Weekly Rollup #15
Modular Media
0x061A
May 24th, 2023

Mantle Passes BIP-21 | IBCX Launches | MEV burn good or bad? | Can ZKPs keep up with chains? | Week ending May 12th

👋 Welcome to Modular Media! We cover news, updates, educational content, and more within the modular blockchain ecosystem.

Subscribe to get posts sent directly to your email every week, and follow us on Twitter for modular-related updates!

This week’s issue covers:

📣 News & Announcements

Mantle Votes to Optimize Brand and Strategy

After receiving almost 100% approval, BIP-21 has officially passed, meaning BitDAO and the $BIT token will be rebranded to Mantle.

What is the Proposal

On May 5th, a proposal was made on the BitDAO community forum (BIP-21) to optimize the “brand, token, and tokenomics” for Mantle.

Specifically, the proposal looked to merge BitDAO (governance) and Mantle (the product) under a single brand in hopes of achieving long-term success for token holders.

What is BitDAO

BitDAO was launched in July 2021, and has since grown to have the largest DAO treasury.

While most of the treasury consists of its own token (BIT), you can see that the amount of ETH held is also extremely high, reaching close to 270K ETH held in the treasury.

Thanks to this giant war chest, the team has been able to kickstart several initiatives, including building Mantle Network, as well as funding Game7, EduDAO, and a Mantle eco-fund.

Initially, launching new initiatives through the treasury was up to the $BIT token holders, but following this proposal (BIP-21), this will now change to Mantle token holders (ticker symbol still not announced).

What is Mantle

Mantle is an Ethereum L2. Specifically, Mantle is its own execution environment (a rollup), that settles on Ethereum, while posting its data to Eigen Layer’s DA solution (a data availability solution secured by $ETH).

What does the proposal mean now that it passed

As mentioned, BitDAO served as the governance piece for Mantle network, allowing BIT token holders to essentially control the direction of the network.

To make things more simple, the team switched to “one brand one token”, whereby Mantle, rather than BitDAO, will serve as the unified ecosystem brand, while still preserving all existing governance processes.

“The existing BitDAO Treasury holdings and exposure shall remain under the governance of token holders. The treasury will be referred to as the Mantle Treasury”.

In terms of the new token design, and conversion details, the team will share more about this following the network’s audit. That said, existing BIT token holders will not have to take “any preparatory actions and new buyers may buy $BIT in preparation for the conversion”. Over time, multiple distribution channels will be open for users to choose from. And again, all existing proportions of governance rights will remain intact.

The team also announced that the vesting schedule for the remaining n BIT will be accelerated, in order to make the transition to the new token much smoother.

What’s Next

BIP-21 passed with almost 100% approval in preparation for Mantle’s mainnet launch. I think the merging of BitDAO and Mantle into one unified brand was a great move for the team, as it simplifies things a lot more, reducing confusion and having to distinguish between how BIT relates to the Mantle network. Now, things are much clearer - the Mantle token will serve the mantle ecosystem.

The team has not mentioned specifics as to how the conversion will exactly take place, so make sure to follow the team on Twitter to stay up to date with the ecosystem. You can check out the complete proposal here.

IBCX Launches

After months of development, IonDAO has officially launched IBCX, the index fund for the Cosmos ecosystem.

What is IBCX

The Interchain Index Token (IBCX) is essentially an index fund for the Cosmos ecosystem that aims to consist of the biggest projects within the ecosystem.

IBCX is the first product to come out of IonDAO, and as such, is governed by the ION token holders.

What is IonDAO

IonDAO has had quite a history.

When Osmosis first launched, they needed a pair token to test their AMM solution (needed something to pair with OSMO), and this is where $ION came in.

Rather than getting rid of the token following the Osmosis mainnet launch, the team decided to keep the token live, and thus, ION was airdropped to $ATOM wallets. Altogether, there were 21,294 tokens minted.

ION was first treated as a Cosmos memecoin, and in fact, has had quite a ride:

Eventually, the Ion community formed a DAO around the token and thus, the question became which type of products the DAO would develop.

Some initial ideas included bringing synthetic tokens (commodities, stocks, etc.) to Osmosis, however, this idea was later abandoned following the Terra collapse. Eventually, the DAO decided that they would develop an index fund (IBCX) for the Cosmos ecosystem, removing the hassle of figuring out which tokens to invest in for new entrants.

Next Step: what is stIBCx

Following the launch of IBCX, the DAO developers posted a proposal on the community forum to launch stIBCX, which will be powered by Stride, the biggest liquid staking solution across the Cosmos.

