1/ Manta Pacific
Manta Pacific is an Ethereum Layer 2 solution designed for ZK applications. It is a modular Layer 2 built on Ethereum and has secured over $60 million in funding from institutions such as Polychain, Binance Labs, CoinFund, and SevenX Ventures.
Manta Pacific is currently based on a custom OP Stack architecture by Caldera, making it nearly 100% compatible with the Ethereum EVM. This allows existing developers in the Ethereum ecosystem to seamlessly migrate their applications to Manta Pacific.
Manta Pacific moves the data availability layer from Ethereum to Celestia, making it the first Layer 2 to use Celestia as its data availability layer.
Manta also incorporates ZK circuits into Manta Pacific. Developers can easily call ZK functions with just a few lines of code through SDKs and APIs, enabling the integration of ZK with existing DApps or the development of new ZK applications.
2/ Modularity
Modularity refers to a product design and architectural thinking that is common in Web2 and traditional industries. For example, smartphone manufacturers choose suppliers for screens, chips, WiFi, Bluetooth, etc., and then use contract manufacturers for assembly, significantly improving efficiency and reducing costs, rather than producing all components themselves.
Typically, a blockchain can be broken down into the consensus layer, settlement layer, data availability layer, and execution layer.
Ethereum's mainnet handles the final consensus and settlement responsibilities, while data availability layer projects include Celestia, EigenDA, Polygon Avail, and more. Common Ethereum Layer 2s are execution layer projects.
Modularity means customization and greater composability. Projects can make trade-offs based on their needs, such as entrusting security to the Ethereum mainnet while pursuing low Gas fees, even zero Gas fees, and ultra-high transaction speeds.
Modularity allows projects to build their chain based on proven technical stacks like Polygon CDK or OP Stack without constructing all the infrastructure from scratch.
3/ Manta Pacific's Modularity
Manta's modular design encompasses two aspects:
Manta Pacific uses mature technology stacks like OP Stack and Polygon CDK to implement its modular architecture.
Unlike other Layer 2 solutions, Manta Pacific did not build its infrastructure from scratch but instead used the existing mature OP Stack technology stack.
If Manta were a newly established smartphone brand, using OP Stack would be like directly using iPhone's supply chain and technology architecture.
The advantage of this approach is that Optimism is a project tested by the bear market, and its technology stack, OP Stack, has also undergone long-term market testing and is very mature. Manta Pacific can directly stand on the shoulders of giants, inheriting the existing security and technical advantages of OP Stack to a large extent.
Moreover, it achieves full EVM compatibility, allowing developers to easily migrate existing DApps to Manta Pacific. More importantly, Manta can focus more on ecosystem construction and project expansion. To date, Manta Pacific has verified over 810 smart contracts on its chain, with over 200 ecosystem projects.
Manta Pacific uses Celestia as its data availability layer, meaning its data availability security is partly guaranteed by both the Ethereum mainnet and Celestia. If the sequencer nodes publish authentic data, corresponding data can be found on both the Ethereum mainnet and Celestia.
Manta Pacific's sequencer specifies the block height for publishing blobs to Ethereum. If the blob is not present at that height, the transaction is invalid.
The sequencer publishes data: a transaction to the Inbox, encoded in three parts: a version number (0x02), a block height (0xa4aa050000000000), and a blob commitment (the remaining part). By specifying the height, nodes know where to look.
For example, 0xa4aa050000000000 is the little-endian encoding of block height, converted to block 371364. You can find the same block at https://celenium.io/block/371364.
The block contains a block in Manta Pacific's namespace. Complete data can be found:
If the sequencer publishes falsified data, nodes will be unable to find the commitment at the specified block height.
Manta's own ZK circuits are modularly designed, making ZK functionalities built into Manta Pacific. Developers can fully call and implement ZK functions and features within Manta Pacific, differentiating it from other ZK Rollups or zkEVMs. Developers can also easily call ZK circuits to combine ZK functions with applications.
In ZK Rollup interactions, users trade within the ZK Rollup, and the Rollup's sequencer acts as the prover, sequencing user transactions, compressing, packaging, and generating ZK proofs. Ethereum mainnet smart contracts act as verifiers, verifying the correctness of the ZK proof, thus verifying the correctness of the transactions it represents.
The mainnet smart contract does not need to perform complex validation of ZK Rollup transactions, and one ZK proof can represent the correctness of more transaction information, achieving scalability and improving the Ethereum mainnet's ability to confirm transactions.
