L2

Intro / Survey

  • L2 for Beginners - describing a mental model of an L2 as a chain which writes enough state back to Ethereum that no one (including the L2's miners/validators) can send back a fraudulent state
  • Optimistic rollups vs ZK-rollups - a recent assessment of the state of various rollup projects
  • Vitalik's post on rollups - a fairly technical summary of the SOTW of rollups
  • Validating Bridges (Sep 2021) - a fairly thorough assessment of L2 solutions (including Oasis?) as well as open research questions
  • Eth docs on L2 Rollups - see the bottom of this page for further links

Optimistic rollups

zk-Rollups

Primary source of info for zkps should be awesome-zero-knowledge-proofs, a git-based list of learnings curated by Matter Labs.

Our shortlist:

  • Validity Proofs vs Fraud Proofs (2019) - StarkWare's summary of fraud proofs (typically employed by optimistic rollups) vs validity proofs (not feasible on optimistic rollups)
  • zk-STARKS vs zk-SNARKS
  • ethhub ZK-STARKS
  • StarkNet (Jan 2021) - StarkWare's description of their STARK-powered zk-rollup
  • Awesome StarkNet - curated list of StarkNet resources and tools from @gakonst and others
  • zkSync (June 2020) - Matter Labs' description of their "SNORK"-powered zk-rollup. SNORKS are SNARKs with a universal and updateable trusted setup.
  • Volitions: best of all worlds (Aug 2021) - describing the volition, a hybrid system where users can choose between storing their data as a rollup (on-chain data) or as a validium (off-chain).
    • See also StarkWare's proposal (June 2020) for the volition concept, and Matter Labs' description of its volition implementation zkSync 2.0 (Apr 2021)

zk-Proofs

Analytics

  • L2beat - comparison of current state of various L2s

Other Lists / Acknowledgements

  • L2 skill tree - this tweetstorm by @likebeckett was instrumental in assembling this page