The main reason to launch stIBCX is to solve the issue of the underlying tokens in the IBCX basket losing out on staking rewards.

Plus, stIBCX will open the door for more defi opportunities, as token holders will be able to use their stIBCX as collateral to earn additional yield - on top of the accumulating staking rewards.

The voting period is set to close on the 29th, and so far, it looks like it’ll 100% pass. You can learn all about stIBCX here.

More News & Announcements

  • Lagrange Labs raised $4M in a pre-seed funding round led by 1kx, for the development of their zk-proof based interoperability solution.

  • @smsunarto introduced World Engine during a recent presentation. World Engine is “a sharded rollup SDK built to horizontally scale onchain games” that is being developed by Argus Labs. We should be expecting more details to come once the presentation is posted online for the public to view.

  • Helika Analytics will be deploying on Base, the rollup powered by Coinbase. “Helika will provide Base & its gaming projects leading analytics” including user segmentation, retention tracking, and predective models.

  • Here are the winning projects from the recent ZKHack, which was hosted by the RISCZero team. Take a look to see the different ways in which zk-proofs are being used.

  • Radius, a shared sequencer solution, announces “Scaling 2023”, an event filled with keynote speeches and presentations from several teams across the modular space, that will take place on June 4th in Seoul Korea.

  • AltLayer announces RaaS (rollup-as-a-service) day, which is set tot ake place on June 22nd. Details expected to be announced soon.

  • The Taiko (zkEVM) team just published a recap of everything they achieved over Q1.

  • The Aztec (privacy-enabled L2) team recently asked the community to share their input as to how the network should approach sequencing. Here is a thread that highlights some of the proposed mechanisms, including a PBS method, “whisk”, and other existing shared sequencers.

  • @0xGoldzn published the latest monthly update for the Fuel (modular execution environment) ecosystem.

  • Here are the Fuel-based hackathon winners from ETHGlobal Lisbon: Fuelet Pay, and Fuel Predicate.

  • Here are the Scroll-based hackathon winners from ETHGlobal Lisbon

  • Particle Network, a fullstack middleware platform, and Questn, a web3 marketing and analysis platform, both deployed on the Scroll (zkEVM) network.

  • Scroll announces ZK Symposium, “a series where we invite experts and founders in ZK to discuss their protocols and technological breakthroughs”. So far, this includes an intro to the Noir programming language, a discussion about ZKML, HyperPlonk, the Axium project (zk coprocessors), and more.

  • Optimism announces the official date (June 6th) for the OP mainnet upgrade to Bedrock.

  • Wormhole announces a $50M cross-chain ecosystem fund.

  • Chainlink Automation is now live on Optimism: “Chainlink Automation is a highly performant and decentralized automation service. Developers can use Chainlink Automation to monitor automation logic securely and cost-efficiently off-chain, and then initiate an on-chain transaction to execute the smart contract function when predefined conditions are met”.

  • Thales Markets (on-chain derivatives) just released their new simplified UI: “You can now access all positional markets on crypto asset prices (w/ @chainlink Price Feeds) in just a few easy steps”.

  • Businesses can now integrate and leverage NOWPayments to start accepting DAI payments through the Arbitrum network.

  • Altitude, a LayerZero powered bridge integrates the Arbitrum network, giving users a new way to enter the L2 network.

  • LionDEX v2 testnet is now live on Arbitrum. LionDEX is a P2P AMM perpetual futures protocol.

  • Users can now bridge from Coinbase exchange to zkSync Era directly, thanks to Layerswap.

  • Tiny Worlds, a platform for idle-style games that runs through its $TINC token, is now live on Era.

  • Madara (StarkNet sequencer) + Kakarot (zkEVM on StarkNet) = zkEVM Type-1

  • Kasar Labs finally opens up “pre-orders for the plug'n'play Starknode.

  • Four more projects have deployed (or are in the process of deploying) on Polygon zkEVM:

    1. VirtuSwap: a native Polygon DEX that aims to improve the user experience with AI.

    2. Sentio: “Sentio is a real-time, fully-hosted platform that helps dApps fully host on-chain data indexing, visualization, monitoring and log search.”

    3. Gamma: a protocol for managing active liquidity across DEXs like Uniswap v3 and Quickswap v3.

    4. Idle: a defi yield automation protocol that will also be deploying on zkEVM after 100% voting approval from the community.

📚 Discourse & Education

MEV burn good or bad?

