Sovereign Labs, an encryption project focused on building rollups, completed a $7.4 million seed round of financing. The round was led by Haun Ventures, with participation from Maven 11, 1KX, Robot Ventures and Plaintext Capital. A spokesman for the project said the funding puts the company at an “eight-figure” valuation. It is understood that Sovereign Labs is building a software development kit (SDK) to help developers create secure and interoperable zero-knowledge rollups. This Coincu article will give us an overview of this project.
What is Sovereign?
Sovereign is an open and connected rollup ecosystem. Committed to enabling all developers to deploy rollups that are seamlessly interoperable and scalable and run on all blockchains. This is the original intention of creating Sovereign SDK, which will be the simplest framework for creating secure and interoperable sovereign zk-rollups.
Blockchain applications do not scale
The monolithic Layer 1 cannot be expanded
At present, there are three main paradigms for the expansion of blockchain applications: L1 public chains for applications, optimistic rollups, and zk-rollups. The L1 public chain for applications is the easiest to design and deploy, but it has obvious flaws. Each L1 must recruit its own validators and convince them to stake enough funds to protect the blockchain from attacks. Due to the high cost of capital, this approach is only suitable for a small number of well-funded applications.
Optimistic rollups destroy composability
Rollups solve this problem by allowing developers to extend existing blockchains with new logic rather than launching new ones. This greatly reduces the development threshold of the application chain.
But the optimistic rollups that dominate today are no panacea. To minimize the burden on a shared validator set, optimistic rollups rely on fraud proofs to prevent misconduct. When attacked, fraud proofs may face scrutiny, so optimistic rollups have long “finality delays” in which transactions are rolled back due to fraud proofs. Bridging optimistic rollups can thus be slow and expensive.
Optimistic rollup developers have to make tough decisions: should they build narrowly specific rollups that allow users to frequently bridge between blockchains? Or build a generic rollup to meet all user needs in one place? Neither option is good enough.
The bridging speed between Optimistic chains is too slow, the cost is too high, and the risk is too great to meet daily use. However, general optimistic rollups have to face many shortcomings of the monolithic L1 public chain: they not only have their own scalability problems but also cannot support the complete and diverse functions that application chains can create.
Zk-rollups are the future
For the above reasons, we expect zk-rollups to become the dominant scaling paradigm. It has the benefits of optimistic rollups without the long finality delay. Instead of waiting days for proof of fraud, the user can be confident that the transaction has been completed as soon as the proof of validity is created (which can take only a few seconds).
So, since zk-rollups is a better scaling solution, why hasn’t it been popularized on a large scale? The reason is that until now, actually building zk-rollups has been a daunting task, requiring years of dedicated cryptography engineers.
Sovereign came into being
What is the Sovereign SDK?
The Sovereign SDK is dedicated to doing for zk-rollups what the Cosmos SDK did for the L1 public chain.
It will provide various boilerplate components usually provided by a blockchain, such as a P2P network, database, and RPC nodes, so that builders can focus on the business logic of their own blockchain.
Additionally, it also provides a set of default modules that operate efficiently in a zero-knowledge environment: token deployment, verified data storage, and bridge modules. Developers can integrate these primitive components into AppChain, or build their own state-transition functions entirely from scratch by deploying a set of standard APIs.
Not only that, Sovereign SDK will be the first rollup framework to eliminate complex zero-knowledge details. To take advantage of its powerful features, developers don’t need to be experts in cryptography, just write applications in idiomatic Rust (or eventually use C++), and the SDK will automatically assemble them into an efficient zk virtual machine.
What are the features of the Sovereign SDK?
- Sovereign SDK rollups enable seamless interoperability. We use a novel proof-aggregation-based bridging technique to bridge Sovereign SDK rollups to and from shared L1 without the need for a trusted third party. zk-proofs can achieve aggregation, and rollups will be able to maintain as many bridges as possible with minimal cost.
Off-chain relayers can aggregate the proofs of all contemporaneous rollups into a single proof, which then only needs to be verified on-chain. And because state transitions are proven to work, there is no need to pay liquidity providers or wait a week for transactions to complete. - Sovereign SDK rollups will be safe and scalable. By tailoring each component to the usage scenario in zk-rollups, the Sovereign SDK will provide excellent performance by default. Thanks to advances in parallelism, our proofs will be delayed by seconds. With the magic of zero-knowledge proofs, blockchains will be able to scale without sacrificing end-user verifiability.
- Sovereign SDK rollups can run on any blockchain. The SovereignSDK chain delegates the responsibility of checking the proof to the end user, not the underlying L1 public chain. Hence, they are called “sovereign” rollups, not smart contract rollups. Since the data availability layer does not need to have the ability to verify proofs, the Sovereign SDK rollup can be automatically ported to any L1.
Project progress
Efforts are currently underway to develop the Sovereign SDK, and the roadmap is divided into three phases.
Phase 1: Research (ongoing)
The Sovereign SDK is under development. Its team is designing the default storage module, crypto-economic model, and core API. They are also developing a research prototype. The SDK will support a wide range of data availability layers and proof systems, but its current prototype integrates Celestia for data availability and Risc0 for proof. The project expects this phase to be completed around the second quarter of 2023.
Phase 2: Initial deployment
The initial deployment of the Sovereign SDK will occur in parallel with the remaining research. During this time, the team will deploy the p2p network, RPC nodes, core API, and default storage and order modules.
The 3: Hardening experience
Once the SDK is fully functional, the team spends a lot of time doing code cleanup, testing, fuzzing, and auditing. At the same time, they will also develop the first use cases of the SDK. The hardening of the initial deployment is expected to last approximately six months, after which the SDK will land on the mainnet.
Make scaling easier
Sovereign Labs wants to see blockchain empower billions of users. To achieve this, the threshold for zero-knowledge technology must be lowered: developers no longer need to be PhDs in cryptography, and Rollups no longer need professional protocol engineers.
But infinite scalability is meaningless if it comes at the expense of end-user verifiability. If building, running, or viewing the state of a blockchain still relies on cooperating with a centralized entity, we don’t have to talk about winning. Because of this, the Sovereign SDK will always remain completely free and open source and is committed to building every component in the technical organization with the highest standards of resilience.
DISCLAIMER: The Information on this website is provided as general market commentary and does not constitute investment advice. We encourage you to do your own research before investing.
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Harold
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