Hello all! Taiko had its Community Call #5 last Friday. Here’s a written version of it. You can also watch the recording here.
Enjoy!
Introduction
Community growth. Ben kicked off the meeting by saying that the community has grown to over 370,000 members on Discord and over 307,000 followers on Twitter. Ben welcomed everyone who has joined the community recently.
New Taiko teammates. Ben announced that ex_scxr, who’s been a moderator on Discord for almost a year, will join the core team as a Community Manager. JUN has joined as a language Discord Moderator and RJ joined as Content Creator with a focus on video production. The community team now consists of Mikko, Ben, RJ, Archie, Lisa, and ex_scxr. Matt later added that Joaquin has joined as a Business Development and Ecosystem Lead.
Ben also said that Taiko is happy to promote people from the community and that Taiko takes its community very seriously, and loves it. He said that the greatest opportunity to join Taiko is by being active in the community.
Proposer and prover growth. Mikko highlighted the growth of successful proposers and provers. Since the last community call, L2 proposers have grown to 4,975 and provers — to 588. L3 provers and proposers have also grown: 642 proposers and 145 provers.
Galxe proposer and prover tasks. Ben said that Taiko has ended the proposer and prover tasks on Galxe slightly earlier than expected. That’s because, based on user feedback, the tasks were too challenging. Also, there were difficulties for people to connect two different wallets to Galxe. That’s going to change in the near future because Galxe will soon fix the problem. Users will be able to add the second wallet to their accounts and claim their points.
Ben also revealed that new Galxe tasks will be launched next week.
RJ introduction. RJ, Taiko’s new Content Creator, said that she’s happy to be in her first community call. RJ joined Taiko three weeks ago with the main focus on content creation, both in video and text formats. She’ll do internal and external videos.
RJ also revealed that she’s already done one internal interview with Taiko co-founder Brecht and will soon upload it. She said that what Brecht shared was valuable and included topics like L2s, L3s, cross-layer communication, and ZK rollup security. She said there will be more videos in the future.
Team updates
Matthew’s update. Taiko co-founder Matthew thanked everyone for being on the call. He said that less talking and more listening is good (talking about himself). Matthew said that Joaquin has joined the ecosystem team. His arrival is a nod to an increased effort on the ecosystem front. Matthew said that Joaquin said “Hi” and will be in the next community call.
Matthew welcomed RJ and Archie, and congratulated ex_scr and JUN, and the whole extended team. He said that their effort has been incredible, and mentioned that he met Sam, one of the moderators, in Paris, which was really nice. EthCC in general was very fun.
Matthew then talked about Taiko’s current focus, which is making sure builders have everything they need like infrastructure and tooling in the near future on testnets, as well as mainnet. The ecosystem page is the best place to keep an eye on the expanding ecosystem, as well as Tea with Taiko and other places.
Matthew also reminded that Taiko recently launched its first grants program, which is an attempt to attract new builders. He said that the program allows builders to build alongside the core team and be part of the team in that their efforts will have a stake in the network later. Matthew said that feedback on the program is very helpful, and Taiko will iterate and do different programs in the future.
Matthew added that Taiko’s rate of shipping new protocol iterations and testing them in the wild is very fast, which is what makes Taiko unique on that front. Permissionlessness is difficult in a testnet environment but Taiko is doing just that. He also said that it’s nice to see the community grow and OGs stick around. Matthew mentioned Jeff’s new NFTs and how some of the community members use them as their profile pictures. He said he needs to join the gang himself.
Brecht’s update. Brecht said that one of the biggest things that Taiko launched lately is Eldfell, the L3 testnet. The testnet is interesting from a technical perspective because it has a staking-based prover mechanism built in. Brecht said that Taiko has published a couple of articles on Eldfell and encouraged to check them out.
However, Brecht said that L3 is not a priority for Taiko itself — it’s there more for the ecosystem and partners. He said that Taiko encourages everyone to work on that. He added that another scaling approach is having multiple L2s and told everyone interested about different trade-offs of this approach to listen to his interview with RJ that’s coming soon.
As for ZK, Brecht said that the goal of this quarter is to get the coverage of ZK circuits to 85%. This means that Taiko will have ZK circuits for everything except precompiles. Taiko is also working on the EIP-1559 circuit, as well as the MPT circuit that’s almost feature complete. Block hash calculation circuit and some precompiles are also in the works.
From the protocol perspective, EIP-4844 is coming to improve data availability (DA) and Taiko will integrate it ASAP. Dani also added that he and his team are working on bridge optimizations and UI. An NFT bridge will also launch soon.
Mikko asked if Archie had anything to share. Archie encouraged everyone to go show some love to the Taiko community forum and read two articles on proving schemes that were recently published by Lisa and himself.
Devrel’s update. Dave said that the devrel team sees the feedback and constantly looks for ways how to improve the experience of running a node. He said the team will make updates to make it easier to run nodes. Dave shared that they’ve already made a few videos on node running and have updated troubleshooting.
Dave asked the community to come to Taiko’s documentation and add whatever they see can be improved. He said the devrel team will also be working on providing more information on how to easily deploy on Taiko.
Marcus added that he’s currently running a node on a VPS but wants to do it using local hardware. He said the team is focusing on user experience.
