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Taiko Alpha-2 Testnet

Taiko Alpha-2 Testnet

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Reward pool

$50,000

50,000 USDC

Expected profit

Unknown

USDC

Max participants

No limit

DropsEarn score

Neutral

Normal, Low Risks

Details

  • Open to all developers to deploy smart contracts. As Taiko aims to be a type-1 ZK-EVM (Ethereum-equivalent), you can use all the Ethereum/solidity tooling you are familiar with, and deploy your Ethereum smart contracts exactly as is.
  • Open to all users who want to use it and play around with some transactions.

  • Open to all interested parties to run an L2 node, including as a prover. Taiko will be running some nodes + hopes provers will join.

  • Taiko protocol economics are implemented to modulate prover and proposer rewards and fees, and to simulate a real resource pricing scenario.

  • Faucet for requesting sample ERC20 tokens for use on the testnet. For ETH, you can use existing Sepolia ETH faucets or find a Taiko teammate in Discord.

  • Bridge to move assets between testnet L2 and L1.

  • Block explorers to view assets and activity on testnet L2 and Sepolia L1.

  • Status page to monitor the network and various stats.

  • Swap app deployed (Uniswap V2 fork).

Provers

Validity proof generation has entered the network. As you may know, validity proofs (ZK proofs) are what proves the validity of the L2 EVM state transitions, and generally what makes a ZK-Rollup special.

Alpha-2 does not entail proving the full EVM execution yet, but rather proving the “public input” circuit. The public input circuit takes the data that a proposer pushes on to L1 and hashes it, and checks this hash value against the hash value that was automatically generated by the L1 smart contract. Effectively, it checks that the blob of data (the list of transactions) is valid, and that it matches what was committed to.

Oracle Prover

Since the ZKP coverage in a2 is still incomplete, Taiko holds a special address that acts as the oracle prover. Only this oracle prover can prove blocks as the very first prover (with empty proofs that won’t be verified onchain), all other actual provers must prove the block after the oracle prover with the same block headers.

Oracle prover is a way to ensure the blockchain does not enter an invalid state while ZKP coverage is not comprehensive. When ZKP coverage is indeed comprehensive, this oracle prover will be removed entirely from the codebase.

Hardware requirements and benchmarks

Generating validity proofs is a computationally-intensive process. Below is a sense of the minimum hardware required, and benchmarks if using this hardware.

  • 8 or 16 core CPU
  • 32 GB memory
  • Proof generation takes approximately 10 minutes, and if renting a machine with the above specs, would cost approx $0.15 per proof.

Note: this is not representative of what a full ZK-EVM proof will eventually cost.

Rewards for provers

To reward provers for their computing resources expended during proof generation, Taiko Labs is creating a reward campaign. It’s worth noting that under a ‘normal’ mainnet scenario, provers would be rewarded by the protocol for their work with a token that trades freely in the market (like ETH or a rollup token). In a testnet scenario Taiko has to make the following modifications.

The Taiko protocol will account and administer proof rewards as it normally would, and mint test tokens (“TTKO”) to the prover of each block. These TTKO will then be redeemable for USDC at the end of the testnet reward period. The reward budget for provers on alpha-2 testnet will be up to 50,000 USDC, and provers will redeem their TTKO for their proportional share of the USDC. The project expects the reward period to last for approximately 300,000 blocks, or 69 days. Taiko uses the assumptions of 20 second block times, and $0.15 average proof generation cost. Given rewards will be in USDC (representing a potential match to the currency costs are incurred in), Taiko attempts to bake in a surplus of rewards of approximately 10% relative to provers’ costs. The project will not reward provers after 300,000 blocks. Learning how the protocol reacts in the scenario where most provers stop proving blocks is part of this testnet’s desired outcomes.

Please note, profit considerations (if any) will heavily depend on a prover’s hardware cost, and certain assumptions Taiko uses may not reflect reality for the duration of the reward period. Taiko reserves the right to adjust the program, with the ultimate goal of testing permissionless proving while providing a reasonable reward to provers on average.

What is not in this testnet

  • Ability to become a proposer. Taiko will run a permissioned proposer.

You may notice that this is in contrast to testnet alpha-1 which did allow anyone to become a proposer permissionlessly—and indeed, over 2000 of you showed up to act as a proposer.

The reason Taiko has permissioned the proposer role in alpha-2 is for DOS-resistance. Specifically, given permissionless provers are now introduced onto the network, and given that proof generation consumes meaningful computing resources, the project must limit who can propose blocks to be proven since proposing on a testnet consumes no real resources, thus creating a mismatch. That is, proposers can spam-propose blocks to L1 by just paying Sepolia ETH (not real ETH), requiring provers to expend real resources to prove them, potentially making the pending blocks queue interminable and halting the network (or requiring a much larger budget from Taiko to reward provers). By controlling the proposer for this testnet, Taiko can emulate a higher-fidelity environment to what real ETH costs for proposers would naturally lead to.

Get involved

Once more, here is the testnet hub where you can find documentation, guides, and links to all relevant apps and tools for testnet usage:

Just like the first time around, besides deploying, transacting, node running—and now proving—there are plenty of other ways you can get involved and help Taiko improve. Some of these include:

  • Providing feedback or share any bugs you come across on this form.

  • Create tutorials or other content that can help developers, provers, and users get started.

Taiko will have Community Call #2 on Friday, March 24th at 15:00 UTC in its Discord server. You can find the ‘stage’ channel here. The team will provide some general updates but will spend much more time answering questions. Please ask any questions you would like in the community-call-questions channel in Discord in advance. The questions can be testnet-related or general.

Links

 

 

About

Taiko has announced Alpha-2 testnet. Following its first testnet (a1), Snæfellsjökull, a2 continues the trend of Icelandic volcanos and is called Askja.

Activity Type

Testing

Testnet

Bugs

Date

from 23 Mar 2023 06:00(UTC+3)

Registration

Closed

When Reward:

None

Event Status

You can't participate(Event ended)