The Rollup Coaster #18

The Rollup Coaster is a bi-weekly newsletter that dives into the fascinating world of Ethereum, exploring the latest in rollups, zero-knowledge proofs, MEV-PBS, and much more.
This edition is written by Taiko’s Community Advocate Jünger.
Hold on tight! 🎢
Disclaimer: This newsletter is neither financial advice, nor is indicative of Taiko’s position on any of the material presented. Please do your own research.

Highlights 🎢

• Taiko’s Katla Testnet (Alpha-6) is now live! In this testnet, Taiko integrated the Based Contestable Rollup (BCR) design, multi-proofs, and SGX. Check the details in this article.
• Dencun upgrade is coming! The upgrade includes several changes, most notably protodanksharding, which will help reduce L2 transaction fees.
• Vitalik in his article, advocated for a return to Ethereum's core principles of openness and decentralization. He criticized the current trend toward centralization and financialization, which had been fueled by high transaction fees and a gambling culture.
• Vitalik highlighted the potential of rollups, privacy enhancements, and zero-knowledge proofs to reinvigorate Ethereum's original vision. He saw a future where Ethereum could contribute significantly to a technologically integrated society, prioritizing security and decentralization.
• Discussions about increasing the gas limits of Ethereum. Dankrad pointed out that it’s important to increase the CALLDATA fee while increasing the GASLIMIT.

ZK and rollup research 🧙

• Andrew Miller wrote a post with significant points about the use of TEEs in the crypto space.
• Eclipse (Solana VM on Ethereum) shared a blog post about their bridge and proving system.
• New episode of Zero Knowledge Podcast Prediction: ZK in 2024.
• LambdaClass shared a blog post Comparing Provers: Starknet and Polygon.
• Noam Nisan shared a paper about tokenomics.
• L2s can horizontally scale only without compromising trust-minimization. Wei Dai argued in favor of trust-minimized systems that can horizontally scale.
• Elliptic curves have made their way into all kinds of modern cryptography. Here is the Developer's Guide to Application-Specific Elliptic Curves.
• MolochDAO shared a figure about the pros and cons of private voting mechanisms.

ZK and rollup updates 🗞️

• Arbitrum passed 1B daily volume.
• A well-written article about Merkle Tree by Sovereign Labs.
• Some updates on o1js (library for cryptography).

MEV/PBS/staking research and updates 🔍

• Tarun Chitra explained the differences between PBS and Jito (MEV on Solana).
• Celsius (ETH staking service) will unstake their existing ETH holdings. 16,000 validators entered to queue for unstaking.
• A new approach to transaction ordering in a modular world by Maven11 Research.
• How restaking acts as a shared security layer, Bell Curve explained with Sreeram Kannan.

Education and events 🎫

• A high-level Introduction to ZK and SNARKS course.
• ZKHack IV has started! This virtual hackathon includes various tutorials and puzzles.
• ZK auditing fellowship has been started by yAcademy.

Additional resources 📖

• The Columbia CryptoEconomics Workshop playlist has dropped.
• A great lecture by Andrej Bauer about formalizing invisible mathematics.
• Celestia explained how their bridge works.
• Encrypted mempool and shared sequencers by AJ Park.