Planned events. Matthew said that there are 3-4 new event appearances planned. End of August-beginning of September Marcus and maybe some other team members will be present at ETHWarsaw and other side events like L2Warsaw, ZKWarsaw, and an L2Beat event. Matthew encouraged community members to come to meet Marcus. Marcus added that there’s going to be a hackathon and a conference in Warsaw at the same time.
After Warsaw, in early September, Taiko will be present at ETHCon Korea and the whole Korea Blockchain Week. Taiko will have bounties at the hackathon. Dave, Ben, Keng, and maybe others from the team will be there.
After Korea, Matthew said that Taiko will have a heavy presence in Singapore where the team will participate in ETHSingapore and TOKEN2049. The team will give talks, be at the hackathon, and attend side events. After that, Taiko will be at ETHKL in October with Keng there, and maybe at ETHGlobal New York.
Questions
davaymne|0x720a—b03d43|—13974f: How long will A3 and A4 testnets run?
Daniel: We’ll keep the current testnets for an additional month after we launch the subsequent testnets. You’ll have another network to use before we set up new ones. We’ll give enough time for developers to switch over.
davaymne|0x720a—b03d43|—13974f: Sometimes we face problems on A4 when running proposers and provers. What’s next for A4?
Daniel: We’re planning for a new L2 testnet for end of September or early Q4 but it depends on the features. We’ve changed some stuff already: Gas limit is larger than previously. We’ve also had a discussion internally and decided to not go forward with some other changes that would break Ethereum equivalence. Once on mainnet, we can rely on L1 validators and solve some problems.
As for L3s, for most of them the sequencers will be very centralized because you have a large block delay. For most app chains, the sequencer or proposer won’t be as decentralized as L2. At Taiko, we’ll focus on our L2 solution, and make it more robust and competitive. We aren’t solving the L3 problems now. We’ll need one more testnet in the next few months.
davaymne|0x720a—b03d43|—13974f: Will you support GPU?
Daniel: Of course. internally, we’ll optimize for GPU. Otherwise, the time for block proving will be too long. Performance optimization always comes second compared to functionality and ZK circuit coverage. Without ZK coverage, it’s still not secure. Security is first, then optimization.
davaymne|0x720a—b03d43|—13974f: Will you test a proving delegation mechanism?
Daniel: Yes and no. In theory, anyone can develop a secondary proof market. This isn’t considered core protocol though. This is why we have proof markets on our grants program. We’ll be very interested if a third party wants to build something like that. For the core protocol, we’ll need something as simple as possible. Proof markets aren’t built in. The Taiko protocol should be as simple as possible so that no one removes stuff from it. We want to restrict ourselves to just offering our core solution and allow people to build around it.
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Helios: Last night there was a drama about open-source code. Can Taiko share its perspective on working with open-source code?
Matthew: Such stories might demotivate teams. Maybe now teams will be more incentivized to not open-source their code. It would be a sad outcome. From my personal understanding, it wasn’t intentional. The teams have deep respect to each other. And today everyone builds on everyone’s stuff. Blockchain culture is supposed to solve this issue with free and open-source software, new libraries, etc.
Daniel: I’m still in favor of open-sourcing everything. Taiko is possible only because of so many people open-sourcing solutions: We use the PSE ZK circuits codebase, we use the Halo2 library. Taiko is only one building block in the entire ecosystem. We take other people’s code and I think we should contribute open-source code back so other people can use it to build something else. Furthermore, when code is open-source, people can review it and it contributes to the project.
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Vicky_Styles: wen airdrop
Daniel: We’re waiting for the Ethereum hardfork to happen (EIP-4844) to launch the protocol. However, we don’t know when exactly we’ll launch on mainnet.
ikthejoyboy: Will there be a stress test before mainnet launch?
Matthew: Testnets already stress test our networks. We have no plan for mainnet yet but we’ll adhere to best practices. Sometimes it’s a bit like permissioned roll out, though it goes against what we’ve been doing so far. We just gated provers and proposers once. Once mainnet, maybe we won’t gate anything. But of course, we’ll need to maintain upgradeability. Upgradeability, upgradeability with delay, upgradeability with security council. This is not so much about stress test but keeping the rollup training wheels long enough to mitigate the downsides. Could be a multiyear process also. Do people like more upgradeability or is a foundation or security council securing upgradeability for a few years a better choice and removing training wheels as time goes on? We’ll see.
ikthejoyboy: Will the launch be gated or will we be able to deploy dapps right away?
Matthew: It might be completely permissionless to deploy right from the start. Sometimes teams help partners behind the scenes. But we don’t really know yet.
ikthejoyboy: How do you support developers? Will you support gaming?
Matthew: Supporting developers is the work of our whole team but our devrels Dave, Keng, Marcus spend all of their time on documentation. Our whole ethos is to have the best developer experience. We take the hard path on the circuit side for the best developer experience. It’s in our DNA.
We also have a grants program, we’re happy to have launched it earlier than later. We like the idea of involving builders early and allowing them to build alongside us, versus a clear demarcation line. We build hand in hand. There will be more different flavors of the grants program.
We’re also making sure we’re building out the ecosystem, making sure builders have tools, infrastructure at their disposal to build whatever they want. That’s really happening in earnest right now. We’re also going to more and more hackathons.
Wrap-up
Mikko gave a shoutout to L2Beat for integrating Vitalik’s stages for rollups on their platform. He wrapped up the community call and said bye to everyone. Ben thanked the community for their amazing support in helping each other and said bye.