The Trailblazers Trail 4: Defi on Taiko

This week, we’re introducing the Master Faction Badge and inviting you to dive into the world of DeFi by creating a position on any of our partner protocols.

1/ 📅 DeFi Trail
Dates: July 8 - July 21, 2024

Whether you choose to borrow, lend, provide liquidity, or create a position on a perpetual contract, you have the chance to earn not just Trailblazers XP but yield as well from dapps in our ecosystem!

2/

Trailblazers Trail 3: Game Challenge!

Considering how much our community is eager to play games on Taiko, we are thrilled to announce that we will be extending the Gaming trail to last for 2 weeks!

1/ 📅 Week 2 Challenge
Dates: June 24 - July 7, 2024

Now you can game longer, have more time to compete with others and more time to earn the Bouncer Faction badge. To get it, you just need to perform in-game on-chain activities.

2/

Heads up! 🔊

We are upgrading the Taiko BCR mainnet protocol to version 1.7.0 on July 1st.

This release is ABI-compatible with the current Taiko-geth and client release, but includes underlying protocol changes affecting block proposers and provers.

1/ Breaking changes for proposers and provers:

- The protocol now mandates that the block’s assigned prover must also be the proposer. This change removes hook calls for gas optimization and simplicity, as hooks are expensive.

2/

Dear Taiko Community,

We are beyond excited to announce that after two years of hard work, the Taiko protocol has been deployed on Ethereum mainnet! 🥳

Let's look at how you can start exploring Taiko today:

1/ If you’re a regular user, you can:

- Bridge ETH to Taiko by using our official bridge. Bridging back from Taiko to Ethereum currently has 15-minute quotas, which we'll be progressively increasing and plan to remove in the future.

L1 → L2 has no quota.

2/

The Rollup Coaster #22 is out!

Find out what happened in the rollup space during the past two weeks. Let's roll. 🎢

1/ Highlights 🎢

Blobs have arrived on Ethereum! Transacting on rollups has become cheaper thanks to the successful EIP-4844 implementation.

2/

https://twitter.com/313724502/status/1769252351528030378

Introduction to FHE: What is FHE, how does FHE work, how is it connected to ZK and MPC, what are the FHE use cases in and outside of the blockchain, etc.

Check the full article here:

Special thanks to @leofanxiong for invaluable input and to @TomerSolberg for feedback and review.

Some highlights below. 🧵

P.S. All the credits for diagrams and pictures are attributed in the article.

1/taiko.mirror.xyz/2O9rJeB-1PalQe…

Introduction

• FHE stands for Fully Homomorphic Encryption.
• FHE was first proposed in the 1970s. However, until 2009, there hadn’t been much progress.
• Craig Gentry made a seminal leap in 2009, showing the first construction of FHE supporting an arbitrary amount of additions and multiplications.
• FHE enables encrypted computations on encrypted data.
• “Fully” stands for both additive and multiplicative.

2/

Did you like Get Started with Taiko, our first community education campaign on @Galxe?

If you did, we've got great news for you: We've just launched Explore Grímsvötn, our second Galxe campaign!

Let's take a closer look at the campaign and see how you can participate. 🧵

1/ Explore Grímsvötn is all about... well, exploring Grímsvötn, our Alpha-3 testnet!

The campaign consists of three sub-campaigns:

1. Bridging and Swapping on Taiko.
2. Proposing on Taiko;
3. Proving on Taiko.

What's so special about these sub-campaigns, you might ask?

2/

The first ever ZK starter pack just dropped!

Let's unpack it 🧵 Below is the decryption of the ZK starter pack content: check it out if you're learning ZK 🤓

🥁🥁🥁

We are thrilled to announce that we have raised $22 million across two funding rounds in our mission to build a decentralized and Ethereum-equivalent (Type 1) ZK-EVM.

taiko.mirror.xyz/THTEOFtqE6pjDr… Taiko’s goal is to scale Ethereum in a manner that emulates it as closely as possible - both technologically and ideologically.

To that end, we are proud to partner with a group of leading investors who share our vision and have put their trust in us.

We are excited to share that the Taiko alpha-3 testnet is LIVE! 🥁

This marks a significant milestone on our journey towards a decentralized, Ethereum-equivalent ZK-EVM. This testnet will be critical in testing much of the network design and components.

Let's dive in 👇

1/21 Full alpha-3 launch details are in our blog post: taiko.mirror.xyz/wD7yN8Y5RttbP7…

You can find all guides here: taiko.xyz/docs/guides

Continue reading this thread for a summary of the blog post above.

2/21

Just a few days left until @EthPrague! 🙊 💖

We're so excited to meet all of you in Prague and build, chat, and have fun together!

