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Taiko scales Ethereum in a manner that emulates Ethereum as closely as possible - both technically and non-technically. More specifically, Taiko is an Ethereum-equivalent ZK-Rollup, scaling Ethereum by supporting all EVM opcodes in a layer-2 architecture that is decentralized, permissionless, and secure.

The ZK-EVM proves the correctness of the EVM computations on the rollup with validity proofs.

Taiko can run Ethereum smart contract code as is, zero changes necessary. Developers can migrate their existing Ethereum smart contracts and full dapps to Taiko trivially, or of course implement their new solidity code on Taiko as their first/only environment. Taiko implements a ZK-EVM that supports every EVM opcode, producing a validity proof of the ZK-EVM circuit. Besides perfect compatibility with Ethereum L1 smart contracts and dapps, this also means that all Ethereum and solidity tooling works seamlessly with Taiko, no need to disrupt developers’ workflow whatsoever.

Beyond the benefits of EVM-equivalence, which mostly manifests itself at the application layer, Taiko aims for Ethereum-equivalence, allowing it to make use of existing Ethereum infrastructure, such as execution clients, easily repurposed as Taiko nodes. For instance, the Taiko client is currently based on the battle-hardened Go-Ethereum client. So, not only is the VM perfectly compatible, but the ‘surrounding tissue’ is as well, given Taiko nodes use the same hashing algorithm, signature scheme, and storage data structure as Ethereum. Importantly, Taiko seeks to be Ethereum-equivalent going forward as well; if there are Ethereum protocol updates, Taiko will implement them in our zkEVM to maintain synchronization. Finally, if Taiko creates compelling new directions from our own R&D, we can work to have them implemented on Ethereum, helping the L1.

Taiko nodes get transaction data from Ethereum and execute the transactions on L2, ultimately progressing the state according to the transaction executions. Thus these nodes manage the rollup chain. Currently, the Taiko node is an Ethereum Geth fork.

The Taiko protocol defines and enforces the rollup rules and defines potential participants. The design upholds the core principles of security, decentralization, and permissionlessness.

Smart contracts deployed on Ethereum L1 act as the data availability mechanism and verifier of the ZK-SNARK proofs. A smart contract deployed on Taiko L2 performs certain important protocol functions we explain in our whitepaper.

Below layer-1 is layer-0, the people. Blockchains are built by people, and what these people care about gets baked into the social contract, and into the code and overarching design. As mentioned, here again we seek to have the strongest Ethereum-compatibility.

We have good reason to stick close to the Ethereum example and specification; it is not solely out of mere love for the protocol and the people. It is because it is the only ecosystem that gives us what we care about, and a shot at changing the world for the better, especially for those who need it most. This sounds lofty, but such are the aims of the Ethereum community, and of Taiko.

Anyone who wants to use, build on, or participate in Taiko can do so. This is the case because the transaction fees are cheap and throughput is high; the developer experience is robust and Ethereum dapp migration is seamless; the network is permissionless and reuses Ethereum infrastructure to the fullest extent. You can’t have freedom without access.

Taiko is censorship-resistant and cannot exclude groups or individuals. The rollup is decentralized - relying on Ethereum for data availability and security; and permissionless - allowing any network participant, user, or builder to opt-in. There are no special roles which can censor users/applications/transactions. We are only interested in building credibly neutral, fair systems.

Taiko is fully open-source and community-centric. We build on the shoulders of giants, and cherish contributing back into Ethereum’s technical progress and community. We value community contributions into the project, harnessing the best minds and ideas that are interested in the space. The type of activity Taiko executes and secures mandates transparency.

Taiko’s ZK-Rollup design follows a few principles:

The design should prioritize security above all else.

The design should be simple and focus only on the core ZK-Rollup protocol, not its upgradeability, governance, low-level optimizations, non-core bridging functionality, etc.

The design should not depend on game theory for security. All security assumptions should be directly or indirectly enforced by Ethereum and the protocol. For example, there should be no need to use a Proof-of-Stake-like system to slash participants for bad behavior.

The design should encourage a high degree of decentralization in terms of block proposing and proving. No single party should be able to control all transaction ordering or be solely responsible for proving blocks. Being sufficiently decentralized implies that the protocol should keep working in a reliable manner in adversarial situations.

