Thread by @taikoxyz

Taiko ZK-EVM alpha-2 testnet is live! Askja 🌋

As was the case with alpha-1, it's permissonless for anyone to transact and deploy on.

The big change: it's now permissionless for provers to generate proofs!

Read the blog for full info mirror.xyz/labs.taiko.eth… or thread below 🧵

Relative to alpha-1, the most prominent changes are:

- ZKPs (validity proofs) are partially integrated
- Provers are in and are permissionless; proposers are permissioned (just us)—opposite of alpha-1

- Protocol economics are enabled
- Real rewards for provers to compensate their resource expenditure
- The L1 that L2 corresponds with is a true Ethereum testnet, Sepolia
- Uniswap V2 fork deployed to swap with

What remains the same:

- Open to all developers to deploy smart contracts. As Taiko aims to be a type-1 ZK-EVM (Ethereum-equivalent), you can use all the Ethereum/solidity tooling you are familiar with, and deploy your Ethereum smart contracts exactly as is.

- Open to all users who want to use it and play around with some transactions.
- Open to all interested parties to run an L2 node.
- Bridge to move assets between testnet L2 and L1.
- Block explorers to view assets and activity on testnet L2 and L1.
- Status page

Let's talk proofs and permissionless provers! 🔏

Validity proof generation has entered the network.

Alpha-2 does not entail proving the full EVM execution yet, but rather proving the “public input” circuit.

This circuit takes the data that a proposer pushes to L1 and hashes it & checks this hash value against the hash that was automatically generated by the L1 smart contract. i.e., it checks that the blob of data (the list of txs) is valid, and that it matches what was committed to.

Oracle Prover 🔮

Since the ZKP coverage in a2 is still incomplete, Taiko holds a special address that acts as the oracle prover. Only this oracle prover can prove blocks as the very first prover (with empty proofs that won’t be verified onchain)...

All other actual provers must prove the block after the oracle prover with the same block headers.

Hardware requirements and benchmarks 🖥️

Generating validity proofs is a computationally-intensive process. Below is a sense of the minimum hardware required & benchmarks if using this hardware.

- 8 or 16 core CPU
- 32 GB memory
- Proof generation takes approx. 10 mins

- If renting a machine with the above specs, would cost approx. $0.15 per proof.

Note: this is not representative of what a full ZK-EVM proof will eventually cost.

Rewards for provers 🫰🏽

To reward provers for their computing resources expended during proof generation, Taiko Labs is creating a reward campaign worth up to 50,000 USDC. Please review the blog post for these details and participate as a prover if you wish, permissionlessly!

What is not in this testnet:

- Ability to become a proposer. Taiko will run a permissioned proposer.

The reason has to do with proposer-prover mechanics in a testnet environment, where proposers don't need to spend real ETH to publish blocks to L1. Please see blog for more.

Get involved 👋

Here is the testnet hub where you can find documentation, guides, and links to all relevant apps and tools: taiko.xyz/docs/guides

Community Call #2 ☎️

This Friday, March 24th at 15:00 UTC on our Discord server. You can find the ‘stage’ channel here: discord.gg/taikoxyz?event…. We will provide some general updates, and you can ask any questions you would like in Discord in advance.

Thank you 💖

It would not be possible without the community and broader contributors across Ethereum and other ZK or rollup efforts. We are thrilled in inching closer to a fully decentralized Ethereum-equivalent ZK-Rollup with you.

mirror.xyz/labs.taiko.eth…