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Recommended Reading

We recommend you read the following material, provided by speakers and attendees of Scaling Ethereum.

Participants are required to do some preparation beforehand, in order to maximize the efficiency of the time we can spend together IRL.

Oracles & DEX

Chainlink: A Decentralized Oracle Network

  Existing oracles are centralized services. Any smart contract using such services has a single point of failure, making it no more secure than a traditional, centrally run digital agreement. In this paper we present ChainLink, a decentralized oracle network. We describe the on-chain components that ChainLink provides for contracts to gain external connectivity, and the software powering the nodes of the network.

https://link.smartcontract.com/whitepaper

How to Validate Bitcoin Payments in Ethereum (for only 700k gas!)​

  Our auctions and smart contracts verify proofs of Bitcoin payment on-chain to power cross-chain communication. This means fast, efficient cross-chain interoperability without oracles, trusted third parties, or centralized exchanges. 

https://medium.com/summa-technology/cross-chain-auction-technical-f16710bfe69f

When Lightning Starks?

  StarkPay, a payment scalability engine based on STARK technology, addresses many of the drawbacks of Lightning, the Layer-2 payment solution.

https://medium.com/starkware/when-lightning-starks-a90819be37ba

Flash Boys 2.0: Frontrunning, Transaction Reordering, and Consensus Instability in Decentralized Exchanges

  Blockchains, and specifically smart contracts, have promised to create fair and transparent trading ecosystems. 
Unfortunately, we show that this promise has not been met. We document and quantify the widespread and rising deployment of arbitrage bots in blockchain systems, specifically in decentralized exchanges (or "DEXes").

https://arxiv.org/abs/1904.05234

The Rainbow Network: An Off-Chain Decentralized Synthetics Exchange

  This paper presents the Rainbow Network, a design for an off-chain non-custodial exchange and payment network supporting any liquid asset. The Rainbow Network allows a user to trade, lend, borrow, send, and receive any liquid asset, entirely off-chain, while having only one on-chain payment channel collateralized by a single asset.

https://rainbownet.work/RainbowNetwork.pdf

Layer 2

The Rainbow Network: An Off-Chain Decentralized Synthetics Exchange

  This paper presents the Rainbow Network, a design for an off-chain non-custodial exchange and payment network supporting any liquid asset. The Rainbow Network allows a user to trade, lend, borrow, send, and receive any liquid asset, entirely off-chain, while having only one on-chain payment channel collateralized by a single asset.

https://rainbownet.work/RainbowNetwork.pdf

The Plasma Framework

  Get a high-level overview of the tools provided by the plasma framework. Remember that plasma is a framework for building scalable applications. There isn’t any single project called “plasma.” Instead, there are lots of different projects that use the tools provided by the plasma framework. This tends to be pretty confusing when you’re first learning about plasma (and that’s fine!).

https://www.learnplasma.org/en/learn/framework.html

 

Understanding the Generalized Plasma Architecture

  Imagine a world where every time you wanted to build a dApp you had to build Ethereum from scratch... Until now, that's what plasma app development has been like. Each deployed plasma chain was app-specific due to constraints in the architecture. Not upgradeable not generalizable. We present an architecture that allows people to build applications in the same way you build on Ethereum. Upgradeable. Modular. Generalizable.

https://medium.com/plasma-group/plapps-and-predicates-understanding-the-generalized-plasma-architecture-fc171b25741

Matic Network

Matic Network strives to solve the scalability and usability issues, while not compromising on decentralization and leveraging the existing developer community and ecosystem. It is an ​off/side chain scaling solution for existing platforms to provide scalability and superior user experience to DApps/user functionalities. 

https://whitepaper.matic.network/#whitepaper

Nitro Protocol

State channels are an important technique for scaling blockchains, allowing a fixed set of participants to jointly run an application in order to determine how a set of assets should be distributed between them. In this paper, we present a new protocol for constructing state channel networks, allowing state channels to be opened and closed without on-chain transactions and decreasing the number of deposits that need to be held. The protocol readily extends to nn-party channels and we include the construction of a 3-party virtual channel.

https://eprint.iacr.org/2019/219

Celer Network: Bring Internet Scale to Every Blockchain

Celer Network is an Internet-scale, trust-free, and privacy-preserving platform where everyone can quickly build, operate, and use highly scalable dApps. It is not a standalone blockchain but a networked system running on top of existing and future blockchains. It provides unprecedented performance and flexibility through innovation in o↵-chain scaling techniques and incentive-aligned cryptoeconomics.

https://www.celer.network/assets/doc/CelerNetwork-Whitepaper.pdf

State Channels and Plasma Cash

While a plasma chain needs quite a lot of features for us to be able to implement state channels on the plasma chain, we can implement state channels on ethereum chain funded by a plasma withdrawal if the plasma chain supports multisignature accounts. Here is a concrete proposal sketch.

https://ethresear.ch/t/state-channels-and-plasma-cash/1515

 

Matter Labs Infrastructure Tests

Over the first weeks of May 2019 we, Matter Labs, have performed a series of infrastructure tests to evaluate the performance of consistency of our alpha version of ZK rollup.

https://medium.com/matter-labs/matter-labs-infrastructure-tests-62c0cef2c7bc

State Channels API Notes

This document is a rough overview of what the high level API of a generalized state channels network looks like based on some aggregation of the various techniques seen so far. Taken from a meeting during New York Blockchain Week.

https://paper.dropbox.com/doc/yGdSpMUhUGeoKgVOohlbQ

ETH 2.0

Proposed Further Simplifications/ Abstractions for Phase 2

  A proposal for designing the execution environments for ETH 2.0

https://ethresear.ch/t/proposed-further-simplifications-abstraction-for-phase-2/5445

A Journey Through Phase 2 of Ethereum 2.0

  Ethereum 2.0 development has been split into 3 phases for its initial launch. This article takes you through all the moving parts in order to gain a foundational understanding, and compares the pros and cons of this new architecture.

https://medium.com/@william.j.villanueva/a-journey-through-phase-2-of-ethereum-2-0-c7a2397a36cb

On-chain scaling to potentially ~500 tx/sec through mass tx validation

We can actually scale asset transfer transactions on ethereum by a huge amount, without using layer 2’s that introduce liveness assumptions (eg. channels, plasma), by using ZK-SNARKs to mass-validate transactions. Here is how we do it.

https://ethresear.ch/t/on-chain-scaling-to-potentially-500-tx-sec-through-mass-tx-validation/3477

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