Anyone willing should be able to join and leave the network at any time, without causing significant disturbance to the network or being detrimental to the party in question. No single entity should have the power to allowlist or blocklist participants.

The goal is to help Ethereum scale in the best possible way. Ether is used to pay the L2 transaction fees.

The design should stick to the design of Ethereum as closely as possible, not only for compatibility reasons but also for the expectations and demands of users of Ethereum L2 solutions.

Surely you have already seen and heard about other ZK Rollup’s, like Scroll or zkSync, but how is Taiko different and how is Taiko better?

The fundamental difference is that all three mentioned projects have a different type of zkEVM.

Taiko — 1 type (fully Ethereum-equivalent)

Scroll — 2 type (fully EVM-equivalent)

zkSync — Type 3 (almost EVM-equivalent)

Type 1 ZK-EVMs strive to be fully and uncompromisingly Ethereum-equivalent. They do not change any part of the Ethereum system to make it easier to generate proofs. They do not replace hashes, state trees, transaction trees, precompiles or any other in-consensus logic, no matter how peripheral.

The bottom line is that the higher the type level, the more difficult it becomes for developers to deploy their products on a specific zkEVM. For example, Uniswap took about a month to deploy in Optimism and Arbitrum and in the case of Taiko, it would be much faster.

Nomad is a new design for radically cheaper cross-chain communication without header verification. We expect operating Nomad to cut 90% of gas costs compared to a traditional header relay. To accomplish this, we took inspiration from optimistic systems (a la Optimistic Roll-ups). Nomad features many of the features we prize in an optimistic mechanism, like public verification, low gas fees, broad participation, but has a slightly different security model.

Nomad is a novel approach to blockchain interoperability that leverages an optimistic mechanism to increase the security of cross-chain communication. Using Nomad, developers can securely build cross-chain applications (or xApps) and bridge assets between chains. Nomad channels and the flagship xApp, the Nomad token bridge, are live on Ethereum and Moonbeam, with more chains coming soon.

What we found through connecting the dots backward is that there is a consistent philosophy that informs Nomad’s design. Specifically, there are three core tenets that our decisions anchor to. By leaning on this backbone anytime we encountered a hard decision, we ensured that we developed Nomad in a way that adhered to our values and prioritized delivery over yak shaving.

Nomad will form the base layer of a cross-chain communication network that provides fast, cheap communication for all smart contract chains and rollups. It relies only on widely-available cryptographic primitives (unlike header relays), has a latency of thirty minutes (rather than an ORU’s one week latency), and imposes only about 120,000 gas overhead on message senders.

We thought that these tenets could be useful for other teams working on gnarly problems, and could serve as a guidepost the way it does for us. Without further ado, the three tenets behind Nomad:

Tech matters. Users matter most.

The ability to build solutions to problems that real people experience is what gets us out of bed in the morning. Prioritizing the system can easily distract us from providing great products users want. System design should serve this end; it is not the end itself.

• We value human-facing utility more than interesting primitives.

• If we must choose between applications and mechanisms, we choose applications.

• Our success is measured in the wild, not in the lab.

Complexity is the death of innovation.

We strive to build solutions that are no more complex than they need to be. We avoid new cryptography, and love reusing others’ libraries. Interoperability is inherently complex. Our goal is to make it simple for any developer.

• We value approachable and maintainable code more than minimal code.

• If we must choose between documentation and optimization, we choose documentation.

• Our success is measured in the bazaar, not in the cathedral.

Real harm is more important than theoretical harm.

We strive to take advantage of every tool that protects users. We aim to minimize the probability and impact of security issues. Our security practices are informed by formal analysis, but not centered on it.

• We value the real-world safety of users and funds more than crypto-economic models.

• If we must choose between smart contract security and a new whitepaper, we choose smart contract security.

•Our success is measured in mainnet attacks, not arXiv attacks.

Nomad is an optimistic interoperability protocol that enables secure cross-chain communication.

Using Nomad:

• Users can bridge tokens between chains

• Asset issuers can deploy tokens across chains

• DAOs can facilitate cross-chain governance proposals

• Developers can build native cross-chain applications

The goal of Nomad is to provide the connective tissue to enable users and developers to interact

securely in a multi-chain world.

