Intro
Welcome to the first edition of Taiko Tuesday — a weekly community-driven newsletter documenting the ins and outs of Taiko, a ZK-EVM aiming to become a fully decentralized Ethereum-equivalent validity rollup.
What to expect from this newsletter? First, Taiko Tuesday is going to cover the latest Taiko development, community, ecosystem, and other important updates.
But this newsletter isn’t going to be just another dry news dump.
I’m going to do my best to include feature articles written by myself or other community members, art, memes, and research related to zero-knowledge cryptography and Taiko specifically.
Oh, and I almost forgot about poetry. Yes, poetry. Read to the end to see what it’s all about!
All in all, Taiko Tuesday is an ongoing experiment that I’m sure will evolve over time. My only hope is that it gains traction and gets Taiko some well-deserved attention.
Let’s fire this baby up!
Testnet status
Taiko’s first public testnet Snæfellsjökull is still going strong. Let’s look at some numbers.
Since the launch on December 27, the testnet has seen:
Average block time: 7 seconds;
Total transactions: 3,020,752;
Total blocks: 1,689,741;
Total wallet addresses: 350,194;
Total nodes: 2000+.
Snæfellsjökull is still open for testing, so roll up your sleeves and go play with it! More info here.
Development updates
Taiko shared a flurry of technical updates on its ZK-EVM efforts, protocol, client, testnet, and bridge in its 2022 Q4 community update.
I’m not sure which updates came when so I’m just going to copy all and leave them here (don’t hate, it’s the first edition of Taiko Tuesday!).
ZK-EVM
Implemented RETURNDATASIZE/RETURNDATACOPY.
Added circuit benchmarks.
Added unit tests for math gadgets/super circuit.
Added support for invalid transactions.
Refactored math gadgets.
Made improvements to MPT circuit.
Investigated caulk, hyperplonk and plonky2.
Client and testnet
Created
simple-taiko-node
for running a Taiko node with a simple command, inspired bysimple-optimism-node
.Created a guide documenting how to use the testnet.
Launched faucets and block explorers for interacting with the testnet.
Bridge
Implemented a functional bridge relayer in Go.
Implemented a web UI to integrate with the relayer and bridge smart contracts.
Protocol
Fixed a bug in the Bridge contract that allows anyone to disable destination chains.
Fixed a bug in
getProposedBlock
with boundary checks.Refactored the Bridge contract to persist the message status in known storage slots for easier generation of Merkle proofs.
Exposed more data from the core protocol such as
getUncleProofDelay
,getBlockProvers
, andgetLatestSyncedHeader
.Merged the first tokenomics implementation into the core protocol.
Forced
invalidBlock
to have the latest verified block as the parent and also force the transactor to be the golden touch address with 0 gas-price.Fixed a bug in the TokenVault contract with respect to
msg.value
.Changed the core protocol rules to allow empty blocks (blocks with only an anchor transaction).
Add a Failed Bridge message status to allow future token releasing from the source bridge contract.
To increase readability, we now call a block “verified” when it is actually finalized on-chain. Previously the status was called “finalized” which was confusing sometimes.
Removed proposer and prover whitelisting from the core protocol implementation to enable the next fully permissionless testnet.
Moved away from yarn and adopted pnpm.
Introduced a lot of small improvements to the core protocol implementation.
Taiko also updated its website look. It looks much more intuitive and sleeker, go see yourself.
Community updates
Taiko launched its Ambassador Program on January 4 aiming to onboard 2-4 ambassadors to spread the word about Taiko in both technical and non-technical ways. The team said that they have received over 1800 applications and are now going through them.
The recording of the first community call has been uploaded on YouTube. You can listen to it here:
Ecosystem updates
Taiko has done a few presentations at various conferences. The team is going to do more of that in the coming months. They plan to attend upcoming Ethereum ecosystem events, developer conferences, and hackathons to build up a community of developers.
Stay tuned for more information.
Interesting tweets
Taiko’s Matt Finestone talked about Andy Guzman’s article on the properties of zero-knowledge proofs.
