Layer 2 Group Grants Winners

The Privateness & Scaling Explorations staff is worked up to announce the winners of the Layer 2 Group Grants 2022.

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

This chart exhibits share of preliminary candidates by class:

As a result of prime quality of proposals, we raised the funds from an preliminary 750k USD to a complete of 948k USD.

The awarded functions share per class:

Grantees

We congratulate the 22 grantees awarded and current their mission 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 targeted.

Quantstamp – Rollup Safety Framework

The mission will create an in depth safety framework for distinctive options of rollups. They wish to set up a basis for primary greatest practices and transparency for these options to help new builders of those techniques and allow the neighborhood to evaluate the safety dangers of a specific rollup earlier than they use one. Related to those who can be found for good 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.

👨‍💻 Person Expertise

Spiro – zkWallet

Multi-party wallets (e.g. Gnosis secure multisigs) are a confirmed method 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 aim of this mission is to construct a personal 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 functions that can have extra freedom over their execution selections.

ScopeLift – L2 Optimizors

Layer 2 networks share safety with main-net by posting transaction name information to Layer 1. Consequently, Layer 2 customers pay their portion of the main-net gasoline prices when executing transactions. Layer 1 gasoline may be >25,000x dearer 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 cut back transaction prices to work together with fashionable protocols.

Testinprod – Layer1.5

Layer 1.5 permits anybody to launch their very own Layer 2 by offering simple instruments. It offers a straightforward software that launches your personal Layer 2 with vital 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 may vote from Layer 2, paying the cheaper gasoline costs obtainable 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-recognized spreadsheet to assist the person question and hyperlink on-chain sources. The work is saved on-chain as NFTs and may be queried later-on from every other dApp/contract

Kristof Gazso – Typescript ERC-4337 Bundler

The mission 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 straight Geth-compatible chain (which incorporates most L2s) with little modifications. The bundler can even expose the RPC calls outlined within the specification, and keep an inner mempool to be future-proof when P2P propagation might be developed.

Soul Pockets – 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 neighborhood 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 completely different actions from publications to workshops totally free, whereas supporting the completely different tasks that innovate on this house, whereas sustaining additionally its core neutrality.
Bruce Xu – MyFirstLayer2
This might be an open-source, community-driven, and academic mission. This might be a web site for individuals interested by 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 concept behind Layer2 in 30mins. Afterward, we are going to 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 presently wanted for the L2 ecosystem. Blockscout is already utilized by many L2 tasks, 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 neighborhood explorer.
Quantstamp – Evaluating Rollup Compression
Compression is usually neglected when discussing rollups. By design, rollups are required to make information obtainable to be able to confirm state transitions or state roots; nonetheless, the tactic for this publication varies, and will embody compressed information. There’s additionally variability within the compression methods used. This mission will discover the usage of compression within the rollup setting. First, the mission will explicate locations the place compression is used and doc the methods that could be used. Second, the mission will survey present rollups to research the approaches which can be truly utilized in apply. Third, the mission will consider approaches proposed or used throughout related techniques and try and determine why a specific method is used. Lastly, the mission will use the insights collected to be able to counsel new approaches for compression of rollup information and pose open issues to the neighborhood.
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 comparable to Algorand, Solana and Diem and might be printed quickly in a peer reviewed worldwide convention (Eurosys). This mission 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
Via this mission, we intention to ship a high-quality set of Dashboards that assist allow information scientists, researchers, and all neighborhood members to higher perceive Layer 2 ActivityWe will mixture information throughout Layer 2 networks leveraging sources comparable to Dune, L2Beats, Santiment, CoinGecko, Github, Discord, and, in lots of circumstances, straight from the mission APIs/RPCs.We are going to clear and set up this information to offer a set of shows that can enable the neighborhood to visualise adjustments throughout key L2 metrics (e.g. tps, hire paid to Ethereum, progress in TVL, day by day lively addresses, new addresses, complete addresses, charges paid, and developer exercise based mostly on GitHub affiliated repo commits).We intention to label good contracts (and finally allow the neighborhood to label good contracts) by utilization classes (Native switch, DeFi DEX, DeFi different, NFT, CEX, Stablecoin, ERC20 different, L2 hire, Bridge, Arbitrage/MEV, Utility). This labeling will enable us to investigate and visualize the utilization patterns on a excessive stage and likewise present the “hottest” good 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 Commonplace for L2 Block Exporers
This mission will clearly outline properties {that a} block explorer ought to implement to be able to be thought of feature-complete within the normal layer two setting. Moreover, our aim is to suggest and specify a regular API interface that the layer two networks ought to expose to normal block explorers. We envision that such a standardized interface will allow and vastly 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 excellent state of affairs, the usual would flip the event of the core of a brand new block explorer right into a mission that may very well be accomplished by an skilled staff throughout a weekend hackathon. Our aim might be to additionally outline a regular 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 doubtlessly even decentralized. The mission 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 in a straightforward method, offering the mandatory infrastructure to scale Ethereum.

🧮 Cryptography and Zero-knowledge proofs

Zhe Ye, Ujval Misra, and Daybreak Track (College of California at Berkeley) – Specular
The most well-liked optimistic rollups (ORUs) as we speak, Arbitrum and Optimism, try to increase present Ethereum consumer software program (Geth) to help 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 particular consumer program binary—oblivious to its higher-level semantics. This method (1) precludes the trust-minimized, permissionless participation of a number of Ethereum consumer packages, magnifying monocolture failure danger; (2) results in an unnecessarily massive and sophisticated 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 subsequently targeted on constructing a safe, trust-minimized ORU that addresses these issues, whereas preserving scalability and dispute decision effectivity. To take action, we’ve got 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 help IFP building—demonstrating the practicality, extensibility and trust-minimal nature of our method.
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 barely conjectured. Moreover, we consider that in some circumstances 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 mission 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 sincere, 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 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 listing 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 stage of safety of Mainnet?

We had been extraordinarily proud of the standard of candidates for this grants spherical. The analysis and work they produce may have a constructive affect on the ecosystem. We recommend maintaining a tally of them!