Overview

Welcome to Ethereum Economic Zone’s monthly update, our regular note on what we shipped, what we showed in public, and where the project stands.

This edition covers October and the first week of November, when we took EEZ from our experimental network to Ethereum mainnet and then onto the Devcon stage.

Where things stand

On 5 October we sent the first atomic cross-chain transaction from Ethereum mainnet to a rollup. One transaction started on L1, called a contract on Rollup X, got the result back and finished, all inside a single L1 block. Synchronous composability on Ethereum had been a design until then, and now it was running on mainnet.

• Hash on mainnet: 0xd0cb…0a02 on Blockscout

• X Post

The rest of October went into getting that network ready for other people to use. Gas estimation and fees for cross-chain calls now work in both directions, so wallets show real costs instead of false fail warnings.

On 20 October, Nethermind ran its own prover client end to end against EEZ, the first client built outside our team. Rollup X runs with a single prover today, and this is the first step toward running it with more than one.

Then came Devcon in Mumbai November 3-6. Over four days we launched Rollup X, the first public EEZ testnet with launch partners, presented on stage, built with developers at our booth and met a large part of the Ethereum community. Rollup X composes with Ethereum mainnet, but it is still a testnet: auditing now with a single prover, and not meant to hold real value yet. Think of it as a playground for your dapp.

Launching Rollup X at Devcon

On 4 November, in “One Ethereum: Same Block, Every Chain”, Friederike Ernst and Edu Antuña made the case for One Ethereum and demoed three firsts for synchronous composability between a rollup and Ethereum mainnet, live on Lotus Stage 1:

• CoW Swap: the first swap on a rollup filled with mainnet liquidity. A user on Rollup X signed one order. CoW Swap’s solvers filled it against liquidity on Ethereum mainnet, and the tokens landed back on Rollup X in the same transaction. There was no bridge, no waiting and no second signature. Try it here:

  https://rollupx.eez.dev/dashboard/#/cow-demo

• Safe: the first atomic L2↔︎L1 owner changes and unified accounts. A user updated owners and reached treasury funds across several Safes in one atomic step. Owner changes on L1 Safe accounts are read and verified from the L2 Safe accounts in the same transaction, so their state can’t drift apart. The Safes also share limits, so a payment can draw on their combined balance as if they were one account. Try it here:

  https://rollupx.eez.dev/dashboard/#/treasury-demo

• A post-quantum signature verified on Rollup X and used on mainnet. A mainnet contract called Rollup X, which checked a Falcon signature, and the mainnet contract used the result to authorize a transfer in the same transaction. Verifying that signature directly on mainnet takes about 5.5 million gas; through Rollup X it takes around 91% less, because the expensive check runs where gas costs a fraction of mainnet’s. EEZ’s own contracts are not post-quantum secure. The demo shows how heavy computation can move to a rollup while the result is still used on L1. Try it here: https://rollupx.eez.dev/dashboard/#/falcon-demo

The next day, Jordi Baylina gave “EEZ: Building Synchronous Ethereum with Real-Time ZK Proofs”. He walked through how rollups exchange synchronous call information through Ethereum blobs, and the smart contracts that coordinate execution. Real-time proving is the piece that makes this work at scale: the day before, ZisK showed it live on OP Mainnet, proving on just four consumer GPUs.

• One Ethereum: Same Block, Every Chain

• EEZ: Building Synchronous Ethereum with Real-Time ZK Proofs

• The three demos, in one thread: x.com/etheconomiczone/status/2117866567685849443

Dapp teams have already started building on Rollup X. The best example to try right now comes from Bermuda Bay: a single L1 transaction deposits tokens into a privacy pool on Rollup X, and you can then transfer or trade there while your assets stay shielded and still use liquidity from L1.

• Bermuda Bay’s private cross-chain calls: eez.bermudabay.xyz

At our booth, we ran two hands-on workshops with the Remix team. Builders made their first cross-chain call: they deployed a contract, created its proxy on the other network, and called it to get a return value in the same transaction.

During the week we also met the Reserve Bank of India, together with Tanvi Ratna, Joseph Lubin and Friederike Ernst, and took the first steps toward moving next steps.

Thank you to the Devcon team for featuring EEZ among the projects building Ethereum’s shared infrastructure, and to everyone who came by the booth.

Technical Progress

What moved since September:

• The canonical token bridge will support both synchronous and asynchronous transfers. Synchronous calls stay the core of the protocol, and the asynchronous path is built on top, as we set out last month.

• Fees for cross-chain calls. L1→L2 and L2→L1 calls now get fee estimates from a dedicated endpoint, for both legacy and EIP-1559 transactions.

• A streaming prover protocol. We defined how a prover can take blocks one at a time as they arrive, instead of a whole batch at the end (PR #168, PR #198). It’s a specification for now, and implementations follow. eez-association/eez-rollup0#198 simplified it after feedback from teams building outside prover clients.

• Nethermind can run a Rollup X follower. A new runbook documents how to start a Nethermind L2 follower node, with a Compose file, the required L1 execution and Beacon inputs, and the canonical hash, root and receipt checks it runs. The same image follows both the Chiado-backed and the Ethereum-backed Rollup X networks (docs PR #127). Snap sync isn’t supported yet, and work on it is under way.

• Four new docs and expanded end-to-end tests landed in the core protocol repository (#52).

Start building

At Devcon we also launched our build and docs pages, with step-by-step walkthroughs of how EEZ works. Every demo example is open to try:

• build.eez.io: guides to deploy and make your first cross-chain call.

• eez.dev: the demo examples and the network monitor, which shows L1 and L2 blocks side by side with every batch we post to Ethereum.

• docs.eez.io: how EEZ works and the protocol specifications.

Cross-chain calls in Remix

You can now call contracts across chains from the IDE most Solidity developers start in. Remix has an EEZ tab: deploy your contract, give it a cross-chain proxy, and call it from the other chain as if it lived there. Your L1 and rollup contracts can call each other in the same transaction.

The tab includes:

• Create Proxy: give an L1 contract an address on L2, or an L2 contract an address on L1.

• Find Cross-Chain Proxies: look up the proxy address for any contract.

• EEZ revert decoding: failed cross-chain calls show readable errors.

• Custom networks: add your own EEZ RPCs in Settings → EEZ.

• Try it on testnet

Talking EEZ in Zug

On 23 October we hosted Zug Ethereum Meetup #1 at the ZisK office, dedicated to the Ethereum Economic Zone. Jordi took a technical room through the question at the centre of EEZ, whether a contract on one rollup can call a contract on another and use the return value in the same transaction, and where the implementation stands today.

Making EEZ’s contracts safe for chains to adopt

Our grant on TheDAO Security Fund is still open for pledges until 1 February: EEZ Extends Ethereum: Making Its Contracts Safe for Chains to Adopt

It funds an independent audit of the core contracts, a public testnet that other chains can integrate against, and a final payment that only lands once outside chains and dapps run EEZ on mainnet. Gnosis has committed $30,000 of the $120,000 goal. If you want cross-chain execution to rest on independently reviewed code, you can pledge and help get it there. We have plenty of adaptation updates coming your way this month. Stay tuned!

See you on-chain!