Meet Askja — Taiko Tuesday #9
Everything that happened in the Taiko world last week — and more.
Welcome to Taiko Tuesday!
Taiko Tuesday is a community-driven weekly newsletter covering the ins and outs of Taiko, a fully decentralized Ethereum-equivalent validity rollup.
Let’s see what happened last week in the Taiko world!
Testnet status
Askja is live!
Here’s how Taiko’s A2 testnet is different from the last testnet:
ZKPs (validity proofs) are partially integrated.
Provers are in and are permissionless.
Proposers are permissioned (just Taiko running its own proposers).
Protocol economics are enabled.
Real rewards for provers to compensate for their resource expenditure.
Ethereum testnet Sepolia integrated.
Here’s what you can do on Askja:
Run a simple node.
Run a prover node.
Swap (Uniswap V2 fork).
Bridge.
Deploy smart contracts.
Build dapps.
Follow the guides on Taiko’s website to test Askja!
Now a word on running prover nodes.
Provers are the network participants that are responsible for generating proofs to validate proposed blocks. On Askja, you can run a prover permissionlessly AND get real rewards.
To run a prover, your machine has to have at least an 8/16 core CPU and 32GB of RAM.
However, there’s a caveat: Proving currently is a race that only the quickest nodes can win. To be the quickest, you need to run your prover on a really powerful machine. That’s what some of the community members are doing and they are capturing all of the blocks.
So, if you’re planning to run your prover node on a machine that has only the minimum requirements, chances are you won’t capture any blocks.
However, at least in my view, setting up a prover node even without proving any blocks is a fun educational experience. Of course, you need to take into account your expenses, but to me it makes sense to set it up and run it for a few hours, just to get a sense of it how it all works.
As for those who have powerful enough hardware and want to run a prover, you can earn some real rewards if you manage to prove some blocks. Here’s how it works: For every proven block you get TTKO, a test token that can be later redeemed for USDC.
The total reward budget is $50,000, and the reward program will run for around 300,000 blocks or 69 days.
Follow this guide to set up a prover node.
Now let’s look at the numbers. Since the launch on March 22nd, Askja has seen:
Average block time: 22.1 seconds.
Total transactions: 541,668.
Total blocks: 47,461.
Total wallet addresses: 55,834.
Total unique provers: 42.
Find more info on the Askja status page.
Development updates
As always, you can follow the automated changelogs to see what’s been happening in the Taiko development department. There are two changelogs: The Taiko client and the Taiko-mono repository.
Community updates
Taiko hosted its second Community Call. Here’s a great summary of the call by Mikko:
d1onys1us’ main takeaway from the call:
Taiko also hosted its second Office Hours. Thanks again to Mikkko for recording the call and even providing timestamps!
Who will be the ones that progress the Taiko chain? The total anarchists running proposers permissionlessly:
The Daily Gwei gave a shoutout to Taiko:
Ecosystem updates
Waiting to see what you big brains have managed to build/hack/improve for Taiko:
Interesting tweets
Differences between trusted setup and multisig:
Matter Labs launched its zkSync Era ZK-EVM:
Polygon also launched its ZK-EVM:
Guess what Linea launched? Yeah, a ZK-EVM:
How Arbitrum’s governance works:
L2s taking over:
A great thread discussing how the Polygon ZK-EVM works:
Meme of the week
Just come to Taiko’s Discord and you’ll see why this is true:
Or check the Askja status page to see how active the testnet is.
Feature👷
It’s been all about Askja this week, anon. I’ll do my best to prepare something interesting for you next week.
In the meantime, take a look at this beauty:
Taiko Haiku
Ethereum
Ethereum is
A beacon in the darkness,
Shining in plain view.
Useful links
Thanks for reading the ninth installment of Taiko Tuesday! Special thanks to d1onys1us and odesium for their feedback and general support for the project.
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Note: This newsletter is for educational purposes only and in no way constitutes financial, investment, or any other type of advice. Always do your own research before making financial decisions.