Taiko

Overview of the Taiko Type-1 ZK-EVM

Matt Finestone
Co-founder @ Taiko Labs

Topics of discussion

• Background on Taiko
• What are we?
• Tradeoff space understanding
• Where are we going?
• Resources for building on Taiko

Background on Taiko

• Scaling Ethereum with a Type 1 ZK-EVM
• Community ZK-EVM effort
• Several members from Loopring, built the first ZK-Rollup on Ethereum
• Now around 25 people from all around the world

What are we?

• A fully decentralized, Ethereum-equivalent ZK-Rollup (a Type 1 ZK-EVM)
• Fully open source and MIT licensed
• Community developed/driven, no permissioned block proposing/proving
• Released an alpha-1 and alpha-2 testnet, alpha-3 coming soon 👀

What are we: Ethereum-equivalent

• Type 1 ZK-EVM
  • We choose compatibility over proof generation time
• EVM-equivalent
  • Yellow paper validity rules (defining the state transition)
  • No changes to the gas schedule
• Ethereum architecture
  • Re-use execution clients
  • Gas costs, state tries, hashes, etc.
  • Equivalent bridge contracts on L1 and L2
  • We are also "based" (or L1-sequenced)
• Decentralized and open source

What are we: Decentralized

Why we like our point on the tradeoff curve

• EVM winning/has won
  • Zero cognitive overhead for devs; all tooling, best DevX
• Ethereum infrastructure maximum re-use, minimum diffs.
  • Battle-hardened, well supported
• Security edge cases minimized or removed
  • Contracts/dapps – peace of mind for devs (and users)
  • Nodes/infra – peace of mind for whole network
• We are comfortable with what we tradeoff: proof generation time

We are comfortable with what we tradeoff

• Matters less than people expect from time/delay POV
  • Only matters for withdrawals; everything on rollup quick and deterministic
    • Optimistic rollups, 7 day delay
    • Liquidity providing bridges
    • Sidecar proofs for withdrawals
• Cost continuously coming down from hardware and software optimization, our own and across the community.

Proposing

Proving

Verifying

What are we: flowchart overview

Where are we going: learnings from Taiko alpha-1 testnet

• ~2k unique proposers
  • Proposing was permissionless, just commit your rollup blocks to Ethereum L1

Where are we going: learnings from Taiko alpha-2 testnet

• ~140 unique provers
  • Proving is permissionless, first proof wins; incentivizes max efficiency (it's not the full EVM circuit).
• Issues found. Protocol economics flaw, precision too low.

Where are we going: Taiko alpha-3 testnet

• Simplify protocol w/ major optimizations / features
  • Moving lots of validity logic into ZKPs
  • Enable EIP-1559 on L2
• EIP-1559 inspired proposer / prover fee
  • Proposer fee is based on gas per second
• Apply lessons learned from alpha-2
  • Contract upgradability
  • Does prover decentralization matter
• More circuits included

Where are we going: long term

• Equivalent
• Decentralized
• Ethereum

Resources to build on Taiko

• Dapp development a bit boring, essentially "build on Ethereum"
  • Any Ethereum learning resource applies; simply change the RPC like you would with another Ethereum-equivalent chain, such as an L1 testnet like Goerli
• Guides available at taiko.xyz
• Check out starter repo dapp-slaps:
  • https://github.com/d1onys1us/dapp-slaps
• Also help build Taiko itself, check CONTRIBUTING.md:
  • https://github.com/taiko-mono

Thank you