The Scaling World This Week
A look at some of the exciting developments in the scaling world (14/04/2023)
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A weekly newsletter covering exciting and interesting news from the world of scaling technologies.
Index:
After Shanghai, Ethereum Eyes EIP-4844
After the Merge last year, the latest Shanghai upgrade was another success story for the Ethereum community 🔥.
With that out of the way, the next big ticket item on the list for the core developers is EIP-4844, also called Proto-Danksharding.
EIP-4844 will help L2 transactions get much cheaper and could result in a sub-1 cent cost per transaction.
The release dates are unknown, but Anthony Sassano feels it could be later this year.
Fingers crossed 🤞
Provers Also Centralize L2s
In a typical zk-rollup design, the prover has the important job of creating the proof (a.k.a. succinct proof) for the transaction batches created by the sequencer.
But like the sequencer, the prover is also centralized, hence a potential attack target 😬.
Scroll is working on a mechanism that will decentralize the prover by replacing it with a collection of “miners” whose role will be to generate proofs and get rewarded for this work.
Polygon has also said that it intends to move to a provers market in the future.
For details, refer to this tweet by Twitter user @expctchaos.
The New Arbitrum AIP 1.1 and 1.2
Following last week’s drama around AIP 1.0, the Arbitrum DAO came out with two new proposals, AIP-1.1 and AIP-1.2.
AIP-1.1 proposes a lockup, a budget, and transparency reporting regarding the 7.5% of the $ARB tokens distributed to the Foundation’s “Administrative Budget Wallet”.
The new proposal has been agreed upon by most voters so far.
AIP-1.2 was more of an administrative proposal that sought to remove references to the original AIP-1.
This document (“AIP-1.2”) proposes amendments to the Constitution, and The Arbitrum Foundation Amended & Restated Memorandum & Articles of Association (the “A&R M&A”) and Bylaws (the “Bylaws”) to (1) remove references to AIP-1, and (2) make other changes reflecting feedback from the community.
AIP-1.2 has also been agreed upon by most of the voters 🙏.
The “Ultimate Layer2 Tracker”
Data analyst Twitter user @ahkek4 tweeted a new L2 dashboard he created on Dune Analytics that provides useful information about the Layer 2 landscape.
The “Layer 2 Eth Bridge Comparison Tracker” dashboard mainly focuses on activity levels of various layer-2 protocols.
[It] aggregates all layer2 Ethereum bridge volume data, providing users with a clear view of which chains are the most active and where the liquidity is flowing.
Here is the link to the dashboard 👍.
Uniswap Votes to Launch On Polygon ZkEvm
Decentralized exchange Uniswap is voting to debut on Polygon's new zero-knowledge Ethereum Virtual Machine (zkEVM) roll-up solution.
The move of dApps like Uniswap and Aave to the new zk protocols indicates the ecosystem's tilt towards rollups 💪.
Currently, the bulk of trading volume comes from the Ethereum mainnet, which is likely to change as more and more activity moves to L2s.
Till next time, have a great weekend!