Nomad enables applications to send data between chains and rollups. Applications interact with

Nomad core contracts to enqueue messages to be sent, after which off-chain agents verify and

ferry these messages between chains.

In order to ensure that message-passing is secure, Nomad uses an optimistic verification

mechanism, inspired by fraud-proof based designs like optimistic rollups. This makes Nomad more

secure, cheaper, and easier to deploy compared to validator / proof-of-stake based interoperability

protocols.

Public blockchain networks have experienced a period of strong growth in 2020-2021, with new use-cases for smart contracts encompassing the finance and art worlds. Decentralised Finance (DeFi) has seen enormous inflows of capital, with the top applications seeing the equivalent of $10 billion (summer 2021) of liquidity added, and this has helped push the overall capitalisation of cryptoassets above $2 trillion (summer 2021). Meanwhile, Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs) surged in value to $10 billion (autumn 2021).

Public blockchains rely on the entire network seeing all transactions in order to be able to validate them and secure the network. This makes them transparency engines. Unfortunately, this creates a front-running issue, known as Maximal Extractable Value (MEV), where miners or stakers and block proposers may steal value by observing user transactions and then preempting them. For example, a miner or bot may observe a user’s desire to buy an asset at market price with an automated market maker, insert their purchase ahead in the processing queue by paying a higher transaction fee, causing the price to go up for the user, and then sell their purchase at a higher price and extract a profit from the user.

By some estimates, front-running was valued at $1.4 billion annually in early 2021. This means users of public blockchain networks are not deriving the full economic benefits of the technology. In addition, the transparent nature of the technology makes them inappropriate for many commercial and personal use-cases, where the confidential nature of interactions and deals should be maintained.

Obscuro is a decentralised Ethereum Layer 2 Rollup protocol designed to address the above problems, introduce new use-cases, and unlock blockchain technology’s full potential and economic advantages.

Obscuro is a general-purpose, privacy-first Ethereum L2 solution that sits between Optimistic and ZK rollups. It leverages Trusted Execution Environments to benefit from the best of both worlds.

Obscuro is a general-purpose L2 on Ethereum. Think Optimistic-based L2s; these allow you to redeploy/deploy existing/new Ethereum Dapps, save massively on gas and transact a lot faster, except they come with long withdrawal times and are generally centralized.

ZK-Rollups, the other type of L2 offers similar advantages; they have no withdrawal delay, however, they are not general-purpose. Currently, all rollup solutions are centralized. We designed Obscuro to sit in the sweet spot between Optimistic and ZK rollups. In addition, with Obscuro, out of the box, you'll be part of a completely decentralized network, get complete, privacy, data confidentially (private balances, transacting, etc.), and MEV prevention baked in.

Obscuro offers the same functionality as Ethereum and indeed leverages Ethereum for security, except it also solves the following four problems:

• Privacy - solving for privacy will unlock hundreds of new use cases.

• MEV - moving value back into the hands of end-users.

• Scalability - we've developed a novel protocol called Proof of Block Inclusion (or POBI for short), enabling Obscuro to •

scale massively.

• Gas - with no Proof of Work and by leveraging Proof of Block Inclusion, gas on Obscuro is a fraction of what it is on L1.

There are many, many use cases for applications deployed to the Obscuro network, but a recurring theme is protecting privacy to create fair markets.

In a sealed bid auction, bidders privately submit their one offer in writing, in a sealed envelope. The bids are opened privately by the auctioneer and seller, who do not reveal the bids to any of the participants.

Keeping the bids private helps ensure that if all bids are too low for any of them to be accepted by the seller, the property will not become stigmatised by having a perceived low value in the marketplace. It also ensures that the auctioneer cannot collude and reveal a competing bid to another bidder privately, or front-run a bidder and out-bid them.

This type of auction requires Obscuro.

A dark pool is a privately organised exchange for trading securities where exposure can be hidden until after execution and reporting. This allows investors to trade without publicly revealing their intentions during the search for a buyer or seller, as well as hiding any pricing data which could result in investors receiving poorer prices.

Dark pools on Obscuro would be different from a typical DEX; direct peer-to-peer trading with a layer of ‘dark’ price discovery added.

