Espresso Systems

From their introduction (7-3-2022):

"Espresso Systems is developing Espresso: a layer 1 blockchain system that combines proof-of-stake consensus and a ZK-Rollup mechanism to achieve high throughput and low fees. Espresso has also developed Configurable Asset Privacy for Ethereum (CAPE), an application that can run on any EVM blockchain (and will eventually run on Espresso natively). CAPE enables asset creators to offer users customized privacy guarantees."

Basics

• Based in:
• Started in / Announced on:
• Testnet release:
• Mainnet release:

Audits & Exploits

• Bug bounty program can be found [insert here].

Token

Launch

• Will have a CAPE token for their CAPE project, as can be seen on their testnet (6-2022).

Technology

• Whitepaper or docs can be found here.
• Code can be viewed here.

Implementations

• Built on: will be on its own L1, but hasn't so far (25-10-2022)
• Programming language used:

Transaction Details

• Capacity (TPS):
• Latency:

How it works

• From their introduction (7-3-2022):

"What is needed is an approach that can maximize throughput while maintaining decentralized data availability. At Espresso Systems, we are developing a solution to this by tightly integrating the ZK-Rollup scaling mechanism with our proof-of-stake consensus protocol from the start. The fact that the Espresso ZK-Rollup is natively integrated with consensus—and does not need to treat it as a black box—is what will enable Espresso to avoid the trade-off of other designs which approach the rollup as a separate modular component agnostic to the underlying consensus protocol."

Scaling

• From their introduction (7-3-2022):

"Espresso’s approach to scaling throughput involves a careful integration of ZK-Rollup for the EVM with a decentralized proof-of-stake consensus protocol. A server aggregates a large number of transactions into a single summary transaction and produces a succinct zero-knowledge proof (zk-SNARK) of their validity, which is subsequently sent to the consensus system. This rollup proof compresses both the amount of information and the computation that the consensus protocol needs to validate the transactions, thus increasing the throughput."

Compliance

• From their introduction (7-3-2022):

"While CAPE can be used by anyone looking to create or wrap assets, the protocol was designed with stablecoin providers specifically in mind. Stablecoin providers today generally want to maintain avenues to be able to address fraud, theft, and dispute resolution, demanding that they retain insights into the ledger of activity for their assets as well as controls like freezing capabilities. Prior to CAPE, there were no solutions for these types of asset creators to offer privacy-enabled versions of their tokens to users while being able to meet needs around visibility and dispute resolution. With CAPE’s viewing and freezing policies, this is now possible."

Their Other Projects

Configurable Asset Privacy on Ethereum

• Got released on Goerli testnet (16-6-2022).
• From their introduction (7-3-2022):

"CAPE (Configurable Asset Privacy for Ethereum) is a smart-contract application developed by Espresso Systems which enables digital asset creators to determine who can see what information about the activity in the tokens they mint.

Digital assets on CAPE, from stablecoins to NFTs, can be customized to balance transparency, a noted benefit of Web3 products, with privacy, wherever it is required by users. While CAPE transactions appear anonymous and indistinguishable to normal viewers, hiding even the type of asset being transacted, the creator of an asset can configure a viewing policy, which ensures that select parties can decrypt select information about transactions for that asset.

CAPE can be used to create new assets or to wrap assets that already exist on Ethereum, endowing them with privacy properties. Wrapping an ERC-20 with CAPE requires the specification of a wrapper type, which configures who can see what and who can maintain specific controls regarding the assets in question. Wrapping locks the asset in the ERC-20 contract and creates a corresponding CAPE asset of the specified type, while unwrapping burns the CAPE asset and releases the lock."

Hyperplonk and their other Plonk implementations

• From their blog (24-10-2022):

"Over the past few years, Plonk has become the proof system of choice for most applications in the blockchain space. The reason is that Plonk provides great tradeoffs with short proofs, efficient verification, a high level of customization, and minimal trust assumptions. Unfortunately, Plonk still has limitations, especially when proving large statements or trying to use highly parallel hardware. These limitations are especially important when proving large and complex statements such as rollups and zkEVMs.

To overcome these bottlenecks, we built Hyperplonk. A new zk-proof system with a fully linear time prover and support for high-degree and lookup custom gates. Our prototype Hyperplonk implementation already beats our highly optimized Plonk implementation (Jellyfish), starting from circuits with about 16000 constraints, and the gap keeps growing as statement size increases or more parallelism is used. Hyperplonk also enables high-degree custom gates and lookup, something that is particularly useful for complicated circuits like the ZK-EVM one. These special gates can be used to enable complex EVM OPCODES and building a memory stack."

The Espresso Sequencer

• From their docs (3-2023):

"Espresso Systems is developing the Espresso Sequencer to support rollups in decentralizing, without compromising on scale. The Espresso Sequencer is designed to offer rollups a means of achieving credible neutrality, enhanced interoperability, mitigation of negative effects of MEV, and long-term economic incentive alignment with L1 validators."

Roadmap

• Can be found [Insert link here].

Pros and Cons

Cons

• Had investment from bankrupt Alameda Research/FTX and Sequoia. This could mean fall-out risk.

Team, Funding and Partners

Team

• Full team can be found here (25-10-2022).

Funding

• Raised $28 million in its Series B (21-3-2024):

"a16z crypto, Polygon, Taiko, o1Labs, StarkWare, Offchain Labs, Aztec, AltLayer, Frax, Gelato, EigenLayer, Obol and core contributors and strategic investors from over 30 notable ecosystem projects — spanning rollups, L2 infrastructure, interoperability, and more."

• Mentions the following investors on their website (25-10-2022):

Greylock, Electric Capital, Polychain Capital, Scalar Capital, Sequioia, Paxos, Gemini, Robot Ventures, Blockchain Capital, Coinbase Ventures, SLOW, ZKV, Alameda Research

Partners

• Started partnering with Offchain Labs to bring decentralized and open shared sequencing technology to Ethereum rollups (12-9-2023).

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