Yao Qi, Founder of AltLayer
Thanks, everyone. And also thanks for Jocy and IOSG Venture’s invite. I’m YQ, founder of AltLayer. Today I will share some sort of new progress and updates from our side. Basically, our close collaboration and partnership with EigenLayer introduce these Restake Rollups to the interior blockchain industry. As we know right, for the past two to three years, there have been a lot of Rollup Stacks like Optimism, Op Stack, Arbitron, Orbit, Polygon, CDK, and also zkSync, and zk Stack. If we say like three years ago to build a Rollup, no matter if it’s Optimism’s Rollup or ZK Rollup, it was so difficult. We need $100 million and probably 100 sorts of people team to rebuild it. But with the development for the past three years, we already made all the Rollup standards sort of quite mature.
And that’s why for example for us, with the official partnership with all these four big Rollup stack providers, and at the same time, we are providing this sort of like one one-click Rollup launching platform. So basically developers, you can quickly launch a Rollup for all different test nets within a few minutes or almost within a few hours. And since with so many of these Rollup providers, and at the same time, there are a lot of mature infrastructure service providers, now we can see that launching Rollup is as easy as deploying sort of smart contracts on Ethereum. Based on our expectations, by the end of this year, we can definitely have hundreds of Rollups in different sectors.
No matter if it’s a general-purpose l two similar to OP, Arbitrum, or Polygon ZKEVM or there will be a lot of application Rollups like doing these on-chain games or doing social applications, or even doing our different new Defi protocols like Perps. However, as we can see, right, no matter whether for the existing big general-purpose L2s or the new application Rollup often is quite constrained with the existing technology we can have. For example, for all the existing Rollup stacks, we always have a single sequencer. So in that case big brands like Optimism, Arbitrum, or even Coinbase Base, can trust them because they have good backers and good reputations.
However, for a lot of new Rollups, basically launched by some anonymous developers, since it’s just a single sequencer, even if there is fraud proof or ZK proof, we couldn’t really trust the single sequencer. So there is an issue like sort of a single point failure or censorship issues or even this kind of trust issues for the existing Rollup stack. Beyond that, we all know that since we have the TVL in different Rollups, right? It always has these liquidity fragmentation issues when we have these DeFi protocols and assets across different Rollups. Okay. On our side, working closely with the EigenLayer team, we really proposed this Restake Rollup by the end of last year. So one thing like there are a lot of misunderstandings about this Restake Rollup. So Restake Rollup is not a new Rollup stack, as I mentioned at the beginning.
We are working closely with all the Rollup stack providers. When we provide the features of Restake Rollup, it’s plug-and-play and compatible with all the existing Rollup stacks. And the second thing is that we are not building a dedicated sort of L2 or Rollup. Some people or friends reach out to us and say oh, what’s AltLayer’s L2? And how we deploy smart contracts on it. Actually, it’s a big misunderstanding. We don’t really build sort of a dedicated Rollup for this Restake Rollup. It’s just a framework. And the third thing is that we don’t really change the security guarantee of the Rollup. For example, if it’s the Optimism Rollup, it’s secured by this fraud-proof. If it’s a ZK Rollup, we have the ZK proof to ensure the security derived from this ethereum.
Then what can the Restake Rollups offer? The first thing, as I mentioned, it’s a modular framework that is compatible with all the existing Rollup stacks. You have your Rollup with OP stack or Arbitrum Orbit or Polygon CDK. You can always use the features provided by Restake Rollup. At the same time, it can provide better decentralization, security, and also faster finality. And later I will just show you how it can achieve all these fancy features. As I mentioned, without the contributions from the different Rollup stacks, these solutions, and also EigenLayer, we won’t have the Restake Rollup. At this stage, we provide three very unique features for the Restake Rollup. The first one is decentralized verification, as I mentioned.
Since for the existing Rollup, we only have the single sequencer for some new Rollups, probably people don’t really trust the result of the single sequencers. In that case, we need a dedicated and trustworthy decentralized network to do the extra verification and provide trustworthy results. And on top of that, we also provide a solution called MACH. For lots of Defi protocols, Exchanges, and also for the User. Sometimes we don’t want to wait for a seven-day challenge period for Optimistic Rollup all these few hours. ZK proof generation for ZK Rollup. So we have this unique feature called MACH to provide faster financial. Basically, the user can quickly get the finalized blog result within a few seconds for different Rollup stacks. And the last one is called SQUAD.
Basically, what we provide is decentralized sequencing with a dedicated network of sequencers to help to be precise and also generate the blocks for the dedicated Rollups. As you can see, right, all these things are part of the implementation of EigenLayer’s AVS system. It’s called Actively Validated Services, I believe Sreeram mentioned in the early talks. And in general, as you can see, EigenLayer is not just about Restaking. Right now we know everything is quite hacked around these Eigen points and LRTs, right? But it’s just one of the ways to lock the Ethers for the Eigensystem. But in the end, the system is to provide the shared securities or pool security for all different applications, as I mentioned, for the AVS. So all these features or the three services we provide, right, are secured by these EigenLayers, staked ETH.