Prices for assets can be derived from order flow within the Obscuro enclaves, guaranteeing fair price discovery and leveraging oracles such as Chainlink to ensure prices are within a fair band. The eventual revelation is also essential, as trades eventually must be disseminated to all investors (a consolidated tape).

Over-the-counter (OTC) trading is where bespoke products are tailored to specific client requirements. The most common usage of OTC is in financial derivatives, where “OTC” means the opposite of “Exchange-traded”.

They come in where there is a need for unique, idiosyncratic terms for, as an example, an option, such as non-standard length of time, strike price, market conventions, or payoff structure and are negotiated between a buyer and issuer. Obscuro can guarantee privacy in both negotiating and structuring such products.

Competing products are already available, but these are not decentralised, and by definition, it is not possible to have a ‘dark’ pool in a decentralised manner without something like Obscuro.

This type of trading is made possible with Obscuro.

The idea is to allow NFTs to be tokenised to allow fractional ownership. The difficulty with fractional ownership in the NFT space is that for the art piece to be valuable, there needs to be the ability to bring all the pieces back together to allow the whole piece to be sold to a buyer.

To allow this to happen, a reserve price needs to be set, where once hit, all the individual token holders are compensated, and the NFT is sold as a whole piece. A few mechanisms are required for this to happen.

Token holders need to submit the reserve price that makes sense to them. This gets weighted by the number of tokens they hold in relation to the total number. Then, the reserve price is calculated and set. To be most effective, both of these require privacy. A hidden reserve price has the potential to attract larger bids.

Current smart contract activity undertaken by individuals can often be linked to them, either by data mining or simple association of an Ethereum L1 address with a username registered on the Ethereum Name Service. Pioneers do not care about whether their NFT purchases are publicly visible, but the next wave of mass adoption and use of smart contracts by the wider public (such as a health insurance contract) requires privacy. Obscuro helps here.

The Obscuro network requires the participation of several types of actor, some of whom incur costs in performing their roles and need to be remunerated. Furthermore, the system’s security depends, in part, on the ability to economically punish those who can be proved, within the protocol, to have acted maliciously. This is achieved through a traditional staking model, and a digital asset, OBX, is used for these purposes. In what follows, the functions such a token performs in the system, the game-theoretic requirements with respect to Sybil-resistance, broad allocation and stakeholder incentivisation, and how the minting and distribution of the token have been designed to achieve these ends is outlined. Readers only interested in the technical design of the platform may skip this section.

The main goals for the creation of the OBX token are to provide a truly decentralised network and sustainable growth of the network. That means creating an equally attractive system to developers, Obscuro node operators, end-users, enterprises, and the wider community. The OBX token will be issued as a utility token and not a regular coin or security. The token has four primary uses:

• During bootstrapping, to provide an inflationary block reward to incentivise users to operate Obscuro nodes.

• A medium in which users can pay fees and node operators receive rewards.

• A means to fund the ongoing development of the Obscuro platform.

• A way to incentivise eco-system development via grants and competitions.

The OBX token is issued initially onto Ethereum Mainnet as an ERC-20 token. This is because it is easier to bootstrap adoption onto an already existing network with financial infrastructure such as exchanges and other existing DeFi applications. The intention is that the OBX token is not issued until the first release of the Obscuro platform is substantially complete. In other words, it should be possible to use Obscuro in a testnet environment as a pre-requisite for the utility token launch to proceed.

On Obscuro entering production, an allocation of tokens for Aggregator rewards will be issued directly onto the Obscuro network. Therefore, there are two classes of token: Ethereum native and Obscuro native, and participants can move seamlessly between them using the Obscuro Bridge Contract.

Regain the sovereign control of your own data. 3rd parties cannot misuse your data if you never share them.

Run computation/analysis on your data in your own device, not in centralized servers. Use of ZKP to prove the integrity of your computation. Share only the results, not your personal data.

Zero-Knowledge Proof VM for general purpose computations. Automatic STARK proof generation/verification for customized computation. No need to hand-write your ZKP circuit anymore.

