ChainCatcher news, according to official sources, the Rollup-as-a-Service platform Caldera has announced the establishment of the Caldera Foundation, dedicated to promoting the decentralization of the Metalayer and Caldera networks and the expansion of their ecosystem.Currently, the Caldera ecosystem has locked a total value of over $750 million across 25+ blockchains, with nearly 300 million transactions completed.

ChainCatcher news, Ethereum Rollup deployment platform Caldera acquires Hook. This strategic acquisition brings Hook's team into Caldera's one-click Rollup platform, thereby driving product development. Hook is the development team behind Hook Odyssey, a perpetual futures Rollup focused on memecoins and NFTs.The addition of the Hook team brings Caldera's employee count to 20, distributed across the Americas, Europe, and Asia.

ChainCatcher message, Ethereum Rollup deployment platform Caldera posted on X: "We have noticed that scammers are creating and promoting counterfeit Caldera tokens on BSC. Please be aware that the official token has not been launched yet, and do not purchase or interact with this fraudulent token."

ChainCatcher news, according to CoinDesk, the Bitcoin rollup project Citrea has announced the completion of a $14 million Series A funding round, led by Peter Thiel's Founders Fund, with participation from angel investors such as Erik Voorhees and Balaji Srinivasan. Citrea aims to leverage zero-knowledge (ZK) technology to transform Bitcoin into a programmable asset, introducing Ethereum-like smart contract functionality.Citrea adopts the BitVM computing model, making it compatible with the Ethereum Virtual Machine, allowing applications on Ethereum to be deployed on Citrea without modification.According to RootData, Citrea is a ZK rollup for Bitcoin and also serves as an execution layer based on Bitcoin. Every transaction that occurs on Citrea is fully protected by zero-knowledge proofs and verified through BitVM.

ChainCatcher news, the Rollup-as-a-Service platform Gelato has completed a $11 million Series A+ funding round, led by Hack VC, with participation from Animoca Brands, IOSG Ventures, and Bloccelerate VC. The latest funding round brings Gelato's total funding to $23.2 million.The new funds will be used to expand its team and services to support more enterprise-level blockchain projects.Gelato aims to simplify the creation and management of Rollup integration, streamlining the way web3 applications and ecosystems are built and scaled.

ChainCatcher news, the Web3 industry research and analysis platform Web3Caff Research recently released an in-depth report on the Based Rollup track. Web3Caff Research researcher Wildon pointed out in the report that with the development of blockchain technology and the surge in market demand, Ethereum is gradually unable to handle the massive transaction volume.As a result, the concept of Rollup emerged, separating transaction execution from the mainnet and moving it off-chain for computation, thereby alleviating the computational burden on the mainnet. This is currently the main solution to Ethereum's scalability issues. In the thriving Rollup ecosystem, Optimistic Rollup and ZK Rollup are the two main factions.However, whether it is Optimistic Rollup or ZK Rollup, although they effectively improve transaction processing speed, they also have limitations in terms of security, MEV, decentralization, latency, and computational costs. In light of this, Ethereum researcher Justin Drake proposed the concept of Based Rollup in May 2023, where the mainnet takes on the role of the Rollup sequencer, allowing Rollup to inherit more characteristics of the mainnet in an attempt to break through the dilemmas it faces. The report further points out that while Based Rollup has advantages such as decentralization, enhanced security, and simplified architecture, it also carries inherent issues.

ChainCatcher message, the Ethereum Layer 2 network Base has currently become the Rollup with the highest total locked value.According to data from DeFiLlama, Base's TVL is $2.49 billion, distributed across 366 protocols, slightly higher than Arbitrum's $2.39 billion TVL. A significant portion of Base's TVL comes from the decentralized exchange Aerodrome, which has deposits exceeding $1.3 billion.In addition, in terms of TVL, Base now ranks among the top five blockchain networks, following L1 chains such as Ethereum, Tron, Solana, and BNB Chain.