Matt was implying that current so-called ZK-rollups aren’t in fact “ZK” since they don’t meet the zero-knowledge property. He was saying that they only use ZK-SNARKs for their succinctness and completeness, and not for preserving privacy.
In other words, it’s time to sunset the “ZK-rollup” term. Validity rollups, anyone?
Taiko co-founder Brecht Devos further clarified on Discord that the difference between using a ZK-SNARK and a SNARK proof is minimal in practice.
Brecht explained that the reason why Taiko and other ZK-EVMs decide to skip the “ZK” part is that it would make validity proof generation more expensive.
An interesting discussion between Taiko co-founder Daniel Wang and Ye Zhang, co-founder of Scroll, another ZK-EVM in the making. The two talked about what constitutes a type 1 ZK-EVM, who has contributed to what, and other topics.
I love how both of them maintained their composure and respect for each other. It’s a dying art these days, especially between competitors.
Taiko talked in detail about the role of the proposer in the Taiko rollup.
Meme of the week
I don’t always make memes but when I do I call them the best. (Seriously, I suck at memes. Someone else please step up, I’ll share your work here!)
Feature. The origins behind the name “Taiko”
For the very first Taiko Tuesday feature, I’ve decided to take a look at the meaning and origins of the word “Taiko”.
“Taiko” (a “drum” in Japanese) comes from an old Chinese idiom (also known as chengyu) —鼓作气 (Yīgǔzuòqì). The literal meaning of the chengyu is that the first drumbeat arouses courage.
But did you know that there’s a whole story behind that idiom? Let me tell you about the Battle of Changshao.
It was spring 684 BC when Duke Huan of Qi, an ancient Chinese state, decided to wage a war against Lu, a vassal state. Why? Well, Duke Huan of Qi wanted revenge against his brother Lord Jiu and Duke Zhuang of Lu, who together had tried to kill him because Lord Jiu believed that he, not Duke Huan, was the one who should’ve inherited the throne from his father.
So Duke Huan of Qi attacked Lu. To defend against the enemy, Duke Zhuang of Lu appointed Cao Gui as the general of Lu. When the fateful day came, the army of Lu was already in the trenches, waiting for Cao Gui’s order to attack.
But when the Qi army made the first drumbeat to call Lu into war, Cao Gui remained calm and told its army to stay put. Then came the second drumbeat. But the general again stuck to his strategy and told its soldiers not to respond.
However, when Cao Gui heard the third drumbeat, he immediately ordered his army to counterattack the enemy. And it didn’t take long for Cao Gui’s army to beat the hell out of its enemy.
When Duke Zhuang of Lu, who was also in the trenches with his army, later asked Cao Gui about his war strategy, the general explained:
“The key to victory in war is courage and fortitude. The first drumbeat raised the Qi army’s courage. The second drum lowered it. By the third drumbeat, their army was already in shambles. But our courage was high. We attacked immediately and won,” he said.
Since then, Cao Gui’s explanation has been known for expressing the idea that one should accomplish a task or a goal in one energetic, sustained effort at a particular time when one feels inspired. I guess in modern days you could call it “going with the flow”.
In Taiko’s case, Taiko is the first drumbeat that arouses the courage of the team to roll up their sleeves and accomplish its goal of launching the first Ethereum-equivalent validity rollup ever in one vigorous effort.
(My goal was to write this newsletter in one vigorous effort too but it’s 4 AM already and I still have like 30% of it left to write. One might say I’m already in the second drumbeat zone.)
Taiko Haiku
Thanks for reading the newsletter to the end! Here’s a haiku I wrote about Taiko. I’m going to try to make this a tradition and write one for every newsletter.
Equivalence
Equivalence is
Like night and day; opposite,
Yet one and the same.
Useful links
Thanks for reading the first installment of Taiko Tuesday! Special thanks to d1onys1us for his feedback and general support for the project.
If you liked the newsletter, please share it on Twitter and Lens. If you don’t want to miss future installments, make sure you hit that Subscribe button and follow me on Twitter.
Got any feedback or would like to collaborate? Send me a message on Twitter!
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.