Written by: 0xjs@Golden Finance
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 a $20 million investment in Ithaca, which has launched the L2 testnet Odyssey.
Notably, 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 as chairman.
What is Paradigm trying to do by promoting Ithaca?
According to Ithaca's official website, Ithaca is a company that aims to accelerate the frontier of encryption technology. Ithaca believes that encryption technology must develop faster, and for this reason it has raised $20 million to accelerate encryption development across the entire stack.
Ithaca said its first step is Odyssey, an open source L2 testnet from the future built with Reth, OP Stack, and Conduit.
Ithaca also said that Odyssey was 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 for Ithaca? Ithaca said that "Crypto must go faster", and its goal is to help other L2 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 two future upgrades, Pectra and Fusaka, currently include: EOF, EIP-7702, EIP-2537, and RIP-7212.
Frictionless entry into L2, users don’t need to understand custom RPCs, bridging 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 or an L2 node, but a set of libraries for building high-performance, stable and scalable encryption services, which can be called Reth SDK, which enables Ithaca to launch Odyssey with a small team at record speed.
Reth SDK can bring:
Inherits Reth's high throughput and low write latency.
Inherits Reth's fast archive node and RPC reading capabilities.
Since it shares the same code that runs the Ethereum mainnet, it inherits Reth’s stability.
Due to Reth's extensibility, it's pretty straightforward, <1000 LoC of Rust; including tests.
Odyssey is targeting 33 megagas per second (200 megagas in OP Stack with an elasticity factor of 6) with a block time of 1 second, and Ithaca plans to increase its target gas to a 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 pushing the forefront of crypto infrastructure in the coming months, and the Reth SDK is an important tool to achieve this goal.
Experience the functions of Ethereum's future upgrades PECTRA and FUSAKA in advance
The next two Ethereum network upgrades, Pectra and Fusaka, will bring many exciting new features to the Ethereum mainnet, but developers don’t have to wait until these features are live 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 have been released in Odyssey Chapter 1, ready for developers to build with them.
So, what EIPs does Odyssey Chapter 1 include? Specifically, Odyssey includes:
EIP-7702: Paving the way for account abstraction, which will revolutionize the on-chain user experience. This EIP introduces a new transaction type that allows externally owned accounts (EOAs) to act 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 safer, more efficient, and more developer-friendly smart contracts. EOF specifically makes smart contracts more gas-efficient, easier to statically analyze, and eliminates the infamous "Stack too Deep" bug in Solidity.
EIP-2537: Implement 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 the Apple Secure Enclave and WebAuthn. This curve allows users to securely store private keys in a hardware module and sign messages using biometric authentication. The precompile can efficiently verify these signatures directly on-chain, reducing gas costs by up to 50x compared to traditional methods that do not utilize precompiles. This is already available on most OP Stack chains, but is not yet widely used.
Frictionless entry into L2
By using EIP-7702, RIP-7212, and the new EIP-5792 wallet_RPC namespace (which allows sorters to sponsor transactions), Odyssey allows users to enter 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 examples on its official website. In the examples provided on the official website, just click "Create" to create a smart contract wallet containing testnet tokens supported 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 sponsorship transactions to mint experimental 100 EXP ERC20 tokens, all with just one click.
You can also directly click the "swap" button to swap the EXP test tokens for Odyssey testnet ETH at a fixed ratio of 1:1000, without the need for bridging, configuring RPC, or depositing ETH in advance as gas fees. And vice versa.
Next Steps for Ithaca
Ithaca stated frankly that its future plan is to help other L2s accelerate the adoption of cutting-edge technologies. This work has already started in Paradigm's collaboration with many companies including Optimism, Uniswap, Conduit, Flashbots, Succinct, Base, etc.
Some of this work will be done by Ithaca, and much of it will drive innovative work by others, such as existing collaborators or the broader crypto ecosystem.
Some of Ithaca's broader areas of focus 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 OP Stack’s roadmap, making each rollup a ZK rollup.
Leverage TEE and other emerging technologies to improve MEV market structure.
Deploy cutting-edge cryptography and crypto-enabled applications: zkPassport, FHE, zkEmail, TLS Notary, and more.
Ecosystem-wide interoperability and privacy standards.
Experimental EIP for cutting-edge researchers and developers: Surprise us!
Innovations at the VM layer through 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) powered by rigorous data-driven benchmarking.
High-performance systems engineering is focused on breaking the gigabyte per second barrier through new state machines (e.g., Verkle tries), databases, networking, and consensus.
P.S. How to try out ODYSSEY?
The small picture is the complete Conduit dashboard of Odyssey:
Some information is as follows:
RPC：https://odyssey.ithaca.xyz
WS：wss://odyssey.ithaca.xyz
Block Explorer: https://odyssey-explorer.ithaca.xyz/
Chian ID：911867
Throughput and latency: 33 megagas/s
Gas limit: 200,000,000 gas
Elasticity coefficient: 6
Block time: 1 second
Gas asset: ETH
Withdrawal time: 1 second
You can use Conduit's SuperBridge integration for bridging;
Or send Sepolia ETH to the Canonical Bridge contract via your wallet: 0x9228665c0D8f9Fc36843572bE50B716B81e042BA
or via CLI:
cast send 0x9228665c0D8f9Fc36843572bE50B716B81e042BA \
--value 0.1ether \
--private-key <your private key> \
--rpc-url <your sepolia rpc url>
How to develop with Odyssey EIP?
Ithaca says 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: Showing how EIP-7702 transactions work.
Delegating accounts to p256 keys: Describes how EIP-7702+EIP-7212 provides the ability to sign messages using 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.
