AltLayer is an open and decentralized protocol for rollups. AltLayer brings together a novel idea of Restaked Rollups which takes rollups (spun from any rollup stack such as OP Stack, Arbitrum Orbit, Polygon CDK, ZK Stack, etc.) and provides them with enhanced security, decentralization, interoperability and crypto-economic fast finality by leveraging restaking mechanism.
ALT is AltLayer's native utility token and is used in the following functions:
Economic bond: ALT token will be used alongside restaked assets to provide economic stake. This stake can be slashed if a malicious behavior is detected.
Governance: ALT token holders can vote on governance decisions.
Protocol Incentivization: Operators in the AltLayer ecosystem can earn ALT tokens as rewards for their services.
Protocol Fees: Network participants will need to pay for intra-network services in ALT tokens.
AltLayer’s core offering of restaked rollups consists of three key products:
VITAL: An Actively Validated Service (AVS), where operators verify blocks and the corresponding states committed by the rollup sequencer and raise fraud proof challenges if necessary.
MACH: A protocol to provide faster finality to rollups by allowing operators to restake Ethereum-based assets to back any claims on the rollup state.
SQUAD: Offer decentralized sequencing with economic backing. Decentralized sequencing eliminates short-term liveness concerns, bad MEV, rent extractions and other issues associated with rollups that operate with a single sequencer.
AltLayer has raised 22.8MM USD from two rounds of private token sales, where 18.50% of the ALT total token supply has been sold at 0.008 USD / ALT and 0.018 USD / ALT respectively.
AltLayer’s investors include Polychain Capital, Binance Labs, Jump Crypto, Breyer Capital, DAO5, Balaji Srinivasan (former CTO of Coinbase and former GP of a16z), Gavin Wood (Co-Founder of Ethereum and Parity), Sean Neville (Circle Co-Founder and USDC architect) and Ryan Selkis (Founder of Messari), among others.
As of January 17th 2024, the total supply of ALT is 10,000,000,000 and the circulating supply upon listing will be 1,100,000,000 (11.00% of the total token supply.)
Key metrics (as at January 17th 2024)
1. What is AltLayer?
AltLayer is a decentralized protocol that facilitates the launch of native and restaked rollups with both optimistic and ZK rollup stacks.
AltLayer offers a rollup framework called Restaked Rollups. Restaked rollups combine the power of:
rollups stacks to permissionlessly launch application-specific instances of all major rollups
EigenLayer’s restaking mechanism to bootstrap network with borrowed economic security from Ethereum.
1.1 Highlights
Restaked Rollups: A common framework for application-specific rollups leveraging EigenLayer’s restaking mechanism that provides them with enhanced security, decentralization, interoperability and crypto-economic fast finality.
VITAL: An AVS where operators verify blocks and the corresponding states committed by the rollup sequencer and raise fraud proof challenges if necessary.
MACH: A protocol to provide faster finality to rollups by allowing operators to restake Ethereum-based assets to back any claims on the rollup state.
SQUAD: Offer decentralized sequencing with economic backing. Decentralized sequencing eliminates short-term liveness concerns, bad MEV, rent extractions and other issues associated with rollups that operate with a single sequencer.
Ephemeral Rollups. With ephemeral rollups, a dApp developer expecting an increase in demand for his application could:
quickly spin up a fast and scalable application-tailored rollup secured by a Layer 1
use the rollup for as long as needed
dispose of the rollup by doing an “end-of-life” settlement on the Layer 1.
1.2 Existing Products
Ephemeral Rollups are currently live while the other products like VITAL, MACH and SQUAD are on a private testnet.
Ephemeral rollups have been used across different usecases such as mini-games, game tournaments, NFT mint events and others. Some of the relevant stats are given below:
2048 Game
Loot Royale: 134k game rooms
Cellula: 1.4MM Cellula NFT minted with 1.9MM transactions across 612k wallets
2. Token sales and economics
ALT Token Allocation
ALT Token Release Schedule
3. Roadmap and Updates
3.1 Milestones
3.2 Current Roadmap
Q1 2024:
Testnet launch of the integration of Arbitrum Orbit with Celestia, Espresso, EigenDA
Testnet launch of the integration of Op Stack with EigenDA and Avail
Support ZK Stack
VITAL, MACH: Testnet launch with OP Stack support
TGE
Season 1 Airdrop
Q2 2024:
Testnet launch of the integration of Polygon CDK with alt DAs
VITAL, MACH: Mainnet launch with OP Stack support along with EigenLayer AVS mainnet
Alt staking for restaked rollups
VITAL, MACH: Testnet launch with Arbitrum Orbit support
Q3 2024:
Support non-EVM rollups
VITAL, MACH: Mainnet launch with Arbitrum Orbit support along with EigenLayer AVS mainnet
3.3 Commercial and Business Development Progress
Research Collaborations:
EigenLayer: AltLayer has partnered with EigenLayer to build restaked rollups and support EigenDA.
RISC Zero: RISC Zero is building zkVM – a general purpose ZK compute framework. AltLayer has partnered with RISC Zero to develop a new type of fault proofs called ZK Fault Proofs.
Clients using AltLayer:
Cometh: Cometh is a game studio based out of France. They have previously worked with prestigious clients, namely La Française des Jeux (FDJ), Lacoste, FanLive Rugby, and Life Beyond Studios for their web3 needs. Cometh is building a new game called Cosmik Battle with user-friendly biometric wallets and a customizable NFT marketplace on a rollup provisioned by AltLayer.
Double Jump Tokyo: Double jump.tokyo is a blockchain game development studio based out of Japan. They provide web3 game and NFT development services to large-scale enterprises in the gaming & entertainment sector. They have worked with notable partners such as SEGA, Bandai & Ubisoft and own game IPs such as Sangokushi Taisen. Double Jump is also a member of the Japan Blockchain Organisation & Backed by Jump, Circle & others. AltLayer’s exclusive partnership with Double Jump would allow developers to launch rollups that settle on Oasys – a game dedicated rollup by Double Jump Tokyo.
Injective: Injective is a blockchain where developers can leverage a decentralized orderbook to build applications. Injective has partnered with AltLayer to use the modular Restaked rollup framework.
Avive: Avive is a geosocial protocol with Proof of Network consensus. It introduces the concept of "Sovereign Footprint", emphasizing individual ownership and control over personal data and digital identities.
Deri: Deri Protocol allows users to trade derivatives: to hedge, to speculate, to arbitrage, all on chain. With Deri Protocol, trades are executed under AMM paradigm and positions are tokenized as NFTs, highly composable with other DeFi projects. Deri Protocol has partnered with AltLayer for their app-dedicated rollup launch.
Automata: Automata is a blockchain middleware service provider backed by Binance Labs, Jump Crypto, and others. They recently launched a modular attestation layer with attestation conducted fully on-chain for out-of-protocol computation. The project enables on-chain verification of heavy-weight computation through proof-of-machinehood and uses AltLayer's rollups to achieve scalability. Automata has partnered with AltLayer for their app-dedicated rollup launch for Automata 2.0.
ALLO: Allo protocol is building applications across programmable funds, tokenizing real world assets, trading and staking. This product is being built as an extension of Allocations – a fund management platform with over $1B of assets currently under administration on the platform and backed by Flex Capital, Genesis Accel, Digital Horizon, Whatif Ventures, Garage Syndicate, W5 Group among others. Allo has partnered with AltLayer to build an RWA rollup.
4. Community
5. Appendix