Yesterday, Succinct Labs and Espresso Systems announced their series rounds, with $55M and $28M respectively. Here’s a brief recap of the developments for each one:
Succinct
https://twitter.com/SuccinctLabs/status/1770843544388771914
There are a bunch of zk infra projects in the space (worth mentioning RISC Zero), but I’m mostly bullish on Succint as they developed actual useful zk products that developers can use today. They built Telepathy, a “proof of consensus” zkSNARK that enables to read the Ethereum state on any other chain, basically a ‘zk bridge’ secured by circuits and math.
IBC to Ethereum: Tendermint consensus is not easy to verify in the EVM as cosmos’ light clients are not gas efficient and can consume up to 25M gas or even more (consuming almost full gas limit on an Ethereum block), due to the lack of a precompile for Ed25519 (the default signature scheme used by Cosmos chains)
They built Tendermint X, a light client of the original Tendermint for cosmos’ chains that is extremely gas efficient (~350k gas per proof), and compatible with any current cosmos chain. Celestia’s bridge (Blobstream X) will be leveraging Tendermint X to bring Celestia DA to Ethereum.
Espresso
https://twitter.com/EspressoSys/status/1770842658887373058
Espresso recently announced they’re also building a blockspace marketplace for shared sequencing networks through which L2s can sell blockspace to shared proposers, including the proposer for the Ethereum L1 itself.
Proposers can buy multiple rollup block sequencing rights simultaneously to offer cross-domain user’s intent execution (e.g. atomic execution). The Ethereum L1 proposer has a ‘right of first refusal’ to purchase block space at the price set by the auction, once they are identified as the proposer for a particular slot (32 slots in advance)
A rollup can decide to participate in this shared sequencing marketplace for each individual slot, or they can decide to sequence themselves for one block and then include a block sequenced by the shared sequencing network. It’s a pretty modular design in which rollups can opt-in/out to sequence their blocks whenever they think it is worth it.
HotShot BFT is the consensus protocol built by Espresso, it offers fast finality and it will be run by EigenLayer restaking nodes. Rollups participating in Based Espresso will derive their state from the output of HotShot consensus.