P.S. We're crafting some awesome SWAG for you right now. Can't wait to share! 😍 Six Taikoers will be supporting builders throughout the event ✨

Try to catch them all at @EthPrague:
@umededoteth – Ambassador 💖
@indraynor and @goerlibot – DevRels 😎 😎
@odesium and @MikkoIkola – Community Leads 🥁🥁
@dani_who_daniel – Engineer 👷

ZK-Roller-Coaster #6 🎢 🥁

Community edition! 💖

Special thanks to @umededoteth, @ex_scxr, @msfew_eth, @212anon, and @i_am_yona22!

Check full digest: taiko.mirror.xyz/7BwxX8eR_dW2ji…

Highlights below 🧵 Spice of the weeks 1/2 🌶️

TLDR @jon_charb did some research and ended up with the idea that “rollups are L1s.”

@dankrad disagreed that “a rollup is defined by its nodes,” highlighting that “a smart contract rollup is defined by its bridge.”

https://twitter.com/dankrad/status/1664963439838593025

1/15 The phenomenal @ETHGlobal Tokyo hackathon is over!

All weekend, 1070 hackers from 59 countries were non-stop building legendary projects.

311 projects submitted; 38 sponsors w/ bounties.

50 projects were submitted for Taiko bounty! 😍 🥁

We appreciate you so much! 🧵 👇 2/15 We appreciate your effort and love.

Awesome projects, impressive pitches, and dedicated, smart, kind builders!

Let's look at the 11 Taiko prize winners and share their wonderful work with the community 🏆 👇

We will deprecate the alpha-2 testnet within 10 hours ⏲️

We recently provided an update and overview of how the testnet has functioned, the metrics achieved, and the issues exposed. You can read that blog post here: taiko.mirror.xyz/EM1IEpF_Pd9_Wu… or thread here:

https://twitter.com/taikoxyz/status/1644103789119692800?s=20

Thank you so much once again to everyone that participated in any capacity 💕

The findings of this testnet have been instrumental in our learning and development, and we are well on our way for an alpha-3 testnet that implements many of the fixes, improvements, + new components.

Taiko changelogs v0.9.0 released 🕊️

These are our bi-weekly updates on Taiko's progress to keep the community informed, let's dive in 👇 🔬 Protocol:

• EIP-1559 on L2 merged
• New fee/reward scheme in progress
• Simulation tests and converting existing tests to foundry

Taiko changelogs v0.9.0 released 🕊️

These are our bi-weekly updates on Taiko's progress to keep the community informed, let's dive in 👇 🔬 Protocol:

• Alpha-2 testnet is live
• Fee system fixes
• Plain EIP-1559 proposer/prover fees in progress
• Other Alpha-3 testnet protocol design updates in progress

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

We're happy to share with you Taiko's roadmap: the core milestones on our way to the Taiko Mainnet 🥁

Ethereum’s commitment to rollups is strong and credible; rollups’ commitment to Ethereum ought to be the same.

Some highlights 🧵

mirror.xyz/labs.taiko.eth… Our goal is to scale Ethereum while upholding the root principles of security, permissionlessness, and decentralization.

We started building Taiko in Q1 2022 and are currently working on the ZK-EVM circuits, the L2 rollup node, and the protocol smart contracts.

One of the most meaningful takeaways from our first testnet has been the high unique proposer participation: *over 2000* unique nodes have proposed a block! 🧑‍💻

Let's learn about the proposers' role in the Taiko rollup 👇 Proposers build & propose a Taiko block to Ethereum L1 (in our testnet's case, to a private Ethereum L1 fork).

The block data is published on Ethereum, and the block gets appended to the proposedBlocks list which is stored in the TaikoL1 contract.

Taiko's first public testnet is now live!

Welcome to our Alpha-1 testnet, aka Snæfellsjökull 🌋

It's as open as we can make it, so while you are relaxing this week, participate! Deploy a contract, run a node & proposer, or just make some txs!

Learn more mirror.xyz/labs.taiko.eth… Jump right in with the testnet guide: taiko.xyz/docs/category/…

You can:

- Deploy smart contracts
- Run an L2 node
- Extend your node into a proposer
- Bridge L2<>L1
- Make other txs

We wrote a blog post on rollup decentralization.

We cover what it means, why it's important, and an overview of what it takes to get there.

mirror.xyz/labs.taiko.eth…

A summary of the main points in thread 👇 A decentralized rollup is one where *any user can be sure that their transaction will be included/executed*.

That means they can ensure it themselves, if they want.

It also means they can reasonably expect a broad and diverse set of network participants to do so.