Original article by: Ryan Kim, Edward Tan, Dan Park
Original translation: TechFlow
Imagine a world where Ethereum’s scalability is endless, transactions are lightning fast, and user privacy is sacrosanct. It’s not a distant dream, but a rapidly approaching reality, all thanks to Taiko.
As a lead investor, we are excited to support Taiko’s journey to revolutionize the Ethereum ecosystem, and their Type-1 ZK-VM technology is leading this change. Today, as they launch their mainnet, we are on the cusp of an unprecedented leap in technological innovation.
Despite the challenges of integrating ZK with the EVM, Taiko’s Type-1 ZK-VM technology (launched by CEO Daniel Wang in 2023) is a breakthrough. With CTO Brecht Devos and CFO Terence Lam also involved, the experienced team has successfully launched multiple public testnets within a year and demonstrated impressive metrics.
The Taiko team brings a wealth of experience from their background in Loopring, one of the first ZK rollups. This foundation equips them with the knowledge and skills needed to tackle the complex challenges of Ethereum scalability. The management team has been working together for over five years, which is very rare in the space, further solidifying their cohesiveness and effective approach to innovation.
Taiko aims to increase Ethereum's scalability by 1,000 times, providing developers with a UI and experience consistent with the EVM. This means that any EVM-compatible L1 project can seamlessly transition to L2 by simply copying and pasting its code into Taiko.
A unique feature of Taiko’s approach is the decentralization of proposers and validators to prevent single points of failure. Taiko applies Based Rollup to decentralize the ordering process within the protocol. In this setup, ordering is done by Ethereum validators, as Based Rollup allows ordering to be done on the base L1 chain. In addition, Taiko’s Based Contestable Rollup (BCR) allows application chains to adopt newer, more efficient validity proofs without changing Taiko’s core protocol. Combined with Multi-Proof, this reduces potential vulnerabilities and smart contract errors in the protocol, making Taiko the only L2 to implement this feature.
These features have attracted over 100 DApps to Taiko’s testnet. Taiko has already partnered with EtherScan, USDC, Pyth, multiple DeFi protocols, and bridges. With Uniswap announcing the deployment of Uniswap V3 on the Taiko mainnet, we expect similar announcements from other major protocols once the mainnet goes live. Notably, Taiko has the largest Discord community in the entire crypto space, highlighting strong community engagement and support.
Taiko also has an extensive technology roadmap with many promising technologies:
Based “Booster” Rollup (BBR): Booster Rollup enhances the basic Rollup by providing native Ethereum L1 DApp extensions. BBR enables atomic cross-Rollup transactions between all L2s while maintaining the L1 ordering advantages. After launching BCR on the mainnet, Taiko plans to upgrade to BBR or launch a separate BBR L2 as a major milestone.
Inception Layers: This involves using Taiko as the L2 and L3 layers, making it possible to run multiple parallel L2 instances simultaneously and deploy L3 on top of them. Leveraging Taiko’s equivalence to Ethereum, scalability limitations can be addressed, allowing multiple Rollups to coexist. With Inception Layers, this approach ensures extensive scaling capabilities while maintaining interoperability between different layers through Merkle proofs, thereby preventing fragmentation.
Taiko has received support from prominent figures in the Ethereum community, including Vitalik Buterin and Justin Drake. This endorsement highlights the credibility and potential of Taiko’s technology. With such a strong foundation and clear vision, Taiko is poised to become one of the cornerstones of Ethereum’s future of scalability and innovation. We are excited to be a part of this journey.