Layer 2 Neighborhood Grants Winners

The Privateness & Scaling Explorations crew is happy to announce the winners of the Layer 2 Neighborhood Grants 2022.

The Layer 2 Neighborhood Grants spherical began on October twenty fourth, 2022 and used to be open for six weeks. In overall we gained 130+ proposals and thank every mission for taking the time to use.
The wishlist compiled sought packages from all spaces together with Layer 2 explorers, cryptography, and schooling.

This chart presentations proportion of preliminary candidates through class:

Because of the top of the range of proposals, we raised the price range from an preliminary 750k USD to a complete of 948k USD.

The awarded packages proportion consistent with class:

Grantees

We congratulate the 22 grantees awarded and provide their mission descriptions damaged down through class:

🔒 Cybersecurity

• Candidelabs – ERC-4337 Public Infrastructure

  • An open supply bundler and a paymaster provider as public excellent infrastructure for ERC-4337 sensible 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 identify a basis for fundamental very best practices and transparency for those options to help new builders of those techniques and permit the network to evaluate the safety dangers of a specific rollup ahead of they use one. Very similar to the ones which can be to be had for sensible contract construction and the very high-level overviews of rollup safety like L2Beat.com. The framework will speak about considerations and main points of get away hatch construction and operational dangers for end-users and builders and identify a constant language for those and different options.

👨‍💻 Person Revel in

• Spiro – zkWallet

  • Multi-party wallets (e.g. Gnosis secure multisigs) are a confirmed method for a bunch of customers to proportion keep an eye on over an account’s virtual belongings and behaviors. Sadly, present implementations of multi-party wallets divulge the privateness in their overall choice of operators and their related externally owned accounts. The purpose of this mission is to construct a non-public multi-party pockets that shields finish customers through using account abstraction (EIP-4337) and zero-knowledge proofs.

• Kautak Kundan – Stackr Community

  • The mission makes a speciality of the core concept of a roll-up that runs a state system off-chain – managing transactions in an off-chain state after which intimating the general states and the inputs that modified the preliminary state to the bottom layer. Following those regulations, you’ll use any software to construct a rollup. It can be general-purpose languages that handle the app state and supply an execution atmosphere to switch that, or it is usually a fork of an current EVM rollup during which current contracts can also be deployed. It could actually also be an excel sheet that data transactions!

• ScopeLift – L2 Optimizors

  • Layer 2 networks proportion safety with main-net through posting transaction name records to Layer 1. Consequently, Layer 2 customers pay their portion of the main-net fuel prices when executing transactions. Layer 1 fuel can also be >25,000x costlier than Layer 2 fuel, so paying for name records dominates L2 transaction prices. With customized router contracts that use much less name records than same old strategies, we will be able to considerably scale back transaction prices to engage with standard protocols.

• Testinprod – Layer1.5

  • Layer 1.5 allows someone to release their very own Layer 2 through offering simple gear. It supplies a very easy utility that launches your personal Layer 2 with important gear—for instance, block explorer, token bridge, tracking gear, and so forth.

• ScopeLift – Layer 2 Governance with Versatile Balloting

  • Versatile Balloting is an extension of the preferred Governor gadget utilized by many DAOs. It permits new types of delegation contracts to be written, making it more uncomplicated for governance token holders to take part in on-chain votes. One such use case is the topic of this grant: Layer 2 governance vote casting. Holders of bridged governance tokens may just vote from Layer 2, paying the less expensive fuel costs to be had there. Those votes could be trustlessly mirrored on L1 the place the DAO’s Governor gadget is deployed.

• Clement Walter – Starksheet

  • Starksheet objectives to democratize the get right of entry to and utilization of on-chain sources (records and common sense). It leverages a well-known spreadsheet to lend a hand the consumer question and hyperlink on-chain sources. The paintings is stored on-chain as NFTs and can also be queried later-on from some other dApp/contract

• Kristof Gazso – Typescript ERC-4337 Bundler

  • The mission will come with the advance of an ERC-4337 bundler in Typescript and the related changes to a Geth node for simulation functions in order that the bundler can run on any at once Geth-compatible chain (which contains maximum L2s) with little changes. The bundler may also divulge the RPC calls outlined within the specification, and handle an inner mempool to be future-proof when P2P propagation can be advanced.

