Activate the Hyperscale!
Ethereum Hyperscaling Primer, the Founder Bell Curve, Partnerships and more....
In the latest ReStakening, we look at: Ethereum Hyperscaling, Espresso’s latest team-up, the Founder Bell Curve, We Like the Flash Layers and EigenLayer’s latest partnership updates.
Ethereum Hyperscaling Primer
On July 25 2022, Sreeram put out a thread discussing the concept of Ethereum hyperscaling, detailing the aims to achieve high scalability and robust security in blockchain systems, including why hyperscale Data Availability is critical and how Ethereum gets there.
Following all the discussion around EigenLayer’s Data Availability (DA) Layer recently, the team retweeted the thread:
How is the thread structured?
It discusses the concept of Ethereum hyperscaling, focusing on achieving optimal scalability and security in blockchain systems. Identifying four essential resources in a blockchain network for each participating node: computation, state, networking, and history storage.
Sreeram explains that early blockchain systems offered increased security with more nodes by replicating computation but lacked scalability.
What sort of solutions were initially implemented to combat this?
The Sharding approach divides the state into smaller shards maintained by subsets of nodes. It was criticized for its inherent security-scalability trade-off due to possible collusion among nodes allocated to a shard.
Well, how about Rollups? An alternative scaling method that offloads computation and state management to off-chain systems while enabling on-chain verification.
Sreeram points out, however, that rollups address only computation and state scaling, leaving networking as a bottleneck.
How does one resolve this?
Using a scalable data availability layer that guarantees rollup blobs' availability without requiring every node to download each blob.
Are there risks?
If data availability is sharded naively, then a small subset of nodes downloading each blob could potentially collude and lie. That’s not great.
Danksharding has entered the chat:
Erasure codes—a method of data protection in which data is broken into fragments, expanded and encoded with redundant data pieces and stored across a set of different locations or storage media and KZG polynomial commitments—a scheme that enables efficient and verifiable secret-sharing schemes, and cryptographic accumulators have been proposed as tools to eliminate the security-scalability tradeoff for data availability, achieving both high performance and security:
These tools were pioneered by dankrad (and others) and were codenamed Danksharding on the ETH roadmap.
Danksharding could increase the existing DA rate of Ethereum from ~70kB/s to 1.3MB/s to 1TB/s, which is insane.
In case it’s not evident from Sreeram’s post, Eigenlayer is at the forefront and actively involved in building this hyperscale data availability layer on Ethereum. The team is committed to achieving the 1TB/s, aiming for gold-standard security for hyperscaled Ethereum.
This is just a TLDR overview of Sreeram’s detailed thread; it doesn't do it justice. Check out the original here, Anon!
Espresso x Caldera Team Up! 🤜🤛
On July 24th, Espresso Systems announced its collaboration with Caldera, a rollup-as-a-service (RaaS) company, to contribute to the OP ecosystem.
The partnership aims to enable developers to deploy custom-built rollups for on-chain applications using the Espresso Sequencer and Espresso Data Availability (DA).
With this partnership, Espresso is also growing its decentralized sequencer network—which is fantastic—especially since they’ll be integrating EigenLayer’s pooled security.
How will both teams utilize the Sequencer and DA?
Espresso plan to deploy an optimistic rollup leveraging the Espresso Sequencer for ordering and fast confirmations and the Espresso DA for storage—with Caldera providing the OP rollup interface, site hosting, block explorer, and indexers.
The integration between the Espresso Sequencer and the OP stack facilitates the development of decentralized rollups and contributes to their Superchain vision.
Another key highlight:
Both Espresso Sequencer and Espresso DA utilize the HotShot consensus protocol, emphasising the balance between robust decentralization and fast, low-fee user experiences.
What role does Caldera play?
Caldera simplifies the process of launching blockchains, offering an ecosystem of interoperable, EVM-compatible Caldera chains with recommended bridges.
If you’re a developer, digging into the docs and potentially considering participating by integrating the Espresso Sequencer for early access would be worthwhile.
The Founder Bell Curve 🔔
On 25th July, the latest Bell Curve podcast dropped, in this episode Sreeram joined hosts Mike and Myles, to discuss the intersection of restaking and liquid staking in the crypto world. Delving into Eigen Layer as a concept—social coordination mechanism between Ethereum stakers and middleware protocols—and the dynamics between protocols like Lido and Eigen Layer.
As our readers will know, Eigen Layer, a system of smart contracts built on top of Ethereum, enables stakers to validate other chains or protocols. This extension of trust is known as Actively Validated Services (AVS) and aims to create a decentralized economy or marketplace of trust on top of Ethereum.