In comparison, Manta Pacific users act as provers, generating ZK proofs locally when submitting transactions. On-chain collators act as verifiers, validating ZK proofs. Verified transactions are then compressed by the sequencer and submitted to the Ethereum mainnet. Within Layer 2, Manta Pacific completes ZK generation and validation, fully realizing ZK features.
4/ OP Stack
OP Stack is a modular, open-source blockchain technology stack launched by the Optimism team, designed to provide highly scalable, highly interoperable blockchain solutions. OP Stack adopts a modular design, with each module implementing a specific layer of the stack and connecting through well-defined APIs. This allows developers to easily modify existing modules or create new ones, supporting different types of blockchain applications and innovations.
The goal of OP Stack is to go beyond traditional single-chain or multi-chain models and promote a structure composed of highly integrated chains, known as the Superchain. The Superchain, by sharing messaging formats, allows different chains to communicate easily without custom adapters for each chain. It also supports atomic cross-chain composability, where multiple op-chains share a sequencer set, ensuring atomic-level interactions between chains.
5/ Data Availability Layer (DA Layer)
The Data Availability Layer ensures that all data within a blockchain network, especially Layer 2 data, can be publicly accessed and verified. The data availability layer allows any participant to retrieve this data to validate the network's state and the validity of transactions, providing a crucial guarantee of blockchain transparency and security.
6/ Celestia
Celestia provides a pluggable data availability and consensus layer, built on Cosmos Tendermint consensus and the Cosmos SDK, compatible with EVM chains and Cosmos application chains. These chains can directly use Celestia as their data availability layer, with block data stored, accessed, and verified through Celestia. Celestia also supports native Rollups, allowing Layer 2 constructions on it, though it does not support smart contracts.
Rollups integrate with Celestia by running Celestia nodes. Celestia receives Rollup transaction information, orders transactions through Tendermint consensus, but does not execute or validate the transactions' correctness. It packages, orders, broadcasts transactions, and ensures data security and availability through erasure coding and data availability sampling (DAS).
7/ ZK Circuits
In zero-knowledge proofs, "circuits" are a way of representing complex algorithms and functions. Here, circuits do not refer to traditional electronic circuits but to a mathematical or logical structure.
In the context of zero-knowledge proofs, circuits are often used to describe or define a specific problem or statement.
The main functions of circuits:
Problem Description: Circuits can describe or define a specific problem or statement. For example, the prover may want to prove they know the input that satisfies a specific circuit.
Privacy of Details: By using circuits, the prover can prove they know information that satisfies the circuit's conditions without revealing the specific content of that information.
Verifiability: Circuits provide a way for the verifier to check the correctness of the proof without knowing the specific input used by the prover.
Generality and Reusability: Once defined, circuits can be used for a variety of problems and scenarios. This is why some ZKP frameworks support so-called "universal" circuits, capable of describing and solving various problems.
In summary, circuits in zero-knowledge proofs act as a bridge, connecting the statements the prover wants to prove with the verifier's need to verify the statement, without revealing any information beyond the statement itself. Circuits are used to define the computations being proved. Each specific application requires its own circuits. Different services (such as zkEVM, ZKML, ZK Oracle, ZK Bridge, and various consensus and state proofs) require different circuits.
8/ Universal ZK Circuits by Manta Pacific
Manta Pacific is a Layer 2 solution designed specifically for ZK (Zero-Knowledge) applications, offering near-complete compatibility with the Ethereum EVM (Ethereum Virtual Machine) environment and the Solidity programming language. Recently, Manta Pacific has launched Universal ZK Circuits 2.0, a developer-oriented ZK library that enables the integration of ZK-enabled contracts into existing Solidity smart contracts and dApps with just a few lines of code.
The Universal ZK Circuits provide ZK-as-a-Service for Solidity developers. Currently, it includes Manta Network's existing MantaPay circuit, the zkShuffle circuit, and ZK circuits from the Ethereum Foundation's Semaphore project.
Using the Universal Circuits on Manta Pacific, developers can easily deploy EVM-native ZK applications. They can also call ZK-enabled contracts for their existing Solidity smart contracts and dApps through advanced APIs.
For example, a developer creating an on-chain card game application can use the zkShuffle circuit to implement decentralized shuffling and dealing of cards. A practical example of simplified ZK application development with Manta Universal Circuits is zkHoldem.
Before the introduction of Universal Circuits, building zkShuffle and similar ZK applications required manual circuit construction and conversions between programming languages like Rust and Solidity. However, with the introduction of Manta Universal Circuits, this complexity has been significantly reduced.
With Manta Pacific's Universal Circuits, building ZK applications has become more straightforward and efficient.