Provide ZKP as a Service for blockchain data privacy applications. Usable for parachains in Polkadot/Kusama and Dapps in major public blockchains including Ethereum, Polygon, BSC, Solana, etc.

zCloak Networkis a privacy-focused computing platform based on Polkadot. It uses a novel zk-STARK virtual machine for general purpose computations. It enables a new computation paradigm called the Cloaking Space, which provides a private and scalable computation environment for Web 3.0. zCloak Network was formerly known as Starks Network.

zCloak Network is a privacy-preserving computing platform. It enables a new computation paradigm where people can do computation/analysis of their data in client device, not in centralized servers. zCloak Network combines the latest progress in zero-knowledge cryptography and verifiable credentials to ensure both the computation process and the user data are trustworthy.

With zCloak, users can prove their identity has certain attributes or they satisfy certain requirements without showing any private data. The user proofs are made available in major public blockchains by zCloak oracle service. Third-party Dapps can leverage this information to provide personalized service to their users.

Sui is supported by a number of contemporary peer-reviewed works and years of open source development.

Sui scales horizontally with no upper bound to meet application demand while maintaining extremely low operating costs per transaction. Its system design breakthrough eliminates a critical bottleneck in existing blockchains: the need to achieve global consensus on a total-ordered list of transactions. This computation is wasteful given most transactions are not contending for the same resource against other transactions.

Sui takes a significant leap in scalability by enabling parallel agreement on causally independent transactions. Sui validators commit such transactions using Byzantine Consistent Broadcast, eliminating global consensus's overhead without sacrificing safety and liveness guarantees.

This breakthrough is possible only with Sui's novel data model. Thanks to its object-centric view and Move’s strong ownership types, dependencies are explicitly encoded. As a result, Sui both agrees on and executes transactions on most objects in parallel, while a minority of transactions that affect shared state are ordered via Byzantine Fault Tolerant consensus and executed in parallel.

• Unmatched scalability, instant settlement

• A safe smart contract language accessible to mainstream developers

• Ability to define rich and composable on-chain assets

• Better user experience for web3 apps

Sui is the only blockchain today that can scale with the growth of web3 while achieving industry-leading performance, cost, programmability, and usability. As we push towards mainnet launch, we will demonstrate capacity beyond the transaction processing capabilities of established systems – traditional and blockchain alike. We see Sui as the first internet-scale programmable blockchain platform, a foundational layer for web3.

Sui - is a boundless platform to build rich and dynamic on-chain assets from gaming to finance.

Sui is the first permissionless layer 1 blockchain designed from the ground up to enable creators and developers to build experiences that will serve the next billion users on web3. Sui scales horizontally, allowing you to develop a wide range of applications at unmatched speed at low cost.

Sui is the first permissionless Layer 1 blockchain designed from the ground up to enable creators and developers to build experiences that cater to the next billion users in web3.

Sui offers scalability and unprecedented low latency for common use cases. Sui enables the vast majority of transactions to be processed in parallel, which makes better use of processing resources and offers the opportunity to increase throughput with more resources. Sui forgoes consensus to instead use simpler, lower latency primitives for common use cases such as payment transactions and asset transfers. This is unprecedented in the world of blockchain and enables a range of new latency-sensitive distributed applications, from gaming to retail payments at physical points of sale.

Sui is written in Rust and supports smart contracts written in the Move programming language to determine which assets can be owned. Move programs define operations on these assets, including custom rules for creating them, transferring those assets to new owners, and operations that modify assets.

Sui has a native SUI token with a fixed supply. The SUI token is used to pay for gas and is also used as a delegated stake on intra-epoch validators . The voting power of validators in this era depends on this delegated share. Validators are periodically reconfigured according to the stake delegated to them. In any era, the set of validators is byzantine failsafe . At the end of the epoch, the fees charged for all processed transactions are distributed among the validators according to their contribution to the system. Validators, in turn, can share part of the commissions as a reward for users who delegated a share to them.

Sui is supported by a number of contemporary peer-reviewed works and years of open source development.

Horizontal scaling, instant completion, low fees.

Sui has the lowest computational cost of all blockchains.

Create more utility in NFT and store directly online.

• Lost your key? No problem. Return of assets without intermediaries.

• Specific Signature Requests: Know exactly what you are authorizing.

• Send assets directly via email, SMS, DM and any other channels.

Sui allows you to spendSpend less time fixing smart contracts, more time creatingbuilding a goodcool product.stuff!