Author: umede.eth
Translation: Odaily Planet Daily jk
Editor’s note: According to Odaily Planet Daily, on June 8th, Taiko, an Ethereum layer 2 network based on zkRollup, completed two rounds of seed funding totaling $22 million. The first round of financing was $10 million, led by Sequoia China and ended in the third quarter of 2022. The most recent second round of financing was $12 million, led by Generative Ventures.
If you’ve been paying attention to the developments in the Ethereum zero-knowledge proof field, you may have heard of names like Polygon, Starkware, Scroll, and zkSync.
- Viewpoint: ZK/L2 is not a narrative, but it can be a fertile ground for breeding new narratives.
- Tenet: A new public chain designed specifically for LSD
- Legal and policy experts’ interpretation: The future of the US SEC’s lawsuit against Binance and Coinbase
In fact, you may not only have heard of them, but also seen them debating various issues on Twitter: what is the true definition of zkEVM, who has/had/will be the first to deploy zkEVM on the Ethereum mainnet, who is better at marketing, and other important and less important issues.
Regardless of your stance on their debates, all of these projects are working hard to push for Ethereum’s scalability.
However, there is a new player emerging, one that is relatively low-key but just as promising as the others. This new player is Taiko – a zkEVM that aims to be a fully decentralized, Ethereum-equivalent zero-knowledge extension. To my knowledge, there are currently no other zkEVM teams attempting this feat, so I believe Taiko is worth special attention.
Let’s take a closer look at what Taiko is all about.
Background
Taiko (Japanese for “drum”) was founded in early 2022 by Daniel Wang, Brecht Devos, and other well-known figures in the field. It’s important, in my opinion, to quickly understand the role that Loopring played in the founding and development of Taiko. Initially, the zkEVM that Taiko was building had to be a part of Loopring’s efforts to bring zero-knowledge proof-driven Ethereum to the masses.
However, at some point in the development process, Wnag and his team realized that conflating the two could cause a lot of confusion because Loopring is an application-specific extension, while Taiko aims to be a general extension. So Taiko was separated from Loopring and developed independently.
Currently, Taiko consists of about 20 employees from countries including Turkey, Austria, Barbados, China, India, the USA, Canada, and Ukraine.
Technical Details
Type-1 zkEVM
The main feature that sets Taiko apart from competitors (or rather, peers) is its aim to become a Type-1 zkEVM. A Type-1 zkEVM strives to be fully equivalent to Ethereum, meaning that it does not modify the Ethereum system in any way to make generating zero-knowledge proofs easier.
Before delving further, it is worth noting that Taiko’s zkEVM is a branch of the Privacy and Scaling Explorations (PSE) team’s community efforts. Taiko uses this branch to test new things and then contribute back to PSE’s zkEVM so that any projects currently developing a Type-1 zkEVM (which do not currently exist) can benefit from this research.
The Type-1 zkEVM aims to be fully compatible with Ethereum. In Taiko’s case, it intends to be equivalent at the opcode level to Ethereum, meaning that hash functions, precompiled contracts, transactions and state trees, and other consistency logic will not be modified. However, as noted in Taiko’s whitepaper, certain Ethereum Improvement Proposals (EIPs) are currently disabled by the protocol, but this will change over time.
Becoming equivalent to Ethereum brings many benefits for developers. For example, developers can seamlessly migrate their smart contracts and decentralized applications (dApps) to Taiko. This is important because if a dApp like Uniswap wants to migrate to Taiko, it does not need to make any changes to its protocol. Otherwise, rewriting code in a different programming language than Solidity or making other changes would immediately introduce multiple risks to the protocol’s security and the assets on it.
Furthermore, compatibility is further strengthened in Taiko’s case. The Taiko client is based on the battle-tested Ethereum client Go-Ethereum. This means that it is more familiar and easier to use for those who wish to participate. From an end-user perspective, the ability to use Uniswap on Taiko is consistent, accessible, and satisfying, and even improved upon, compared to using it on the Ethereum mainnet.
Of course, pursuing a perfect compatibility path requires some trade-offs. The main challenge faced by type-1 zkEVMs like Taiko is slow zero-knowledge proof generation. Because Ethereum was not designed with zero-knowledge proof integration in mind, many parts of the protocol require extensive computation to generate zero-knowledge proofs.
However, proper protocol design can mitigate this problem. Let’s take a look at how Taiko speeds up zero-knowledge proof generation.
Speeding up Zero-Knowledge Proof Generation
Taiko speeds up zero-knowledge proof generation in several ways:
All proposal blocks on Taiko L2 are immediately validated because they are deterministic and cannot be revoked. “Deterministic” means that anyone can calculate the chain state after execution. Only an intrinsic validity test is required when submitting L2 blocks to Taiko L1 to be considered validated.
