Equilibrium Infra Bulletin #39: Low-Latency Rollups On Solana, zkVM Template, The Verifiability Vision, 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.
🔍 Bullet: Building Solana's First Ultra-Low Latency Rollup
⚡️ Topic Summary
Bullet is a low-latency, application-specific Solana L2 (network extension) developed by the team behind the perp-dex Zeta Markets. It’s built on the Sovereign SDK and leverages Solana for settlement and data publication.
The key components of Bullet include:
DA Adapter - Enables the sequencer to pack a batch of transactions into a Solana transaction as pure bytes ("blob"), which are hashed so that the smart contract on Solana holds a data root specific to the application.
Sequencer - Built from the ground up by the Sovereign team with a focus on performance. Features a “streaming” model that allows the sequencer to respond on a per-transaction basis, enabling fast updates (already achieved sub 50ms latency, aiming for sub 5ms with further optimizations).
Security model - Bullet is launching as an optimistic rollup with ZK fraud proofs (12h security window) but plans to transition to a full validity rollup once proving with general-purpose zkVMs becomes cheap enough. The main reason is to lower settlement times to a few minutes (and eventually seconds).
No VM - Bullet runs without a VM, which enables them to focus purely on the application without the complexities or intricacies of regular blockchain development. There are no strict compute or account limits, and they provide standard REST APIs (similar to CEXs).
Database - State access is the biggest throughput bottleneck (not execution). Bullet will leverage Sovereign’s JMT library at launch and based on initial tests, they have hit 100kB/s on the Solana mainnet. This is ~7,840 exchange orders per second with call data amortization (still ~10x less than Nasdaq).
Censorship Resistance - Anyone can run a non-preferred sequencer and submit transactions, which the preferred sequencer is incentivized to include within the next few Solana blocks. In the extreme case where the preferred sequencer fails to include these transactions within a specified timeframe (12h), it loses its stake (slashing) and the ability to provide soft confirmations. The rollup processes all forced transactions and becomes a based rollup.
🤔 Our Thoughts
Bullet is a good demonstration of how opinionated infrastructure can improve the underlying application and user experience when it’s well-designed (rather than just launching generalized infrastructure).
Another interesting observation from Bullet is how it builds on lessons learned from Ethereum and other ecosystems. Rather than building everything from scratch, they leverage infrastructure from Sovereign and zkVMs from Succinct and RiscZero. This means that even a small (although effective) team can build infrastructure to fit its specific needs.
More generally speaking, it’s been interesting to see how Solana L2s focus more on extending the Solana L1 (such as by providing lower latency, new features, or sovereign blockspace), rather than purely focusing on scaling execution.
💡 Research, Articles & Other Things of Interest
🤓 Obelia: Scaling DAG-Based Blockchains to Hundreds of Validators: A two-tier validator system, where a core group of high-stake validators propose blocks as in current protocols and a larger group of lower-stake auxiliary validators that occasionally author blocks.
📚 The 5 Levels of Secure Hardware: Paradigm’s recent post lays out different levels of secure hardware (TEEs) - an important component of the programmable cryptography vision.
📚 Devcon Key Insight: Indistinguishability Obfuscation (IO): A form of encryption that enables hiding (obfuscating) the implementation of a program while still allowing users to execute it. Still pretty far away from being production-ready, but also further along than many previously thought.
📚 Any zkVM template: A Rust template that abstracts which zkVM to use, making it much easier to create benchmarks.
🎧 The Verifiability Vision: Jens Groth lays out his vision of what the digital world would look like if all data was guaranteed to be correct.
🔥 News From Our Partners
Gevulot Firestarter is live and production-ready. Delegating ZK-proving is now much more feasible for a wide range of protocols. Proving on Firestarter is 95% cheaper than traditional cloud solutions, and it supports thousands of prover nodes.
🤌 Personal Recommendations From Our Team
📚 Reading: Confessions Of An Economic Hitman - John Perkins: Covers how private entities helped US intelligence agencies and multinationals pressure foreign countries to serve US foreign policy and award lucrative contracts to American businesses. Based on a true story by John Perkins, a former chief economist of strategy consulting firm Chas. T. Main.
🎧 Listening: Orbital - Halcyon And On And On: A classic by the English electronic music duo from their 1993 album Orbital 2.
💡 Other: A team of 10 AI agents writing a ”fully autonomous” book. Each has a different role - setting the narrative, maintaining consistency, and researching plot points. You can follow it in real-time through the GH repo!