Equilibrium Infra Bulletin #38: ZK in Consensus, Co-Snarks In Action, DA Market Places, and more...
Equilibrium designs, builds, and invests in core infrastructure for the decentralized web. We are a global team of ~30 people who tackle challenges around security, privacy, and scaling.
🔍 Consensus Where It Counts: Rethinking Base Layers for the ZK Era
⚡️ Topic Summary
In a rollup-centric system, the key roles of a base layer are to:
Act as a decentralized trusted third party between rollups to enable interoperability between them
Serve as the asset issuance layer
Provide eventual censorship resistance (through forced exits)
A key idea of the post is to apply consensus sparingly only to where state is actually shared (such as cross-domain asset transfers) rather than requiring it across all operations - leading to rollup-centric base layers where consensus is relaxed in favor of higher throughput and lower latency. This is related to earlier work around Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG) based models for consensus, which aim to point out dependencies so that computation/processing can happen in parallel:
Transactions within a DAG can be confirmed independently of other unrelated transactions. Once a majority of validators have approved a transaction, it is considered valid.
Allowing transactions to be confirmed individually instead of within a block can drive a large increase in transaction throughput, as many transactions can be proposed and confirmed in parallel.
Subsampling for transaction validation (source)
In a world of many validity rollups (ZK-based execution sharding), the role of the base layer boils down to:
Fast confirmation times for rollup transactions (at the speed at which data is disseminated through the base layer)
Fast interoperability between rollups (without the need for liquidity bridges or market makers).
Specialized DA throughput for rollups
Specialized verification tooling (more proving systems) for rollups
🤔 Our Thoughts
There’s recently been more interest in integrating ZK into the consensus layers, Justin Drake’s Beam chain proposal being one example. This article proposes another solution for a base layer in a ZK-based rollup-centric ecosystem - utilizing advancements in ZK and DAG-based consensus research. This is one of the more interesting areas of how ZK will eat the modular stack, something we wrote about almost a year ago.
One key question related to this proposal is how much shared state there will be between rollups in the future. With the complexity of multi-chain UX becoming increasingly abstracted away, users can more easily initiate more advanced transactions touching state across multiple rollups (e.g. buy an asset on rollup A with assets from rollup B).
💡 Research, Articles & Other Things of Interest
📚 ZK Boost Consortium Launches: 39 leading ZK companies joined forces to grow the pie together. Long live ZK!
📚 State of the Proving Infrastructure Landscape - Q3 2024: Gevulot released the latest update on the state of proving infrastructure.
📚 Benefits of EOF (EVM Object Format) for Zero Knowledge Proofs: Benchmarks from Succinct suggest that ZK proving EOF is ~3x more efficient and runs 2.69x faster than the current EVM version. The performance benefits mainly come from eliminating dynamic jump overhead and removal of stack depth limitations, resulting in dramatic reductions in opcode usage.
📚 KUDA: Karak Universal Data Availability: KUDA is the first DA marketplace designed to seamlessly connect rollups with any DA layer - removing the burden of managing multiple implementations.
📚 Slicing Up Binary Towers: A post from the Irreducible team on accelerating sumcheck on GPUs, achieving a 4x speedup over CPU baseline.
📚 CoSnarks in Action at Devcon7: The first production-ready coSNARK program was showcased during Devcon in a collaboration between Taceo, Cursive, and PSE.
🎧 BRAID: Implementing Multiple Concurrent Proposers: A short talk by Max Resnick introducing BRAID - a consensus specification for implementing concurrent leaders in Ethereum from parallel chains.
🔥 News From Our Partners
💥 Paxos acquires Membrane Finance, the issuer of the first MICA-regulated Euro stablecoin EUROe. Upon completion of the acquisition (pending regulatory approval), Paxos will be a fully licensed EMI in Finland and the EU. Membrane Finance was incubated by Equilibrium.
🤌 Personal Recommendations From Our Team
📚 Reading: Rendezvous with Rama - Arthur C. Clarke: Set in the 2130s, the story involves a 50-by-20-kilometre cylindrical alien starship that enters the solar system. A group of human explorers intercepts the ship to unlock its mysteries.
🎧 Listening: GPU organ plays music acoustically by controlling the RPM of each fan
💡 Other: On Building Git for Lawyers: Why don't lawyers and other non-coders use git?