What is different about the L2 developed by Paradigm in person?

Author: 0xjs@Golden Finance

Despite the numerous Ethereum L2s already available, new major players continue to enter the Ethereum L2 battlefield.

On October 9, 2024, Uniswap announced that it will 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, Ithaca and Odyssey are being developed directly by Paradigm. 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 pushing Ithaca to do?

According to Ithaca's official website, Ithaca is a company aimed at accelerating the forefront of crypto technology. Ithaca believes that crypto technology must evolve faster, and has raised $20 million to accelerate crypto development across the entire stack.

Ithaca states that its first step is Odyssey. Odyssey is an open-source L2 testnet from the future, built using Reth, OP Stack, and Conduit.

Ithaca also mentions that building Odyssey is intended to drive innovation in a broader infrastructure ecosystem, planning to frequently redeploy new features, referred to as chapters. Each Odyssey chapter is similar to a development network, introducing new features with a limited duration and not maintaining state between chapters.

Ithaca has also announced that Odyssey Chapter 1 has gone live on the Sepolia testnet.

What is Paradigm pushing Ithaca to do? Ithaca bluntly states, "Crypto must go faster," with the goal of helping other L2s accelerate the adoption of cutting-edge technology. This move is seen by industry insiders as "leveraging developers to control the landscape."

Why is that? Let's take a look at Odyssey Chapter 1.

What is Odyssey Chapter 1 like?

Odyssey Chapter 1 has the following features:

• High performance, stability, and scalability achieved through Reth SDK.
• New features from Ethereum's next two upgrades, Pectra and Fusaka, currently including: EOF, EIP-7702, EIP-2537, RIP-7212.
• Frictionless entry into L2, where users do not need to understand custom RPCs, bridge ETH, or use browser extensions.

RETH SDK: Achieving high performance, stability, and scalability

Odyssey is built using Reth SDK. Reth, developed by Paradigm, is high-performing, stable, and scalable. Reth is neither an L1 node nor an L2 node, but a library for building high-performance, stable, and scalable crypto services, referred to as Reth SDK, which enables Ithaca to launch Odyssey at a record speed with a small team.

Reth SDK brings to Odyssey:

• Inherited high throughput and low write latency from Reth.
• Fast archival nodes and RPC reading capabilities from Reth.
• Stability inherited from sharing the same code that runs on the Ethereum mainnet.
• Simplicity due to Reth's scalability, with <1000 LoC of Rust, including tests.

Odyssey aims for 33 megagas per second (200 megagas in OP Stack, with an elasticity factor of 6), with a block time of 1 second. Ithaca plans to raise its target gas to a gigagas per second next. Ithaca also plans to collaborate with the ecosystem to launch new cutting-edge features.

Paradigm expressed excitement about continuing to push the frontier of crypto infrastructure in the coming months, with Reth SDK being an important tool to achieve this goal.

Experience the features of Ethereum's future upgrades PECTRA and FUSAKA in advance

The next two upgrades of the Ethereum network are Pectra and Fusaka, which will bring many exciting new features to the Ethereum mainnet. However, developers do not have to wait until these features go live on the mainnet to start building and testing them.

Paradigm states that many EIPs have already been implemented and tested in Reth's Pectra and Fusaka, and they have been released in Odyssey Chapter 1 for developers to use in their builds.

So, what EIPs are included in Odyssey Chapter 1? Specifically, Odyssey includes:

• EIP-7702: Paving the way for account abstraction, which will fundamentally change the on-chain user experience. This EIP introduces a new transaction type that allows externally owned accounts (EOAs) to operate like smart contracts. This unlocks features such as gas sponsorship, account recovery, transaction bundling, or granting limited permissions to sub-keys.

• EVM Object Format (EOF): Represents a series of EIPs aimed at improving the EVM. EOF introduces a versioned container format for EVM bytecode, resulting in safer, more efficient, and developer-friendly smart contracts. EOF particularly makes smart contracts more gas-efficient, easier to statically analyze, and eliminates the notorious "Stack too Deep" error in Solidity.

• EIP-2537: Implements a precompiled contract for BLS12-381 to perform cryptographic operations on the BLS12-381 curve. This EIP aims to improve the efficiency of operations used in protocols like BLS signature aggregation and zero-knowledge proofs.

