efficiency and Safety Analysis of Layer 2 Blockchain Programs
  
  • The College of Sydney and the EPFL have designed a benchmark suite to judge the safety and efficiency of blockchain techniques. The primary evaluations in contrast layer 1 blockchains corresponding to Algorand, Solana and Diem and will likely be printed quickly in a peer reviewed worldwide convention (Eurosys). This challenge goals at including layer 2 blockchain techniques to the Diablo benchmark and to make use of it to provide the primary in depth and life like benchmark analysis of layer 2 blockchain techniques on a worldwide deployment.

• Web3-data – Layer 2 Exercise Monitoring & Comparability Suite
  
  • By this challenge, we intention to ship a high-quality set of Dashboards that assist allow information scientists, researchers, and all group members to higher perceive Layer 2 Exercise
  • We’ll mixture information throughout Layer 2 networks leveraging sources corresponding to Dune, L2Beats, Santiment, CoinGecko, Github, Discord, and, in lots of instances, immediately from the challenge APIs/RPCs.
  • We’ll clear and set up this information to supply a collection of shows that can permit the group to visualise adjustments throughout key L2 metrics (e.g. tps, lease paid to Ethereum, progress in TVL, day by day lively addresses, new addresses, whole addresses, charges paid, and developer exercise based mostly on GitHub affiliated repo commits).
  • We intention to label good contracts (and in the end allow the group to label good contracts) by utilization classes (Native switch, DeFi DEX, DeFi different, NFT, CEX, Stablecoin, ERC20 different, L2 lease, Bridge, Arbitrage/MEV, Utility). This labeling will permit us to investigate and visualize the utilization patterns on a excessive stage and in addition present the “hottest” good contracts within the totally different utilization classes. We’re leveraging identified labels from Dune, Arbiscan, Etherscan, and others.

• L2 Beat – L2 Beat
  
  • Proceed to work on clear and verifiable insights into rising layer two (L2) applied sciences with expanded metrics and schooling.

📊 Knowledge Visualization

• Quantstamp – Again-Finish API Commonplace for L2 Block Exporers
  
  • This challenge will clearly outline properties {that a} block explorer ought to implement with a view to be thought of feature-complete within the common layer two setting. Moreover, our purpose is to suggest and specify a typical API interface that the layer two networks ought to expose to common block explorers. We envision that such a standardized interface will allow and enormously simplify the event of a number of block explorers that can plug-and-play reusable with all of the layer 2 networks that assist the usual. Within the ideally suited situation, the usual would flip the event of the core of a brand new block explorer right into a challenge that may very well be accomplished by an skilled staff throughout a weekend hackathon. Our purpose will likely be to additionally outline a typical that’s consumer-agnostic. As such, it won’t matter whether or not it’s consumed by a block explorer that’s offered commercially, is open supply, or probably even decentralized. The challenge can pay particular consideration to what distinctive layer two information a block explorer ought to present, with an emphasis on these associated to safety of the chains monitored by it.

• Blossom Labs – Blobscan
  
  • The primary explorer for the EIP-4844 shard blob transactions. It indexes and presents them in a searchable format that the consumer can visualize and navigate by means of in a straightforward means, offering the mandatory infrastructure to scale Ethereum.

🧮 Cryptography and Zero-knowledge proofs

• Zhe Ye, Ujval Misra, and Daybreak Tune (College of California at Berkeley) – Specular
  
  • The preferred optimistic rollups (ORUs) immediately, Arbitrum and Optimism, attempt to increase present Ethereum shopper software program (Geth) to assist interactive fraud proof (IFP) building, aiming to reuse prior L1 engineering efforts and replicate EVM semantics at L2. Sadly, to take action they tightly couple their on-chain IFP verifier with a selected shopper program binary—oblivious to its higher-level semantics. This strategy (1) precludes the trust-minimized, permissionless participation of a number of Ethereum shopper packages, magnifying monocolture failure threat; (2) results in an unnecessarily giant and sophisticated trusted computing base (TCB) that’s tough to independently audit; and, (3) suffers from a frequently-triggered, but opaque improve course of—each additional rising auditing overhead, and complicating on-chain entry management within the long-term.
  • We’re subsequently centered on constructing a safe, trust-minimized ORU that addresses these issues, whereas preserving scalability and dispute decision effectivity. To take action, we now have designed an IFP system native to the EVM, that enforces Ethereum’s semi-formally specified semantics [5] exactly on the stage of a single EVM instruction. As part of this work, we constructed Specular, an ORU which leverages Geth—modified minimally with solely 99 lines-of-code to assist IFP building—demonstrating the practicality, extensibility and trust-minimal nature of our strategy.

• Nethermind, Justin Thaler (Georgetown College), Matthew Inexperienced (Johns Hopkins College), and Pratyush Tiwari (Georgetown College) – Concrete Safety Evaluation for L2 Deployed Proof Programs
  
  • We suggest to investigate the concrete safety of the proof techniques (SNARKs, STARKs) that safe -rollups. We observe that some proof techniques have safety analyzed within the interactive setting, whereas their safety after making use of the Fiat—Shamir transformation is just conjectured. Moreover, we consider that in some instances extra environment friendly assaults are potential than the claimed safety stage asserts.

• Ethstorage – Proof of Storage on L2 Dynamic Datasets with an Ethereum L1 Contract
  
  • Given an inventory of commitments of BLOBs (e.g., KZG commitments from EIP-4844/Danksharding, listed from 0…n-1) in an L1 contract, the challenge is to check an environment friendly proof system to effectively confirm on L1 that the BLOBs are saved off-chain with the specified redundancy (e.g., 30~50 bodily replicas). By placing these storage nodes in an L2 community and assuming 1/m of nodes is trustworthy, we may construct an L2 storage community that reuses mainnet safety whereas extending Ethereum scalability dramatically.
  • Additional analysis will try and reply the questions of methods to construct the proof/verification system if the BLOBs and the commitments are continuously modified (e.g., new BLOBs are appended to the checklist or a BLOB of an index is modified); and methods to construct incentivized/fee system to make sure desired replication issue utilizing ETH as fee; it’s potential to ask a storage node to retailer partial BLOBs whereas sustaining the identical stage of safety of Mainnet?

We have been extraordinarily pleased with the standard of candidates for this grants spherical. The analysis and work they produce could have a constructive affect on the ecosystem. We advise keeping track of them!