The Present State of L2s, Edition #4

Base path to Mainnet, update on Offchain Labs and many more.

Good Morning Saints,

I hope you’re having a wonderful weekend.

If you’re reading this, you’re always one of the chosen Saints and special.

Here’s what we’re covering today:

• Offchain Lab building Stylus

• Circle launching native $USDC on Arbitrum

• Rocket Pool is coming to zkSync

• Kakarot zkEVM on Starknet

• Omni Network Integrates Scroll

• Fuel’s Account Abstraction

• Base (Road to Mainnet)

The Present of L2s

~Offchain Lab building Stylus~

I bet you thought it was over after Nitro was shipped to Arbitrum One and Nova right??

you got it wrong all if you thought so, Offchain Labs recently announced its development of Stylus which is simply an upgrade to the Arbitrum tech stack.

Stylus will allow Developers to deploy contracts written in new programming languages like Rust, C, C++ e.t.c side-by-side with EVM contracts on the same chain while still maintaining EVM Equivalence.

Stylus is built on the Arbitrum Nitro stack which takes advantage of Arbitrum Nitro’s unique fraud-proving technology.

you can read more on the Stylus working mechanism below.

~Circle launching native $USDC on Arbitrum~

Circle which is the Issuer of the stablecoin $USDC recently announced that it’ll be launching $USDC natively on Arbitrum on June 8th, but before then, it announced launching its Cross-Chain Transfer Protocol on Ethereum and Avalanche.

The CCTP is a major milestone by Circle which will remove the need to bridge $USDC through the traditional lock and mint model but introduce Burn and Mint model instead.

The CCTP will also allow interoperability of $USDC across these chains easily without having to send the actual tokens between chains.

Confused btw Lock and Mint & Burn and Mint, you don’t have to be my lovely lads, DeFI Saint got you, but these are how bridges work (The Basics thou).

you can find more about them here

Circle came late to the party but still representing thou, Aside from them implementing the CCTP, Here are bridges and Circle’s partner which has Integrated this already

• CelerNetwork integrated CCTP in the cBridge

• Layerzero Labs integrated CCTP in their Omnichain Protocol (Don’t forget the future is Omnichain thou)

• Multichain equally integrated CCTP in their Multichain Bridge

• Socket also integrated CCTP in Bungee (A bridge aggregator)

• LIFI integrated CCTP in Jumper (A bridge aggregator)

• Wormhole also integrated CCTP in their Generic Interoperability Protocol for DEVs.

These are some of the Protocols leveraging CCTP, There are many others as well.

Back to Arbitrum, what does this mean?

It means you have been using Bridged $USDC (Based on Lock and Mint model) but not anymore, After 8th June $USDC is now natively on Arbitrum.

Below, you can see Arbitrum’s view on that and how to get ready.

~Rocket Pool is coming to zkSync~

zkSync is now ranked 3rd by TVL, making it the first zkEVM to see successive growth since Mainnent launch, Now we have a zkEVM that can strongly compete against ORs.

Yes, you heard it right, bullish news for $RPL as it is the first Ethereum liquid staking protocol to deploy on zkSync.

This is also an expansion for the derivative token (rETH) as it was previously only on Arbitrum and Optimism.

One major difference btw rETH and other LSDs is that its token is non-rebasing which means that it grows in ether value rather than token holders receiving additional tokens as rewards.

Users can now hold rETH on zkSync while continuing to earn rewards automatically from the most decentralized liquid staking protocol, while also enjoying Era's faster speeds & lower transaction costs.

~Kakarot zkEVM on Starknet~

WTF did I just read? another zkEVM on top of Starknet’s zkEVM…..Yes of course

Starknet in its current form is not EVM-compatible, it’s more of a zk Rollups than a zkEVM but aiming to build a zkEVM which falls in the type 4 zkEVM category (close cousins to the EVM) and in summary still not a zkEVM.

How?

very simple lads, Remember Vitalik categorized zkEVMs according to different types

Starknet happens to fall in type 4 zkEVM which is the high-level-language equivalent and its disadvantage is “more incompatibility” Why again?

zkEVM is simply an upgrade to the zk Rollup tech, it aims to bring an Ethereum-like experience to Developers/builders while still offering Zero Knowledge functionalities.

So what makes a zkEVM a zkEVM is its compatibility with Ethereum and the EVM.

Solidity is the EVM language code and every smart contract is written that runs on Ethereum

Every smart contract that runs on the EVM is written in Solidity which is the EVM language code and EVM compatibility refers to the ability of a blockchain to run and execute the EVM code without needing to make significant changes to the code.

what do you think type 4 zkEVMs are trying to do?

They are altering what is meant to be, they work by taking smart contract code written in High-level language (e.g. Solidity, Vyper) and compiling them to some language that is designed to be ZK-SNARK friendly.

Starknet language is written in Cairo which makes it a type 4 zkEVM and you now see why in its current form not a zkEVM because it’s not compatible with solidity.

This makes Starknet's dreams of achieving EVM compatibility far from being a reality as Developers have to learn Cairo language before they’ll have to deploy or build Dapps on Starknet thereby not creating a seamless experience for builders and also deviating from what zkEVMs tend to achieve.

This era is now over, as Kakarot zkEVM will now enable running solidity code on Starknet.

So you’ve finally understood now….What a good time to be alive 😊

Now, you can read more here to see how the phases of Kakarot zkEVM will come to Starknet

~Omni Network Integrates Scroll~

For DeFI to gain mass adoption, Liquidity has to be unified and not fragmented. Omni Network is an interoperable infrastructure layer on Ethereum built to unify all rollups. It also introduces a programmable and stateful interoperability layer that can manage application states across all integrated domains.

Omni announced its integration with Scroll making it one of the first rollups in the Omni Network.

This is a major milestone for Scroll and Omni as its next testnet phase will leverage the Integration.

~Fuel’s Account Abstraction~

All eyes on me, yes all eyes on AA

As more chains continue to leverage AA, I bet we’ll see AA narrative

Already, 3 chains are currently leveraging AA which are:

• Ethereum

• zkSync and

• Starknet

Now, Fuel joins the party. Fuel is the fastest modular execution layer blockchain.

Fuel is still on testnet and aims to launch on Mainnet with its Native Account Abstraction

Fuel’s method to AA differs from other chains’ Account Abstraction and you can read more on that here

~Base road to Mainnet~

Base is an L2 chain by Coinbase that is built on the OP stack. Base testnet has been live since 23rd Feb and has announced its Mainnet is coming soon.

Here’s all you need to know and prepare for its Mainnet

The DeFI Saint Recap

A lot of DeFI users still don’t know that they can minimize fees while maximizing profits.

Since liquidity in DeFI is fragmented and not unified, aggregators are the best way to gain from that.

To read more on all forms of DeFI Aggregators, below is a well-covered thread by me on that

Twitter Tips and Alpha

Getting into Entrepreneurship and business, You need these podcasts

7 Ways to create passive income systems

Thanks for reading and if you like it, do leave feedback and forward it to your Friends. There is love in Sharing and see you next time.

DeFI Saint

Founder, The Saints Creed.