ChainCatcher news, Ethereum co-founder Vitalik made a presentation on "The Future Development Direction of L2 Scalability" at the RollUp day event, where he mentioned: "The decentralized Based Rollup projects and roadmap represented by Taiko are exciting." He expressed high recognition of this.

ChainCatcher news, Vitalik Buterin tweeted emphasizing that Layer 2 (L2) technology has finally become affordable, which is key to the widespread adoption of decentralized finance (DeFi). He proposed as early as 2020 that low transaction fees are the foundation of success in the crypto industry, and this has only recently become a reality.Robert Sasu, a core engineer at MultiverseX, responded that L2 currently has low fees only in centralized situations. Vitalik disagreed with this view and pointed out that Taiko is a decentralized based rollup solution, indicating that the fees for decentralized L2s like Taiko have reached an affordable level. Sasu agreed but added that rollup-based solutions are still in the minority and hopes that more projects will migrate to this architecture.

ChainCatcher news, the identity and incentive infrastructure Layer3 officially launches the Launchpad feature, with the first project being the Rollup-as-a-Service platform Caldera. Users participating in the first Launchpad tasks can earn Caldera airdrop eligibility and an additional incentive of $100,000.Layer3 states that the Launchpad will redefine the way the crypto ecosystem is built, launched, and scaled, bridging the gap between emerging protocols and users, and creating new standards for token distribution and ecosystem expansion.It is reported that Caldera completed a $15 million Series A financing round in July this year, led by Peter Thiel's Founders Fund, with participation from Dragonfly, Sequoia Capital, and others, bringing the total funding to $25 million.

ChainCatcher news, according to the official Conduit blog, Conduit announced yesterday the launch of the brand new Conduit Marketplace, aimed at providing a one-stop integration solution for Rollup teams. The platform brings together tools from 48 partners, allowing Rollup developers to easily find, purchase, and integrate various on-chain application needs. With the "one-click integration" feature, developers can quickly add selected tools to their Rollup without leaving the Conduit platform.Previous news, the Rollup deployment platform Conduit has completed a $37 million Series A funding round, co-led by Paradigm and Haun Ventures.

ChainCatcher news, according to CoinDesk, Bitcoin developer Robin Linus proposed a theoretical method last year aimed at making the Bitcoin blockchain more programmable. Today, he has launched a second iteration called "BitVM2," which reportedly has significant improvements that bring this concept closer to real-world deployment. The project will rely on advanced cryptography and innovative design to establish a secure "bridge" that transfers Bitcoin from the main network to a secondary network known as "rollup."According to a white paper released this week by Linus and five co-authors, the basic setup involves using cryptography to compress programs into subprograms, which are then executed in Bitcoin transactions. Subsequently, these programs are "verified" in three on-chain transactions, essentially ensuring that no one is attempting to cheat or steal. According to one of the co-authors, Alexei Zamyatin, previous versions required up to 70 transactions for verification. It is reported that Alexei Zamyatin is working separately on the Bitcoin L2 network Build on Bitcoin (BOB).A key improvement in the new version is that anyone can challenge suspicious transactions, a feature known as "permissionless challenges." The original BitVM was released last October but was never truly deployed in practice, with only a fixed group of operators able to initiate challenges."This design brings us these significant improvements," Zamyatin said in a video interview, "We now have a complete and comprehensive description of the BitVM paradigm."

ChainCatcher news, the parallel Bitcoin Rollup project Nexio has completed a $2.2 million Pre-Seed funding round, led by Lattice. The funds will be used to introduce Facebook's Move virtual machine into the Bitcoin ecosystem, addressing smart contract vulnerabilities in EVM-based scaling solutions and multi-signature bridge designs, while reducing transaction costs and increasing transaction throughput.

According to ChainCatcher news, AltLayer has launched a stateless Rollup client design proposal. This design builds a stateless client using an alternative DA layer instead of Ethereum's Rollup. The stateless client needs to ensure that Rollup blocks have been published on the underlying DA layer. Once the availability of the block is confirmed, the stateless client must ensure that the state generated by the execution of transactions in that block has also been committed in the Rollup contract.