Justin Drake from the Ethereum Foundation proposes “MEV burn”, an add-on feature to enshined PBS. If you aren’t familiar with PBS, it’s called proposer-builder separation and there’s a useful recap in Justin’s ETH research post. You can also venture down the PBS rabbit hole here.

The basic idea for MEV burn is similar to EIP-1559 - burn ETH tokens to evenly distribute value across all ETH token holders. How? It makes ETH more deflationary - think “ultrasound money” meme. ETH burned —> less total ETH —> your ETH is a higher percentage of total ETH —> you are wealthier.

Do community members like the MEV burn idea?

Some yes, some no.

Many clear security and economic benefits are outlined in the post, so we won’t go into them. Instead we’ll highlight the controversy - some people see downsides for a super deflationary ETH, as short-term insider benefits (today’s ETH holders get richer) could negatively impact long-term adoption.

One reasonable way to think about MEV burn, which seems to align community members, is that “it’s not perfect but less bad than the other options”.

  • Would we rather distribute value to validators? We have the mechanisms to do so, but it’s probably more centralizing and less fair.

  • Would we rather distribute value to public goods? We might RATHER this, but in practice we don’t have an automated or truly neutral way of doing it. Who gets to decide where funds go?

Can ZKPs keep up with chains?

Anatoly from Solana suggests that zero-knowledge proofs (ZKPs) are simply slower than normal computation and that users will not tolerate this UX. This is similar to a previous post by Anatoly with a similar message - ZKPs just can’t keep up.

Is he right? What’s the deal?

Anatoly is right in that, by definition, ZKPs are slower than normal computation. However, we’d argue this isn’t the right way to think about the problem being solved. As Fede’s Intern puts it, “The thing he is missing is that ZKPs can be composed, folded and recursed. In addition to this the ZKP can be generated by a centralized cluster of nodes.” Put another way, ZKPs are extremely parallelizable. The proving problem can be split into many pieces, where pieces are distributed among many powerful computers that collaborate on solving the problem. If you are following the generative AI revolution, this is largely how models like GPT (ChatGPT) get trained.

The other thing he does not address is the proving function can be decoupled from the sequencing function. This makes it so transactions are finalized at the DA layer speed and ZK proofs are generated asynchronously.

Great - but what do parallelizable, asynchronous ZK proving systems actually mean for your user experience?

A conservative experience would give you a quick confirmation in your wallet, followed a few seconds later by a checkmark indicating the ZK proof was verified. Not bad!

Related note: ZKPs also offer dramatic cost efficiencies, which Polynya explains very well in their recent post.

Ok what are intents?

You’ve probably seen the word “intents” flying around CT lately. We know, it’s been pretty inten… kidding won’t do it. Here are a few resources to kickstart your journey down the intents rabbit hole:

More Discourse & Education

📊 Chart of the Week

Earlier this year we saw two zkEVM’s go live, zkSync Era, and Polygon zkEVM. While zkSync has been running away with most of the TVL (some argue it’s token farming, but only time will tell) initially, Polygon just last week experienced a huge uptick in TVL, as well as achieving a single-day record for transaction volume (+13K):

During this period, Polygon zkEVM experienced a drop in transaction fees. This is because zkEVM is a rollup, and as you may already know, rollups bundle a bunch of transactions together off-chain into a single block, then submit a proof that verifies the validity of that block. The more transactions within a block, the more the fees are split.

The top Polygon defi dapps experienced the biggest rise in TVL, including: Quickswap, (the native Polygon DEX), DoveSwap (token swaps), and 0vix (native Polygon lending platform).

For perspective, as of Tuesday, May 23rd, Polygon zkEVM TVL is sitting at $10.7M:

While zkSync Era TVL is sitting at $121.9M:

So while Polygon zkEVM is experiencing some rapid growth in TVL over the past week, zkSync is still about 10x higher. Although many expected Era to sit above Polygon due to token farming, I don’t think many saw the gap to be this wide. It’ll be interesting to see how these numbers shape up over the course of the year.

That's all for this week! Thanks for reading 🧱🎬

If you found this issue useful, please share this tweet so more people can see it 🙏

Subscribe to Modular Media
Receive the latest updates directly to your inbox.
Mint this entry as an NFT to add it to your collection.
Verification
This entry has been permanently stored onchain and signed by its creator.
Arweave Transaction
qu1TFU3WM4598QJ…hhcMEzO3sbe92f0
Author Address
0x061A36DAe7F6e85…52B1b0Cb882a1Dc
Content Digest
V4UA7s1YJ2YnWN6…oke0iU9cqmjioDA