Telegram Tidbits: Early April

Can PureL1Rollups be used elsewhere? Why will v2 be open source?

April 1st

Community member ShiftyBear asked:

I’ve been wondering, can PureL1Rollups be used to add any other functionality to Ethereum, besides Offshift’s zk-derivatives platform?

Greybeard:

Our architecture is quite similar to state channels but with (fully decentralized) batching which includes sequencing. It’s something in between a state channel and a rollup hence the name we chose.

It’s definitely much more complex to write your own statechannel-like protocol compared to just picking a cheap L2 (which I suspect is the primary reason most don’t go this route), but we needed to in order to make it cheap enough, stay on L1, and keep ourselves fully decentralized. It was a good fit mostly because we required privacy to begin with which combined well with those properties.

There are a few other (completely unrelated) non-privacy projects that do something like this, but none use permissionless sequencing for anything but escape hatches with long waiting periods and only when their centralized coordinators are down.

We are in a unique position because being a privacy project means we end up requiring beefy zk proofs anyway, and the sequencing is easier to include when you’re already proving transactions privately. I think in the future there will be other dapps that go this route, especially privacy ones.

We picked a fresh name because nobody else is doing it quite this way, but I do think there will be others that follow if true decentralized privacy dapps pick up steam.

ShiftyBear:

Once you open source it, will other projects be able to use your tech as a base for their own dApp functionalities? Like, will you allow them to?

Greybeard:

To the extent that the Offshift protocol itself supports what they want to do, there’s nothing preventing them from using it and we don’t intend to stop them. Any usage of our protocol that creates new UTXOs improves the anonymity set for everyone.

Pablo Hippo:

Why would u just straight open source it? Why not make folks buy, acquire or hold x amount of xft to actually use it? Seems like a massive amount of work to just give to the world.

Greybeard:

Without open sourcing it, all you’re doing is trusting that our protocol does what we say it does. Of all applications you want to “trust”, this is definitely not one of them and compromises the entire principle of being trustless. You cannot trust what you cannot verify for yourself. If there was a backdoor that created money out of thin air, you’d have no way of knowing without access to the code that’s actually running the protocol because it’s private.

ShiftyBear:

Right, so it’s a matter of trust?

Greybeard:

That’s one of the biggest reasons almost all DeFi code is open source. Yet copying is still relatively rare because it isn’t as easy as copy + paste when it comes to running crypto infra.

ShiftyBear:

So even if open source, it still requires a lot of work (and skill) to get it to work in the same way after attempting to copy it?

Greybeard:

Yes, and not understanding the architecture or implementing it incorrectly (this applies to lots of software infra) leads to exploits. Anyone attempting to copy would already have to know what they’re doing to begin with. Security through obscurity is famously bad design, and it also harms your ability to find bugs and fix them because nobody else has access to your code.

Uniswap is a good example. SushiSwap and Pancakeswap pale in comparison to them despite being clones. They’re behind on updates and they cannot keep up with Uniswap because Uni continues building new features that are much harder to implement for them since their understanding of the code is lesser to those who actually wrote it.

ShiftyBear:

Interesting. So despite being open source, we still have enough of a moat to stay ahead of the game. This was one of my considerations actually, the “fear” that other copycats would launch soon after we launched.

Greybeard:

In my experience in this industry, knowledge is the main moat. We’ve also chosen a nascent niche where even less people have the experience to copy compared to crypto development at large. ZK is still very young.

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