Paradigm develops L2 itself. How is its L2 different from other L2s?

Written by: 0xjs@黄金财经

Although there are already many Ethereum L2s, new big players are still entering the Ethereum L2 battlefield.

On October 9, 2024, Uniswap announced that it would develop its own L2 Unichain. On the same day, Paradigm announced an investment of $20 million in Ithaca, and Ithaca has launched the L2 testnet Odyssey.

It is worth noting that Paradigm's CTO and general partner Georgios will lead the Ithaca team as CEO, and Paradigm founder Matt Huang will also join the Ithaca team and serve as chairman.

What does Paradigm push Ithaca to do?

According to Ithaca's official website, Ithaca is a company aimed at accelerating the forefront of cryptographic technology. Ithaca believes that cryptographic technology must develop faster, and for this reason it has raised $20 million to accelerate cryptographic development across the stack.

Ithaca said its first step is Odyssey. Odyssey is an open source L2 testnet from the future, built with Reth, OP Stack and Conduit.

Ithaca also said that Odyssey is built to drive innovation in the broader infrastructure ecosystem, and plans to frequently redeploy new features, called chapters. Each Odyssey chapter is similar to a development network, which will launch new features, have a limited duration, and will not maintain status between each chapter.

Ithaca also announced that Odyssey Chapter 1 has been launched on the Sepolia testnet.

What is Paradigm pushing Ithaca for? Ithaca bluntly stated that "Crypto must go faster", and its goal is to help other L2s accelerate the adoption of cutting-edge technologies. This move is considered by industry insiders to be "using developers to control the princes."

Why do you say that? Please see Odyssey Chapter 1.

What is Odyssey Chapter 1 like?

Odyssey Chapter 1 has the following features:

• High performance, stability and scalability through Reth SDK

• The new features of Ethereum's future two upgrades, Pectra and Fusaka, currently include: EOF, EIP-7702, EIP-2537, RIP-7212.

• Frictionless entry into L2, users do not need to understand custom RPC, bridge ETH or browser extensions.

RETH SDK: Achieving High Performance, Stability, and Scalability

Odyssey is built with Reth SDK. Paradigm built Reth with excellent performance, stability, and scalability. Reth is not an L1 node, nor an L2 node, but a set of libraries for building high-performance, stable, and scalable cryptographic services, which can be called Reth SDK, which enables Ithaca to launch Odyssey with a small team at record speed.

What Reth SDK brings to Odyssey:

• Inherits Reth's high throughput and low write latency.

• Inherits Reth's fast archive node and RPC read capabilities.

• Since it shares the same code that runs the Ethereum mainnet, it inherits Reth's stability.

• Due to Reth's scalability, it is very simple, <1000 LoC of Rust; including tests.

Odyssey targets 33 megagas per second (200 megagas in OP Stack with an elasticity factor of 6) and a block time of 1 second, and Ithaca plans to increase its target gas to gigagas per second next. Ithaca also plans to work with the ecosystem to launch new cutting-edge features.

Paradigm said it is very excited to continue to push the forefront of crypto infrastructure in the coming months, and Reth SDK is an important tool to achieve this goal.

Experience the features of Ethereum's future upgrades PECTRA and FUSAKA in advance

The next two upgrades of the Ethereum network are Pectra and Fusaka, which will bring many exciting new features to the Ethereum mainnet. But developers don't have to wait until these features are launched on the mainnet to start building and testing them.

Paradigm said that many EIPs have been implemented and tested in Reth's Pectra and Fusaka, and they have been released in Odyssey Chapter 1, which can be used by developers to build.

So, what EIPs does Odyssey Chapter 1 include? Specifically, Odyssey includes:

• EIP-7702: Paving the way for account abstraction, which will completely change the on-chain user experience. This EIP introduces a new transaction type that allows externally owned accounts (EOA) to run like smart contracts. This unlocks features such as gas sponsorship, account recovery, transaction bundling, or granting limited permissions to subkeys.

• EVM Object Format (EOF): Represents a series of EIPs aimed at improving the EVM. EOF introduces a versioned container format for EVM bytecode, enabling smart contracts that are safer, more efficient, and more developer-friendly. EOF specifically makes smart contracts more gas-efficient, easier to statically analyze, and eliminates the infamous "Stack too Deep" bug in Solidity.

• EIP-2537: Implements a precompile for BLS12-381 to perform cryptographic operations on the BLS12-381 curve. This EIP aims to improve the efficiency of operations used in protocols such as BLS signature aggregation and zero-knowledge proofs.