Since all Taiko L2 proposal blocks are deterministic, they can be proved in parallel, and proofs can be submitted in any order. For example, Prover #1 can verify block #1 at the same time as Prover #2 verifies block #2. This means that only Taiko L1 needs to wait longer for proof.
All of these can speed up zero-knowledge proof generation to some extent. For end users, this means instant finality on L2 and faster bridging speed from L2 to L1.
Taiko Protocol
Taiko’s zero-knowledge protocol deploys two smart contracts on the Ethereum mainnet (L1) and Taiko L2:
- The L1 smart contract is used for proposing, proving, and validating L2 blocks.
- The L2 smart contract is currently used to prove the invalidity of proposal blocks and for anchoring, which is a way that the protocol utilizes the programmability of the EVM to enforce certain protocol behaviors.
zkSNARKs
The Taiko protocol uses zero-knowledge succinct non-interactive argument of knowledge (zkSNARK) proofs. At least in theory, zkSNARKs are considered less scalable and require a trusted setup process compared to zkSTARKs. However, zkSNARKs are lighter weight than zkSTARKs, making verification times shorter. And zkSNARKs require less gas, offering cheaper transactions.
To generate zkSNARKs, Taiko uses the Proving System Using Languange Of New Algebraic structureS (PLONK) proof system based on Lagrange polynomial basis. PLONK’s advantage is that it relies on standard cryptography and has smaller proof sizes. However, Taiko is also exploring the possibility of combining PLONK with other proof systems such as Plonky 2, Hyperplonk, and Halo.
The Taiko network consists of three participants:
- The proposer constructs Rollup blocks based on L2 user transactions and submits them to the Taiko L1 client. They decide which transactions are included in a block and how they are ordered.
- The prover generates zkSNARK proofs that confirm the validity of L2 transactions and blocks. They decide which blocks should be verified on-chain.
- Node operators execute transactions from on-chain data to keep in sync with the chain’s state. Proposers and provers also run nodes, but those who want to provide other services (such as block explorers) need to run a node as well.
Taiko L2 Node
Taiko’s L2 node retrieves transaction data from Ethereum and executes these transactions on Taiko L2. As we mentioned earlier, Taiko’s L2 node is based on Go-Ethereum.
Please read Taiko’s white paper for more detailed technical details.
Current Progress
Taiko recently released its first test network, named Snæfellsjökull, after a volcano in western Iceland. Users can test Taiko by bridging between Ethereum A1 and Taiko A1, transferring tokens between different accounts, interacting with contracts, and running proposer nodes.
Snæfellsjökull volcano. Source: Icelandic Mag.
From a testing perspective, the test network has been a huge success. In just over a week, the Taiko L2 network has processed over 1.6 million transactions, over 650,000 blocks, and 275,000 wallet addresses. It can be said that Snæfellsjökull has erupted.
Source: https://l2 explorer.a 1.taiko.xyz.
The Taiko team plans to gradually phase out Snæfellsjökull in the coming months and replace it with a new test network that will use zero-knowledge proof technology. Further test networks will improve on previous versions and implement a token economic model.
Taiko did not specify when it will launch its mainnet, but mentioned that the end of 2023 or next year is more likely.
Taiko’s Beliefs
Although Taiko is completely different in technical design from other zkEVMS in the field, its pursuit is worth discussing.
Taiko claims to be accessible, inclusive, open, permissionless, and decentralized. In fact, it hopes to go live with a fully decentralized set of proposers and attestors. This is different from other zkEVMS, which mostly choose to start centralized and gradually become decentralized.
Taiko believes that full decentralization and the pursuit of the same goals as Ethereum are necessary conditions for being equivalent to Ethereum. In addition, the team plans to launch a DAO at some point in the future. Co-founder Wang also said that Taiko aims to operate as a non-profit organization.
Reading Taiko’s values makes me feel very avant-garde and almost revolutionary. This reminds me of the mission statement of zkSync. I hope Taiko can fulfill its promise and become the first fully decentralized type-1 zkEVM to land on the Ethereum mainnet.
Conclusion
Type-1 zkEVMs have their advantages and disadvantages. But can their disadvantages be ignored compared to the advantages they provide? If Ethereum equivalence seems to be the highest standard, plus the existing and potential ways to accelerate zero-knowledge proof generation, will Type-1 zkEVM really become the winner in the long run? There are still many unknowns, but at least Vitalik seems to imply that a Type-1-like zkEVM is the right choice.
As for Taiko, I think it has found the right place at the right time. 2023 seems to be a year reserved for Build. If Taiko achieves its goals and launches the mainnet later this year or early next year, it could be one of the big winners in the next adoption cycle.
Taiko is clearly unique and trying to achieve something extraordinary. Whether it can succeed is another question, but from Wang and his team’s achievements on Loopring, the odds seem to be in their favor. If Taiko wins, Ethereum will also be a winner.
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