Taiko Community Update — Q4/2022

January 23rd, 2023

Below is our brief summary of what happened in the fourth quarter of 2022. It was a super busy one to close out the year, and now we are excited to be writing from 2023 - the year where ZK-EVMs are sure to leave an indelible mark on Ethereum and the world. Let’s jump right in.

Research & Development

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 & Testnet

Created simple-taiko-node for running a Taiko node with a simple command, inspired by simple-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, and getLatestSyncedHeader.
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 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. Previous the status is called “finalized” which is 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 on the core protocol implementation.

All of the above is open source. To learn more or contribute, please visit our GitHub.

Operations & Community

We launched our Alpha-1 public testnet, Snæfellsjökull. The launch happened in late December and participation was several times greater than expected — across all metrics. The testnet was open to all developers to deploy contracts; all users to bridge and perform other transactions; and all willing participants to run an L2 node and act as a proposer. A huge thank you to all who helped test it and make it a smashing success.

We will share many stats about the testnet closer to its end, but for now we’d like to highlight that over 2000 proposers have proposed L2 blocks! Thank you.

Community grew significantly

The community grew throughout the quarter, with a big growth spurt in December around the testnet. Our Twitter following has reached over 25K, and our Discord has reached over 30K members! Welcome, new folks! 👋

To keep up with the growth of the lively and incredible community, we onboarded new moderators in Discord. Shout out and much love to ex_scxr, blank, helios, and leppaludi! We still welcome community members to help out and get involved, so don’t be shy to reach out. The community also went truly global with multi-language channels in the Discord, so we will need multi-language help going forward.

Contributors helped meaningfully

Beyond helping coordinate the community, there are tons of other ways to contribute, especially since all of Taiko became fully open source during the quarter. So whether you want to learn from, contribute, or fork any part of the codebase, please go ahead!

To make it as easy as possible to contribute, we wrote a contribution guide covering coding standards, documentation standards/requests, and how you can earn a GitPOAP for your GitHub contributions to Taiko.

Team and extended-team expands

For those wanting to make contributing more of a full-time effort, we created a careers page with several open positions we continue to hire for across engineering and operations.

We also launched the Taiko Ambassador Program to bring in talented developer advocates, community educators, and more. (Okay, technically this happened in Januray so not Q4 but wtvr.) We received over 1800 applications and are still going through them, so please hang tight! As mentioned, we only aim to onboard 2 to 4 Ambassadors in this first cohort, so if you don’t get onboard this time, please don’t be discouraged, there is always next cohort, and still plenty of ways to get involved and contribute outside that program.

Educated the community

We also wrote several educational blog posts covering topics such as Type-1 ZK-EVMs and Rollup Decentralization.

Of course, the education didn’t stop with the blog, but took place across the Taiko website which sports a new and improved look, and the same goes for our documentation. Education also happened in-person, with a few presentations in Colombia and Portugal on the topics of Layer-2 Finality and Taiko Overview and Optimizations.

We had our first community call where several team members gave updates and answered questions to a packed house of over 2400 attendees! Looking forward to seeing you again at the next one.

Ecosystem development

With our first public testnet launched and quite overwhelming node, proposer, and user participation, our next focus is definitely growing our developer community! With that in mind, you will see Taiko’s presence at upcoming Ethereum ecosystem events, developer conferences, and hackathons. We look forward to meeting you all and helping scale Ethereum together.

Thank You

As you can tell, it was an exciting and important quarter for Taiko. As you can also tell, it was a team-wide and community-wide effort. None of this matters without empowering a broad community of developers, users, network participants and advocates — so a heartfelt thank you to all of you. We still have tons of work to do to scale Ethereum securely, let’s get it!