Because of this, it’s essential to explore both the potential of and concerns surrounding Eigen Layer, highlighting the importance of a common framework for decentralized trust—precisely what was covered in the Bell Curve podcast.
In fact there were several big-ticket talking points, such as:
The supply vs demand aspect of Eigen Layer, where Sreeram emphasized the importance of transparency and clarity in associated services.
Digging into questions around Eigen Layer’s role in Ethereum restaking and the potential impact of liquid staking protocols on Ethereum validators.
The governance aspect of Eigen Layer and its role in restaking—discussing the different types of LP positions and stakeholder models in DPoS systems and the options for stakers.
It’s worth remembering that EigenLayer’s goal is to minimize subjective decisions and create a permissionless platform for users to control their tokens.
By facilitating collaboration, EigenLayer will enable multiple parties with varying risk profiles to create valuable services whilst striving to be transparent and provide information to AVS consumers.
What else was covered?
The conversation touched on the challenges of decentralization and the need for decentralized technology—including the high cost of decentralized systems compared to centralized ones and the importance of market demand for decentralization.
Decentralization is notoriously expensive but worth the cost if, as an industry, we want to avoid contagion risk from both centralized bad actors and entities that collapsed like in 2022.
They explored the tensions between creating a permissionless experience and ensuring a good user experience in the Eigen Layer marketplace.
Decentralization is known for hindering the UX experience, so it’s a delicate balance.
In conclusion, this episode of Bell Curve provided valuable insights into how restaking and liquid staking converge and how both play their role in the crypto sphere—With Sreeram emphasizing the importance of decentralization, transparency, and user control in the development of protocols like Eigen Layer.
Finality Capital Partners also shared their favourite three ideas, which stuck out from the podcast, which included:
EigenLayer's end goal is to be enshrined in Ethereum.
Expect to see stratification of validators based on distinct needs of AVSs (services built on EigenLayer).
EigenDA helps to mitigate significant compute power/validator centralization—by separating data from execution reducing compute load on validators.
With a run time of 2 hours, it’s worth a watch.
“We Like The Flash Layers..” 🚀
On 27th July, AltLayer provided an update on their ALTITUDE Phase III, the Launch of which we’ve covered in the previous ReStakening.
As a small recap, phase III introduced Flash Layers, which utilized EigenLayer's innovative restaking mechanism and therefore tapped into Ethereum’s trusted network.
With the upgrade, users could restake stETH or rETH on EigenLayer's testnet and using the same account deploy Flash Layers through AltLayer's user-friendly rollup launchpad—and deploy they did, with over 100,000 Flash Layers already launched!
As a reminder, there are still 2 weeks remaining in the campaign, so if you haven’t been on the testnet yet Anon, what are you waiting for?
Go restake and deploy your own Flash Layer!
The original blog with a guide on here to participate can be found here
Nethermind x EigenLayer Cont.
On Aug 2nd, the Nethermind team posted a medium update which added more context to the EigenLayer strategic partnership.
Wait a minute… haven’t you touched on this before? Great spot ReStakening enjoyooor… you’re right, we have, but this update from Nethermind provides a few more of the juicy details:
So what’s the partnership’s aim?
Both teams plan to create a marketplace for decentralized trust, combining Ethereum's ethos, security, and innovation.
How does EigenLayer fit in?
It empowers developers—by enabling them—to explore every aspect of decentralized networks, pairing Ethereum's decentralized trust with tailor-made execution platforms or data availability layers for more flexibility and customization.
and Nethermind?
As a cornerstone developer within the Ethereum ecosystem, with expertise in infrastructure building and maintaining core Ethereum components—Nethermind is well-positioned to collaborate with EigenLayer.
Both teams share a joint mission to establish a global trustless communication layer, paving the way for secure, modular blockchain development. Very cool.
What’s included?
The collaboration between both teams includes the development of a restaking dashboard, establishing AVS node operator standards, and exploring the possibilities of restaking on Ethereum and other chains.
According to Nethermind, the partnership has been very rewarding to date and continues to be critical for shaping the future of the blockchain ecosystem.
Polyhedra Network Partnership Announcement
On August 3rd, Polyhedra Network announced a partnership with EigenLayer.
Who are Polyhedra I hear you cry? Well, for all those who aren’t in the know:
Polyhedra Network is building the next generation of infrastructure for Web3 interoperability, scalability, and privacy through advanced Zero-knowledge proof (ZKP) technology.
They provide trustless and highly-efficient interoperability solutions, including asset transfers, message passing, and data sharing between various Web2 and Web3 systems.
They have their zkBridge in Alpha on mainnet, and their zkLightClient on LayerZero.
The Partnership aims to significantly enhance the security and efficiency of both Layer-1 and Layer-2 networks.
We’re looking forward to seeing what exciting things both teams build together!