• Soul Pockets – Open-source ERC-4337 pockets

  • Simple-to-use browser pockets implementation powered through ERC-4337.

📚 Neighborhood and Training

• Jose Figueroa – L2 en Español
  
  • L2 en Español is an open network that objectives to investigate, train and pressure the adoption in some of these Ethereum’s scaling answers. They center of attention on each builders and new customers of their quest to stick up to the moment with those applied sciences and their software. We create content material and perform other actions from publications to workshops totally free, whilst supporting the other tasks that innovate on this house, whilst keeping up additionally its core neutrality.

• Bruce Xu – MyFirstLayer2
  

  • This can be an open-source, community-driven, and academic mission. This can be a web page for folks all for Layer2 however with out prior information about Layer2 or Blockchain. We intention to make use of well-designed diagrams and interactive animation to lend a hand folks get the speculation in the back of Layer2 in 30mins. In a while, we will be able to information folks to a couple real-world Layer2 apps step by step and allow them to really feel some great benefits of Layer2.

🗄️ Knowledge Research

• Blockscout – Blockscout Block Explorer
  
  • An open-source block explorer is recently wanted for the L2 ecosystem. Blockscout is already utilized by many L2 tasks, and further customizations explicit to L2 records necessities will building up usability. As well as, a brand new interface, options, analytics and developer pleasant enhancements will lend a hand create a extra clear and usable network explorer.

• Quantstamp – Comparing Rollup Compression
  
  • Compression is continuously overpassed when discussing rollups. By way of design, rollups are required to make records to be had with the intention to test state transitions or state roots; then again, the process for this newsletter varies, and might come with compressed records. There may be variability within the compression ways used. This mission will discover the usage of compression within the rollup surroundings. First, the mission will explicate puts the place compression is used and report the ways that can be used. 2nd, the mission will survey current rollups to research the approaches which can be if truth be told utilized in observe. 3rd, the mission will review approaches proposed or used throughout equivalent techniques and try to establish why a specific manner is used. In any case, the mission will use the insights amassed with the intention to recommend new approaches for compression of rollup records and pose open issues to the network.

• 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 function of blockchain techniques. The primary critiques when compared layer 1 blockchains corresponding to Algorand, Solana and Diem and can be printed quickly in a peer reviewed global convention (Eurosys). This mission objectives at including layer 2 blockchain techniques to the Diablo benchmark and to make use of it to supply the primary intensive and reasonable benchmark analysis of layer 2 blockchain techniques on a global deployment.

• Web3-data – Layer 2 Task Monitoring & Comparability Suite
  
  • Via this mission, we intention to ship a top quality set of Dashboards that lend a hand permit records scientists, researchers, and all network participants to higher perceive Layer 2 Task
  • We can combination records throughout Layer 2 networks leveraging resources corresponding to Dune, L2Beats, Santiment, CoinGecko, Github, Discord, and, in lots of circumstances, at once from the mission APIs/RPCs.
  • We can blank and arrange this knowledge to offer a collection of shows that can permit the network to visualise adjustments throughout key L2 metrics (e.g. tps, hire paid to Ethereum, expansion in TVL, day by day energetic addresses, new addresses, overall addresses, charges paid, and developer process in keeping with GitHub affiliated repo commits).
  • We intention to label sensible contracts (and in the end permit the network to label sensible contracts) through utilization classes (Local switch, DeFi DEX, DeFi different, NFT, CEX, Stablecoin, ERC20 different, L2 hire, Bridge, Arbitrage/MEV, Application). This labeling will permit us to investigate and visualize the utilization patterns on a excessive point and in addition display the “most up to date” sensible contracts within the other utilization classes. We’re leveraging identified labels from Dune, Arbiscan, Etherscan, and others.

• L2 Beat – L2 Beat
  
  • Proceed to paintings on clear and verifiable insights into rising layer two (L2) applied sciences with expanded metrics and schooling.

