Learnings from a fully permissionless ZK-rollup

Marcus, Taiko Labs

Topics of discussion

• What is Taiko?
• What did we learn about?
  • Specialized proposer role
  • Specialized prover role
  • L2s vs L3s

What is Taiko

• An Ethereum-equivalent ZK Rollup (a Type 1 ZK-EVM)
• L1 sequenced / "based rollup"
• Fully open source and MIT licensed (community project)
• Fully permissionless block proposing and proving

Block proposing

Deriving blocks

Proving blocks

Verifying blocks

Money on the table

• Permissionless roles are not "for fun", there's a lot of economic stake which leads to higher efficiency
• Keep the design maximally simple, do as little as possible (think PBS)
• Abstract away the complexity to give a lot of design freedom to other markets (MEV and proving)
• What does Taiko do? Ideally very little!

Specialized proposer role

• PBS on L2 (re-use mev-boost for now, ePBS later)
• Proposer doesn't "exist" anymore, now searchers
• Pay the validator (coinbase address) conditionally (first L2 block)

Specialized prover role

• New developments in abstracting the prover pool (see: https://github.com/taikoxyz/taiko-mono/pull/14510)
• Proof markets may emerge similar to builder markets for proposing

L2s vs L3s

• Generally the same thing depending on how you view it
• L2s make it look more like one chain, "Taiko"
• L3s may be better for specific use cases but not general purpose scaling

Thank you