Imagine a world where Ethereum’s scalability is limitless, transaction speeds are lightning-fast, and user privacy is sacred and inviolable. This is not a distant dream but a rapidly approaching reality, all thanks to Taiko.
As major investors, we are thrilled to support Taiko on their journey of revolutionary innovation within the Ethereum ecosystem, with their Type-1 ZK-VM technology leading the charge. Today, as they launch their mainnet, we stand at the forefront of an unprecedented leap in technological innovation.
While integrating ZK with EVM poses challenges, Taiko’s Type-1 ZK-VM technology (introduced by CEO Daniel Wang in 2023) is a breakthrough. CTO Brecht Devos and CFO Terence Lam have also been involved, and this experienced team successfully launched multiple public testnets within a year, showcasing impressive metrics.
The Taiko team brings with them rich experience from their Loopring background, one of the earliest ZK rollups. This foundation equips them with the knowledge and skills necessary to tackle the complex challenges of Ethereum scalability. The management team has been collaborating for over five years, which is rare in this field, further solidifying their cohesion and effective innovative approach.
Taiko’s goal is to increase Ethereum’s scalability by 1000 times, providing developers with a UI and experience consistent with EVM. This means any L1 project compatible with EVM can seamlessly transition to L2 by simply copying and pasting its code into Taiko.
One unique aspect of Taiko’s approach is the decentralization of proposers and verifiers to prevent single-point failures. Taiko employs Based Rollup to achieve decentralization in the sorting process within the protocol. In this setup, Ethereum verifiers handle the sorting because Based Rollup allows sorting on the underlying L1 chain. Additionally, Taiko’s Based Contestable Rollup (BCR) enables application chains to adopt updated and more efficient validity proofs without changing Taiko’s core protocol. Combined with Multi-Proof, this reduces potential vulnerabilities and smart contract errors within the protocol, making Taiko the only L2 implementation with this capability.
These features have attracted over 100 DApps to enter Taiko’s testnet. Taiko has established partnerships with EtherScan, USDC, Pyth, multiple DeFi protocols, and bridges. With Uniswap announcing the deployment of Uniswap V3 on the Taiko mainnet, we expect other major protocols to make similar announcements once the mainnet is live. Notably, Taiko boasts the largest Discord community in the entire crypto space, highlighting strong community engagement and support.
Taiko also has an extensive technical roadmap that includes many promising technologies. One of these is the Based “Booster” Rollup (BBR), which enhances the basic Rollup by providing native Ethereum L1 DApp scalability. BBR achieves atomic cross-Rollup transactions between all L2 instances while maintaining L1 sorting advantages. After launching BCR on the mainnet, Taiko plans to upgrade to BBR or introduce a standalone BBR L2 as a significant milestone.
Inception Layers involve using Taiko as both L2 and L3 layers, enabling it to simultaneously run multiple parallel L2 instances and deploy L3 on top. Leveraging Taiko’s equivalence with Ethereum, scalability limitations can be addressed, allowing multiple Rollups to coexist. Through Inception Layers, this approach ensures extensive scalability while maintaining interoperability between different layers through Merkle proofs, preventing fragmentation.
Taiko has garnered support from prominent figures in the Ethereum community, including Vitalik Buterin and Justin Drake. This endorsement underscores the credibility and potential of Taiko’s technology. With such a strong foundation and a clear vision, Taiko is poised to become one of the cornerstones of Ethereum’s scalability and innovation in the future. We are excited to be part of this journey.