• RIP-7212: Introduces a precompile for the secp256r1 elliptic curve, which is widely used in protocols such as Apple Secure Enclave and WebAuthn. The curve allows users to securely store private keys in hardware modules and sign messages using biometric authentication. Precompiles can efficiently verify these signatures directly on-chain, reducing gas costs by up to 50 times compared to traditional methods that do not leverage precompiles. This is already available on most OP Stack chains, but is not yet widely used.

Frictionless onboarding to L2

By using EIP-7702, RIP-7212, and the new EIP-5792wallet_RPC namespace (which allows sorters to sponsor transactions), Odyssey allows users to onboard to the Odyssey L2 testnet without installing a wallet, owning gas tokens, interacting with a bridge, or setting up new RPCs. This works across devices and across applications, leveraging the user's operating system's keychain or password manager.

Ithaca provides an example on the official website. In the example provided by the official website, just click "Create" to create a smart contract wallet containing testnet tokens powered by PassKey signers without browser extensions or embedded wallets (Note: a Passkey-enabled device is required). It uses EIP-7702 and RIP-7212 to send a sponsorship transaction to mint an experimental 100 EXP ERC20 tokens, all with just one click.

You can also directly click the "swap" button to swap EXP test tokens for Odyssey testnet ETH at a fixed ratio of 1:1000, without bridging, configuring RPC, or depositing ETH in advance as gas fees. And vice versa.

Ithaca's next steps

Ithaca has stated that its future plan is to help other L2s accelerate the adoption of cutting-edge technologies, and this work has already started in Paradigm's collaboration with many companies such as Optimism, Uniswap, Conduit, Flashbots, Succinct, Base, etc.

Some of this work will be done by Ithaca, and much of it will drive innovation work by others, such as existing collaborators or the broader crypto ecosystem.

Some of the broader areas of focus for Ithaca include:

• Wallet endgame: What ideal functions should a wallet have? How to operate from entry, bridging, exchange, signature aggregation, account recovery, light client verification, etc.?

• Accelerate the decentralization of the second phase of the OP Stack roadmap to make each rollup a ZK rollup.

• Improving MEV market structure with TEE and other emerging technologies.

• Deploying cutting-edge cryptography and crypto-enabled applications: zkPassport, FHE, zkEmail, TLS Notary, etc.

• Ecosystem-wide interoperability and privacy standards.

• Experimental EIPs for cutting-edge researchers and developers: Surprise us!

• Innovation at the VM layer with parallelization, compiled bytecode, block-level access lists, new EOF version, smart contracts using RISC-V ISA.

• New gas cost structures (e.g. multi-dimensional gas) backed by rigorous data-driven benchmarks.

• High-performance systems engineering working to break the gigagas per second barrier with new state states (e.g. verkle tries), databases, networks, and consensus.

P.S. How to try ODYSSEY?

The small picture is the complete Conduit dashboard of Odyssey:

Some information is as follows:

• RPC: https://odyssey.ithaca.xyz

• WS: href="https://odyssey.ithaca.xyz/">wss://odyssey.ithaca.xyz

• Block Explorer: https://odyssey-explorer.ithaca.xyz/

• Chian ID: 911867

• Throughput and latency: 33megagas/s

• Gas limit: 200,000,000 gas

• Elasticity factor: 6

• Block time: 1 second

• Gas asset: ETH

• Withdrawal time: 1 second

You can use Conduit's SuperBridge (https://odyssey-fba0638ec5f46615.testnets.rollbridge.app/) integration for bridging;

Or send Sepolia ETH to the Canonical Bridge contract via your wallet: 0x9228665c0D8f9Fc36843572bE50B716B81e042BA

Or via the CLI:

cast send 0x9228665c0D8f9Fc36843572bE50B716B81e042BA \

    --value 0.1ether \

    --private-key <your private key> \

    --rpc-url <your sepolia rpc url>

How do I develop with the Odyssey EIP?

Ithaca said it provides examples and walkthroughs on its Github page on how to integrate with each feature anvil --odyssey for testing locally:

• Simple Example of EIP-7702: Shows how EIP-7702 transactions work.

• Delegating Accounts to p256 Keys: Describes how EIP-7702+EIP-7212 provide the ability to sign messages with p256 keys.

• BLS Multisig: In-depth demonstration of how to implement multisig based on BLS signatures verified via EIP-2537’s precompile. EOF: Instructions on how to deploy and inspect contracts in the new EOF format.