Taiko: Type-1 zkEVM valued by Sequoia China

original"Taiko: A New zkEVM on the Blockoriginal"

"by umede.eth, compiled by Odaily jk.

Editor's note: According to Odaily, on June 8, Taiko, the second-tier network of Ethereum based on zkRollup, completed two rounds of seed financing totaling US$22 million. The first round of financing is US$10 million, led by Sequoia China, and will close in the third quarter of 2022. The most recent $12 million Series A funding round was led by Generative Ventures.

Disclaimer: The following does not represent the views of Odaily, nor does it constitute investment advice.

If you've followed the zero-knowledge proof Ethereum scene for a bit, you've probably heard the names Polygon, Starkware, Scroll, and zkSync.

In fact, you've probably not only heard of them, but seen them on Twitter arguing about all sorts of issues: what is the true definition of zkEVM, who was/is/will be deploying zkEVM for the first time on Ethereum mainnet, who's in marketing Better, and other important and not-so-important issues.

Regardless of your view on their arguments, all of these projects are working hard to scale Ethereum.

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background

backgroundTaiko ("drum" in Japanese) was founded in early 2022 by Daniel Wang, Brecht Devos and other big names in the field.Before founding Taiko, the two worked at Loopring,

Loopring is the first zero-knowledge rollup deployed on Ethereum.

I think it's important to quickly understand the role Loopring played in Taiko's creation and development. Originally, the zkEVM that Taiko was building had to be part of Loopring’s effort to bring zero-knowledge proof-powered Ethereum to the masses.

Taiko currently consists of about 20 employees from countries such as Turkey, Austria, Barbados, China, India, USA, Canada, Ukraine, etc.

technical details

Type-1 zkEVM

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The main feature that differentiates Taiko from its competitors (or rather, peers) is its aim to be a Type-1 zkEVM. Type-1's zkEVM strives to be fully equivalent to Ethereum, meaning it makes no changes to the Ethereum system to make it easier to generate zero-knowledge proofs.

Before diving in, it's important to note that Taiko's zkEVM is a fork of the Privacy and Scaling Explorations (PSE) team's community effort. Taiko uses this fork to test new stuff and then contribute to PSE's zkEVM so that any project that is developing a Type-1 zkEVM (not yet) can benefit from this research.

Type-1 zkEVM hopes to be fully compatible with Ethereum. In the case of Taiko, it intends to be the equivalent of Ethereum at the opcode level, meaning that hash functions, precompiled contracts, transaction and state trees, and other consensus logic will not change. However, as noted in Taiko’s white paper, the protocol does currently disable certain Ethereum Improvement Proposals (EIPs), but this will change over time.Becoming the equivalent of Ethereum brings many developer benefits. For example, developers can seamlessly migrate their smart contracts and decentralized applications (dApps) to Taiko.

This is very important because if a dApp like Uniswap wants to migrate to Taiko, it does not need to make any changes to its protocol. Otherwise, rewriting the code into a different programming language than Solidity or making other changes would immediately introduce multiple risks to the security of the protocol, as well as the assets on it.

Beyond that, in the case of Taiko, compatibility has been further enhanced. The Taiko client is based on the battle-tested Ethereum client Go-Ethereum. This means they are more familiar and easier to use for those looking to participate. From an end-user perspective, the ability to use Uniswap on Taiko maintains, and even improves, the consistency, accessibility, and user satisfaction of Uniswap on the Ethereum mainnet.

However, proper protocol design can alleviate this problem. Let's see how Taiko can speed up the generation of zero-knowledge proofs.

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Accelerated zero-knowledge proof generation

Taiko speeds up the generation of zero-knowledge proofs in several ways:

All proposed blocks on Taiko L2 are validated immediately because they are deterministic and cannot be revoked. "Deterministic" means that anyone can calculate the state of the chain after execution. It only needs to pass the intrinsic validity test once when the L2 block is submitted to Taiko L1 to be considered as verified.

All of these can speed up the generation of zero-knowledge proofs to a certain extent. For end users, this means instant finality on L2, and faster bridging from L2 to L1.

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Taiko protocol

1. Taiko’s zero-knowledge protocol deploys two smart contracts on the Ethereum mainnet (L1) and Taiko L2:

2. L2 smart contracts are currently used to prove the invalidity of proposed blocks and anchor them, a way for the protocol to leverage the programmability of the EVM to enforce certain protocol behaviors.

zkSNARKs

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The Taiko protocol uses Zero-Knowledge Succinct Non-Interactive Argument of Knowledge (zkSNARK) proofs. At least in theory, zkSNARKs are believed to lack scalability compared to zkSTARKs and require a trusted setup process. However, zkSNARKs are more lightweight than zkSTARKs and thus take less time to verify. And zkSNARK requires less gas, providing cheaper transactions.

To generate zkSNARKs, Taiko uses the Lagrangian base-based Global No Interaction Proof of Knowledge (PLONK) proof system. The advantage of PLONK is that it relies on standard cryptography and its proofs are small in size. However, Taiko is also investigating the possibility of combining PLONK with other proof systems such as Plonky 2, Hyperplonk, and Halo.

1. The Taiko network consists of three participants:

2. Proposers build Rollup blocks based on L2 users' transactions and submit them to Taiko L1 clients. They decide which transactions are included in a block and how to order them.

3. Node runners execute transactions from on-chain data to stay in sync with the state of the chain. Proposers and provers also run nodes, but those who want to provide other services (such as block explorers) also need to run a node.

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Taiko L2 node

Please read Taiko's white paper for more detailed technical details.

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Taiko recently launched its first testnet, called Snæfellsjökull, after a volcano in western Iceland. Users can test Taiko by testing bridges between Ethereum A1 and Taiko A1, transferring tokens between different accounts, interacting with contracts, and running proposer nodes.

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From a testing standpoint, the testnet was a huge success. In just over a week, the Taiko L2 network has processed over 1.6 million transactions, over 650,000 blocks, and 275,000 wallet addresses. Snæfellsjökull can be said to have exploded.

Source: https://l2 explorer.a 1.taiko.xyz.

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Taiko did not specify when its mainnet launch would happen, but mentioned late 2023 or next year as more likely.

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Taiko's Faith

Although Taiko is completely different in technical design from other zkEVMs in this field, its pursuit is also worth discussing.

Taiko claims that it wants to be accessible, inclusive, open, permissionless and decentralized. In fact, it hopes to be able to go live with a fully decentralized set of proposers and provers. This is different from other zkEVMs as most of them choose to start with centralization and gradually become decentralized.

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epilogue

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Type-1 zkEVM has its advantages and disadvantages. But what if its disadvantages are negligible relative to the advantages it offers? What if the Ethereum equivalent, seemingly the highest standard, combined with existing and potential ways to accelerate zero-knowledge proof generation, really make Type-1 zkEVM a long-term winner? There are still many unknowns, but at least Vitalik seems to imply that a Type-1-like zkEVM is the right choice.

As for Taiko, I think it found the right place at the right time. 2023 seems to be a year reserved for Build. If Taiko achieves its goal and launches its mainnet this year or early next year, it could be one of the big winners in the next adoption cycle.