• RIP-7212: Introduces a precompiled contract for the secp256r1 elliptic curve, widely used in protocols like Apple Secure Enclave and WebAuthn. This curve allows users to securely store private keys in hardware modules and sign messages using biometric authentication. The precompiled contract can efficiently verify these signatures directly on-chain, reducing gas costs by up to 50 times compared to traditional methods that do not utilize precompiles. This is already available on most OP Stack chains but has not been 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 needing to install a wallet, hold gas tokens, interact with bridges, or set up new RPCs. This applies across devices and applications, leveraging the user's operating system's keychain or password manager.

Ithaca provides examples on its official website. In the example provided, users can create a smart contract wallet containing testnet tokens supported by PassKey signers by simply clicking "Create," without needing a browser extension or embedded wallet (Note: a device supporting Passkey is required). It uses EIP-7702 and RIP-7212 to send sponsored transactions to mint 100 experimental EXP ERC20 tokens, all with just one click.

Users can also directly click the "swap" button to exchange EXP test tokens for Odyssey testnet ETH at a fixed ratio of 1:1000, without needing to bridge, configure RPCs, or deposit ETH in advance as gas fees. The reverse is also true.

Ithaca's Next Steps

Ithaca states that its future plan is to help other L2s accelerate the adoption of cutting-edge technology, a task that has already begun in collaboration with many companies such as Paradigm, Optimism, Uniswap, Conduit, Flashbots, Succinct, and Base.

Some of this work will be done by Ithaca, while most will drive innovation for others, such as existing collaborators or the broader crypto ecosystem.

Some broader areas of focus for Ithaca include:

• Wallet endgame: What ideal features should wallets have? How to operate from entry, bridging, swapping, signature aggregation, account recovery, light client verification, etc.?

• Accelerating the decentralization of the second phase roadmap of OP Stack, making every rollup a ZK rollup.

• Improving MEV market structure using TEE and other emerging technologies.

• Deploying cutting-edge crypto technologies and supporting crypto applications: zkPassport, FHE, zkEmail, TLS Notary, etc.

• Ecosystem-wide interoperability and privacy standards.

• Experimental EIPs aimed at cutting-edge researchers and developers: surprise us!

• Innovations at the VM layer using parallelization, compiled bytecode, block-level access lists, new EOF versions, and smart contracts using RISC-V ISA.

• A new gas cost structure supported by rigorous data-driven benchmarking (e.g., multidimensional gas).

• High-performance systems engineering dedicated to breaking through the gigagas per second barrier with new national states (e.g., verkle tries), databases, networks, and consensus.

Appendix: How to try ODYSSEY?

The small image is the complete Conduit dashboard for Odyssey:

Some information is as follows:

RPC: https://odyssey.ithaca.xyz

WS: wss://odyssey.ithaca.xyz

Block Explorer: https://odyssey-explorer.ithaca.xyz/

Chain ID: 911867

Throughput and Latency: 33 megagas/s

Gas Limit: 200,000,000 gas

Elasticity Factor: 6

Block Time: 1 second

Gas Asset: ETH

Withdrawal Duration: 1 second

You can use Conduit's SuperBridge (https://odyssey-fba0638ec5f46615.testnets.rollbridge.app/) for bridging;

Or send Sepolia ETH to the Canonical Bridge contract via wallet: 0x9228665c0D8f9Fc36843572bE50B716B81e042BA

Or via CLI:

cast send 0x9228665c0D8f9Fc36843572bE50B716B81e042BA \

--value 0.1ether \

--private-key \

--rpc-url

How to develop using OdysseyEIP?

Ithaca states that it provides examples and tutorials on its Github page for integrating with each feature set using anvil --odyssey for local testing:

• A simple example of EIP-7702: Demonstrates how EIP-7702 transactions work.

• Delegating accounts to p256 keys: Describes how EIP-7702 + EIP-7212 enables the ability to sign messages using P256 keys.

• BLS Multisig: A deep dive into implementing multisignatures based on BLS signatures validated through the precompiled contract of EIP-2537.

• EOF: Instructions on how to deploy and check contracts in the new EOF format.