Layer 2 Neighborhood Grants Winners

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

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

This chart reveals proportion of preliminary candidates by class:

Because of the top quality of proposals, we raised the finances 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 undertaking 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 sensible contracts wallets, layer 2 targeted.

• Quantstamp – Rollup Safety Framework

  • The undertaking will create an in depth safety framework for distinctive options of rollups. They wish to set up a basis for fundamental greatest practices and transparency for these options to help new builders of those methods and allow the group to evaluate the safety dangers of a selected rollup earlier than they use one. Comparable to those who can be found for sensible contract growth and the very high-level overviews of rollup safety like L2Beat.com. The framework will talk about issues and particulars of escape hatch growth 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 secure multisigs) are a confirmed approach for a bunch 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 complete variety of operators and their related externally owned accounts. The objective of this undertaking is to construct a non-public multi-party pockets that shields finish customers by using account abstraction (EIP-4337) and zero-knowledge proofs.

• Kautuk Kundan – Stackr Community

  • Stackr community is an SDK for launching standalone customizable app-specific rollups utilizing acquainted web2-like tooling. It focuses on the core precept of a roll-up, that’s, to run a state machine off-chain and use L1 to retailer transaction particulars. This may be achieved by general-purpose languages that may keep the app-state off-chain and supply an interface to work together with it, thus appearing as a standalone L2. It permits constructing a brand new class of purposes that can have extra freedom over their execution decisions.

• 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 gasoline prices when executing transactions. Layer 1 gasoline will be >25,000x costlier than Layer 2 gasoline, 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 scale back transaction prices to work together with common protocols.

• Testinprod – Layer1.5

  • Layer 1.5 permits anybody to launch their very own Layer 2 by offering straightforward instruments. It gives a straightforward utility that launches your personal Layer 2 with needed instruments—for instance, block explorer, token bridge, monitoring instruments, and many others.

• 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 might vote from Layer 2, paying the cheaper gasoline costs accessible 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 sources (information and logic). It leverages a well-known spreadsheet to assist the person question and hyperlink on-chain sources. The work is saved on-chain as NFTs and will be queried later-on from every other dApp/contract

• Kristof Gazso – Typescript ERC-4337 Bundler

  • The undertaking will embody 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 instantly Geth-compatible chain (which incorporates most L2s) with little modifications. The bundler will even expose the RPC calls outlined within the specification, and keep an inner mempool to be future-proof when P2P propagation will probably be developed.

• Soul Pockets – Open-source ERC-4337 pockets

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

📚 Neighborhood and Schooling

• 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 concentrate on each builders and new customers of their quest to remain updated with these applied sciences and their utility. We create content material and perform completely different actions from publications to workshops at no cost, whereas supporting the completely different tasks that innovate on this area, whereas sustaining additionally its core neutrality.

• Bruce Xu – MyFirstLayer2
  
  • This will probably be an open-source, community-driven, and academic undertaking. This will probably be a web site for individuals interested by Layer2 however with out prior information 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 present wanted for the L2 ecosystem. Blockscout is already utilized by many L2 tasks, and extra customizations particular to L2 information necessities will improve 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 commonly missed when discussing rollups. By design, rollups are required to make information accessible as a way to confirm state transitions or state roots; nonetheless, the tactic for this publication varies, and will embody compressed information. There may be additionally variability within the compression methods used. This undertaking will discover the usage of compression within the rollup setting. First, the undertaking will explicate locations the place compression is used and doc the methods that could be used. Second, the undertaking will survey present rollups to research the approaches which might be truly utilized in observe. Third, the undertaking will consider approaches proposed or used throughout comparable methods and try and establish why a selected strategy is used. Lastly, the undertaking will use the insights collected as a way to recommend new approaches for compression of rollup information and pose open issues to the group.

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

• Web3-data – Layer 2 Exercise Monitoring & Comparability Suite
  
  • Via this undertaking, we intention to ship a high-quality set of Dashboards that assist allow information scientists, researchers, and all group members to raised perceive Layer 2 Exercise
  • We’ll mixture information throughout Layer 2 networks leveraging sources equivalent to Dune, L2Beats, Santiment, CoinGecko, Github, Discord, and, in lots of circumstances, instantly from the undertaking APIs/RPCs.
  • We’ll clear and manage this information to offer a collection of shows that can permit the group to visualise modifications throughout key L2 metrics (e.g. tps, lease paid to Ethereum, progress in TVL, every day energetic addresses, new addresses, complete addresses, charges paid, and developer exercise based mostly on GitHub affiliated repo commits).
  • We intention to label sensible contracts (and in the end allow the group to label sensible 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 degree and in addition present the “hottest” sensible contracts within the completely 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 training.

📊 Knowledge Visualization

• Quantstamp – Again-Finish API Customary for L2 Block Exporers
  
  • This undertaking will clearly outline properties {that a} block explorer ought to implement as a way to be thought of feature-complete within the normal layer two setting. Moreover, our objective is to suggest and specify a normal API interface that the layer two networks ought to expose to normal 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 help the usual. Within the ultimate situation, the usual would flip the event of the core of a brand new block explorer right into a undertaking that might be accomplished by an skilled workforce throughout a weekend hackathon. Our objective will probably be to additionally outline a normal that’s consumer-agnostic. As such, it is not going to matter whether or not it’s consumed by a block explorer that’s offered commercially, is open supply, or probably even decentralized. The undertaking 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 person can visualize and navigate by means of in a straightforward approach, offering the mandatory infrastructure to scale Ethereum.

🧮 Cryptography and Zero-knowledge proofs

• Zhe Ye, Ujval Misra, and Daybreak Music (College of California at Berkeley) – Specular
  
  • The preferred optimistic rollups (ORUs) as we speak, Arbitrum and Optimism, attempt to increase present Ethereum consumer software program (Geth) to help interactive fraud proof (IFP) development, 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 consumer program binary—oblivious to its higher-level semantics. This strategy (1) precludes the trust-minimized, permissionless participation of a number of Ethereum consumer packages, magnifying monocolture failure danger; (2) results in an unnecessarily giant and complicated trusted computing base (TCB) that’s troublesome to independently audit; and, (3) suffers from a frequently-triggered, but opaque improve course of—each additional growing auditing overhead, and complicating on-chain entry management within the long-term.
  • We’re due to this fact targeted on constructing a safe, trust-minimized ORU that addresses these issues, whereas preserving scalability and dispute decision effectivity. To take action, we have now designed an IFP system native to the EVM, that enforces Ethereum’s semi-formally specified semantics [5] exactly on the degree 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 help IFP development—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 Methods
  
  • We suggest to investigate the concrete safety of the proof methods (SNARKs, STARKs) that safe -rollups. We observe that some proof methods have safety analyzed within the interactive setting, whereas their safety after making use of the Fiat—Shamir transformation is simply conjectured. Moreover, we imagine that in some circumstances extra environment friendly assaults are potential than the claimed safety degree 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 undertaking is to review 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 sincere, we might construct an L2 storage community that reuses mainnet safety whereas extending Ethereum scalability dramatically.
  • Additional analysis will try and reply the questions of the way to construct the proof/verification system if the BLOBs and the commitments are consistently modified (e.g., new BLOBs are appended to the checklist or a BLOB of an index is modified); and the way 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 degree of safety of Mainnet?

We have been extraordinarily pleased with the standard of candidates for this grants spherical. The analysis and work they produce may have a optimistic influence on the ecosystem. We propose keeping track of them!