OCLUB AMA RECAP: Orbiter X Taiko (10/02/2023)
OCLUB is an AMA channel designed by Orbiter that aims to bring tech-oriented topics to our audiences. We have invited Taiko, a decentralised, Ethereum-equivalent zk-rollup as our guest in this episode. Taiko’s Developer Experience Engineer, Dave, took us on a deep dive inside Taiko.
Full Recording
Click to play our AMA recording on Spotify.
AMA TLDR
- How does the design of Taiko uphold the core principles? [06:33]
Dave: Essentially Taiko is a zk-rollup. And zk-rollups naturally inherit security principles from the Ethereum. The way they do that is by creating a proof that everything you did off of Ethereum which is the main chain was actually valid and correct. So Taiko is really working on scaling Ethereum itself by taking, letting you do computation off the Ethereum main chain. You do the execution there, and then really you just propose that these are the things that I want to change that I did off chain. And then a verifier on Ethereum itself will be like, ‘Ok, I’ll check the proof. Make sure that you followed all of the rules.’ Then it will accept the state transition. So if you think about it like Taiko, also zk-rollups in general, they don’t really worry about the consensus part. It gets the consensus guarantees from the Ethereum itself. So we get the natural security guarantees of consensus, and we get the guarantees of the state transitions that we proposed by verifying that all the execution was correct. And that’s enabled by validity proofs or zk STARKS. You also said about decentralization, and I really think that Taiko is probably the most decentralised zk-rollups because all of our source code, all of our smart contracts are white paper. Everything is MIT licensed and open source. You can go to Github and read literally everything yourself. Also we have the entire protocol out there. So really we’re kind of supporting the smart contracts that we deployed from our protocol perspective. So that’s one of the angles in which it’s decentralized. The other major angle is that block proposing and improving is totally decentralized. If you looked at the code base, there isn’t a single line that says, like only this particular contract can do this for block proposing. So it’s completely decentralizeled. Same with proof generation. It’s totally decentralized as well. Anybody can generate a proof for a block to be accept for the layer 1 to accept the state transition. I’d say those are the main way for secure and decentralized and that decentralization is what enables the permissionlessness. There’s no restriction for you in terms of proposing any kind of the state transition, or we don’t block anything from yourself.
2. What makes you like the whole blocks of nations special? And why make it stand out. [11:24]
Dave: The block proposing is definitely unique in the sense that like we said before, it’s decentralized and anybody can do it. So it also allows a level of playing field for anybody because anybody can look at the transactions and compete on that or propose a block. I think the really interesting thing that we noticed on Taiko, it’s like built into the protocol is if you look at the Ethereum yellow paper, the blocks validity is really well defined. But we can check some things to make sure that you’re following the rules for a valid block. When you propose a blog to Taiko, at the moment that you propose it, we do some checks based of Ethereum yellow paper to make sure that the block at that point are immutable. So eventually, at the point that you submit a blog, like you want to submit this state, you can already deterministically build the L2 state. On Taiko L2, you can already take note that block that was submitted and deterministically build the state. That’s because we’re able to just check some of those things that are where the validity is really well defined in the Ethereum yellow paper. The only other thing that we need to check when a node basically downloads that block data from L1, it checks a few other things that are like contextual to the block, such as the nodes and the signatures, and they can skip over any of those invalid transactions. So Basically, the really unique part is that at the moment you propose a blog, we don’t use the word ‘finality’ because finality has like an association with L1. But I will say that a proposed block has the same finality as its enclosing Layer1 block. When you propose a block to Ethereum, we don’t use the word finalized that we we call it verified that we know that it’s that beautiful and you can rebuild the state. I’d say that is one of the unique things about our block submission.
3. Dive in and envision of zk-EVMs. [23:59]
Dave: The future of the zk-EVMs in general, it’s just so amazing because you just see that we’re kind of unlocking the scale for a Ethereum. First, we have all of these people building roll-ups, which is awesome, because it’s good to have competition and space. Because we enhance each other and I just think it’s a really good thing overall, even when you think about client diversity. There’s this idea that Ethereum execution clients should be diverse and it shouldn’t just have one. Not everybody should be running gas. And the reason for that is because gas might have a bug or something like that. So you kind of want it to be well distributed. The same thing goes for roll-ups, both from a security perspective, because we might want to have multiple different proving systems from the security standpoint, but also from a scaling standpoint. The way that we’re scaling Ethereum is by going off at these rollups, and the more rollups that we have, the more skill that we have. So the future of zk-EVMs is it’s just unlocking Ethereum for users. Like we’ve always thought about Ethereum as this world computer that everybody can use, but this world computer was just so expensive. I think that with rollups and also the really cool one coming in is that Proto-Danksharding which is basically relying on femoral data instead of actually storing it on the L1. These things are really gonna bring a lot of scale to Ethereum in the sense that users transaction fees will be a lot cheaper. The other consideration in the envasion of zk-EVM is that this is kind of like a multi-chain future. If we have a lot of different rollups, they might need to have some interoperability with each other. That’s a really interesting topic. I think the important thing is is gonna be like that cross roll-ups message passing. Taiko has a really elegant way of handling cross chain messaging and that’s what enables our bridge. So I think that this cross chain messaging is gonna be really important so that other rollups communicate about their state to each other and keep in sync. I see this kind of multi roll of future and and bringing skill to Ethereum. So it’s really exciting.
4. Talk about the development difficulties and challenges Taiko has encountered so far. [28:15]
Dave: Being a fully Ethereum equivalent without any changes at all I’d say it’s probably a little bit hard in developing circuits. But at the same time, like we’re really optimistic about it, like we see proof generation time just kind of going down. Taiko started in the beginning of 2022 and saw some competition in L2, which is why it’s awesome to see you and orbiter finance are also integrating Taiko. We really want it for our next steps as well to bring on a whole community of developers and people who want to deploy dapps and make it easy. Because building on this vibrant ecosystem, having all the dapss that people expect is gonna be really important. And we’re already kind of saying that we provide the an equivalent developing experiment experience anyways. So I I’d say that’s the challenge as well building out that ecosystem and dapps on Taiko.
5. What kinds of specific partnerships or collaborations that Taiko is looking for? [34:20]
Dave: In terms of specific ones, I’m not entirely sure, but we want to have like all of the bigger dapps, for example, one you can think of is like Uniswap and some other the major dapps. I think we want to definitely support and deploy on the protocol. But we really want anyone to permissionlessly come on to taiko. On that note, I’ll also say that, in a little bit of time, we will be posting a developer interest form, basically, to try to help people out to deploy on Taiko to the testnet. So definitely keep an eye out for that.
About Taiko
Taiko is a fully decentralized, Ethereum-equivalent ZK-Rollup.
About Orbiter Finance
Orbiter Finance is a decentralized cross-rollup bridge for transferring the Ethereumnative assets, which is the infrastructure of Layer 2, we offer low cost and almost instant transfers.