So in that case, as you can see, right, it’s sort of like we run the different networks for different services at the same time. All of them derive the shared security from this EigenLayer system. Okay, for the first one, as I mentioned, for VITAL why do we need a decentralized verification? A lot of people may have thought that since we already have the fraud proof and the ZK proof for Rollups, right, we don’t really need another layer of verification for the Rollup itself. However, as I mentioned, most of the Rollups at this stage, are still single sequencers. If you don’t have very good backers or a good reputation sometimes for your own Rollup, the users, or even some developers, may not want to trust the result from your single sequencer.
Even sometimes we say that okay, it’s a ZK Rollup, we have the prover to generate the proof. But even at this stage, the prover is also a single sort of machine to generate proof. As you can see, there’s still the issue of a single-point failure. At the same time, it’s basically a trust-me-bro model for most of the Rollup stacks. That’s why we really need a relatively decentralized network with a lot of operators from Finman, Coinbase, Cloud, or some other famous operators to run this verification software and generate a ZK proof to show that, okay, the result or transaction blocks from the sequencer are basically reverified and secure. On top of that, we really need to have another layer to provide much easier, accessible interfaces for users and developers. That’s called MACH.
And sometimes, as we can see, if we look at the finality for dedicated Rollup, let’s leave this seven-day challenge period for OP Rollup or these few hours of ZKP generation. For ZK Rollup alone, even we confirm sort of the states or the data posted to the L1. We all know that Ethereum’s finality takes around 30 minutes or even longer. So in that case, typically we say the L2 finality is around 30 minutes or even longer. But for a lot of protocols, like DeFi protocols, Perps, and also for Exchanges, they can’t wait that long. So in that case, that’s why we have an overlay like this mark on top of the decentralized verification layer to provide sort of the quick query results for a lot of these DeFi protocols and Exchanges.
So they don’t need to wait for the confirmation of the data posted to the L1. At the same time, they can quickly guide the finality within a few seconds. Another example is sort of the bridge system as we can see. Every Rollup has a native bridge, so it’s much easier for you to bridge assets from the L2 to the L1. However for Optimism Rollup, it takes like sort of seven days, and for ZK Rollup, it takes a few hours or sometimes like 24 hours like zkSync. In that case, typically we have a lot of this liquidity-based bridge, right? For this liquidity-based bridge, typically get the query results from the single sequencer, but you know, it’s not that secure if the sequencer behaves maliciously from some small Rollups.
In that case, to get a better sort of result, a more trustworthy result, right? We need a layer like MACH to do the extra verification and also provide trustworthy results for these developers and bridges. And the last thing is the SQUAD different from this shared sequencing mechanism like our partner Espresso here, is mainly to decentralize the sequencer with a bunch of nodes because some of our partners and customers somehow guide the guidelines from the government that if there are single sequencers, then they will be treated as a custodian. So they need to apply for this custody license. So in that case, you must have a bunch of nodes at the sequencer to do the transaction processing. And also this block generation. This can easily avoid this single-point failure.
And just to make sure they can also mitigate these censorship issues, and as you can see, for all three services, we leverage this EigenLayers AVS system and run different sets of operators to make sure it’s rightly decentralized. At the same time, if any of these operators or nodes behave maliciously, their stake from this sort of EigenLayer system will be slashed. So that’s a way why a lot of projects and sorts of systems would like to leverage the shared security from Eigen to build this relatively decentralized system. As you can see, for all these different systems, we are trying to launch the midnight as early as possible. That’s why we have different phases for this MACH. And soon we launch this MACH Alpha.
As you can see, beyond leveraging the shared security of the stake ETH from EigenLayer, we can also stake our own token, our token, to basically earn the yields by delegating their assets to the operators. If we take MACH as an example, we actually provide multiple modes for the operators or nodes to be part of the system. One is the pessimistic mode because, for a lot of the Rollup stacks, it’s quite straightforward to run the full nodes. And if you want to become part of the system, actually you can run the full nodes for the sort of, the Rollup sequencer. In that case, one is in a pessimistic mode because it needs to re-execute almost every transaction and recalculate the MPT tray. There’s another energy-friendly mode, it’s called Optimistic.
Similarly, the nodes still run either full nodes or some verification software to do the extra verification. But at the same time, they only submit the alerts or challenges when there’s something wrong. So one way, as you can see, right, it’s like an off-chain bisection protocol, quite similar to the fraud-proof system. On the other hand, we also created this on-demand ZK proof mechanism with our closed partner risk zero to generate the ZK proof and to make sure the L1 can quickly verify this ZK proof without doing this best action from the fraud-proof. So after that, as you can see, right, for both the two modes, they may not sort of do the proof generation frequently. There is another way called the third mode Validity Proof mode.
So in this mode, as you can see, the operators for the mark system, will generate ZKP regularly. The good thing, we will work with some of our partners to aggregate these proofs and just reduce the cost of the verification part. And with this validity proof mode. Everyone can quickly get a result from this reverified transaction, from this Rollup, as I mentioned today, so working together with EigenLayer, we provide the first Restake Rollup for a lot of partners. We already lined up around over ten projects in different sectors like gaming, social, BTC, layer2, and the different defi protocols. Together with the risk Rollup, we really want to build a very decentralized, more secure, and at the same time better and faster finality Rollup networks for all different applications in the near future.
Yeah. That’s all the presentation. Thanks, everyone.