📊 Knowledge Visualization

• Quantstamp – Again-Finish API Usual for L2 Block Exporers
  
  • This mission will obviously outline houses {that a} block explorer must put into effect with the intention to be regarded as feature-complete within the total layer two surroundings. Moreover, our purpose is to suggest and specify a regular API interface that the layer two networks must divulge to total block explorers. We envision that one of these standardized interface will permit and a great deal simplify the advance of a couple of block explorers that can plug-and-play reusable with the entire layer 2 networks that give a boost to the usual. Within the very best situation, the usual would flip the advance of the core of a brand new block explorer right into a mission which may be finished through an skilled crew all through a weekend hackathon. Our purpose can be to additionally outline a regular this is consumer-agnostic. As such, it’s going to no longer topic if it is ate up through a block explorer this is supplied commercially, is open supply, or doubtlessly even decentralized. The mission pays particular consideration to what distinctive layer two records a block explorer must supply, with an emphasis on the ones associated with safety of the chains monitored through it.

• Blossom Labs – Blobscan
  
  • The primary explorer for the EIP-4844 shard blob transactions. It indexes and gifts them in a searchable structure that the consumer can visualize and navigate thru in a very easy method, offering the important infrastructure to scale Ethereum.

🧮 Cryptography and 0-knowledge proofs

• Zhe Ye, Ujval Misra, and Crack of dawn Music (College of California at Berkeley) – Specular
  
  • The most well liked positive rollups (ORUs) nowadays, Arbitrum and Optimism, try to increase current Ethereum shopper device (Geth) to give a boost to interactive fraud evidence (IFP) development, aiming to reuse prior L1 engineering efforts and mirror EVM semantics at L2. Sadly, to take action they tightly couple their on-chain IFP verifier with a selected shopper program binary—oblivious to its higher-level semantics. This manner (1) precludes the trust-minimized, permissionless participation of a couple of Ethereum shopper methods, magnifying monocolture failure possibility; (2) ends up in an unnecessarily massive and complicated depended on computing base (TCB) this is tough to independently audit; and, (3) suffers from a frequently-triggered, but opaque improve procedure—each additional expanding auditing overhead, and complicating on-chain get right of entry to keep an eye on within the long-term.
  • We’re due to this fact enthusiastic about construction a safe, trust-minimized ORU that addresses those issues, whilst retaining scalability and dispute answer potency. To take action, we have now designed an IFP gadget local to the EVM, that enforces Ethereum’s semi-formally specified semantics [5] exactly on the point of a unmarried EVM instruction. As part of this paintings, we constructed Specular, an ORU which leverages Geth—changed minimally with handiest 99 lines-of-code to give a boost to IFP development—demonstrating the practicality, extensibility and trust-minimal nature of our manner.

• Nethermind, Justin Thaler (Georgetown College), Matthew Inexperienced (Johns Hopkins College), and Pratyush Tiwari (Georgetown College) – Concrete Safety Research for L2 Deployed Evidence Programs
  
  • We advise to investigate the concrete safety of the evidence techniques (SNARKs, STARKs) that safe -rollups. We follow that some evidence techniques have safety analyzed within the interactive surroundings, whilst their safety after making use of the Fiat—Shamir transformation is handiest conjectured. Moreover, we consider that during some circumstances extra environment friendly assaults are conceivable than the claimed safety point asserts.

• Ethstorage – Evidence of Garage 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 review an effective evidence gadget to successfully test on L1 that the BLOBs are saved off-chain with the specified redundancy (e.g., 30~50 bodily replicas). By way of placing those garage nodes in an L2 community and assuming 1/m of nodes is truthful, shall we construct an L2 garage community that reuses mainnet safety whilst extending Ethereum scalability dramatically.
  • Additional analysis will strive to respond to the questions of find out how to construct the evidence/verification gadget if the BLOBs and the commitments are continuously modified (e.g., new BLOBs are appended to the record or a BLOB of an index is modified); and find out how to construct incentivized/cost gadget to make sure desired replication issue the usage of ETH as cost; it’s conceivable to invite a garage node to retailer partial BLOBs whilst keeping up the similar point of safety of Mainnet?

We had been extraordinarily proud of the standard of candidates for this grants spherical. The analysis and paintings they produce may have a good have an effect on at the ecosystem. We propose keeping track of them!