Taiko alpha-3 testnet, Grímsvötn, is live! This is the next step on the road to a decentralized, Ethereum-equivalent ZK-EVM.

This is my first shot at a “personal” post. I’ve been in crypto for just over a year, and somehow managed to trick people into thinking I know what I’m talking about despite lacking any of the knowledge, skills, or background I’d love to have.

Thank you to Rajiv Patel-O'Connor, Tarun Chitra, getsqt, Ben Fisch, Evan Forbes, Christopher Goes, and apriori for incredibly valuable insights, feedback, and review of this post.

Crypto has always been the perfect storm of planning fallacy. Things take ten times longer than anyone expects. In mid-2020, Loopring, zkSync (later zkSync 1.0, now zkSync Lite) and StarkEx with DeversiFi (now RhinoFi) went live in production. Optimism and Arbitrum were running testnets, the projects claimed and it seemed like 2021 would be the year of the rollups. Few remember, because few were following then - which is precisely why I started writing about rollups. It was pretty easy to follow because there were so few projects to follow. Today, I have very little idea of what’s happening in the rollup space. For example, TIL that BitDAO (backed by Bybit) is building an L2, and Consensys is building Linea - don’t even know how that’s related to their zkEVM project. OK, maybe I don’t have anything interesting to write about rollups anymore. But I do remember the past, and I believe I can attempt to provide a hopefully interesting perspective as a historian. I’m going to skip the early research days, and head straight into the products.