Original article: Introducing Sovereign

Compiled by: Wang Eryu, PANews

Sovereign Labs, a crypto project focused on building rollups, has completed a $7.4 million seed round of financing. This round of financing was led by Haun Ventures, with participation from Maven 11, 1KX, Robot Ventures, and Plaintext Capital. A spokesperson for the project said the financing brought the company's valuation to "eight figures." It is understood that Sovereign Labs is building a software development kit (SDK) to help developers create secure and interoperable zero-knowledge rollups. This article is an official project introduction written by Sovereign, and the PANews translation is as follows.

Sovereign is an open and interconnected rollup ecosystem. It is committed to enabling all developers to deploy rollups that are seamlessly interoperable and scalable and can run on all blockchains. This is the original intention of building the Sovereign SDK, which will be the easiest framework for creating secure and interoperable sovereign zk-rollups.

Pain point: Blockchain applications cannot scale

Monolithic L1 cannot be expanded

There are currently three main paradigms for scaling blockchain applications: application-specific L1 public chains, optimistic rollups, and zk-rollups. Application-specific L1 public chains are the easiest to design and deploy, but they have obvious flaws. Each L1 must recruit its own validators and convince them to stake enough funds to protect the blockchain from attacks. Due to the high cost of funds, this method is only suitable for a small number of well-funded applications.

Optimistic Rollups destroy composability

Rollups solves this problem by allowing developers to extend existing blockchains with new logic rather than launching new blockchains, which greatly reduces the threshold for developing application chains.

But optimistic rollups, which dominate today, are no panacea. To minimize the burden on a shared validator set, optimistic rollups rely on fraud proofs to prevent misconduct. Fraud proofs can face censorship when attacked, so optimistic rollups have long "finality delays" in which transactions are rolled back due to the emergence of fraud proofs. Bridging to optimistic rollups is therefore slow and expensive.

Optimistic rollup developers have to make a difficult decision: build rollups for narrow, specific uses that allow users to frequently bridge between blockchains? Or build general-purpose rollups that meet all of a user’s needs in one place? Neither option is good enough. Bridging between optimistic chains is too slow, too expensive, and too risky for daily use. And general-purpose optimistic rollups face many of the flaws of the monolithic L1 public chain: not only do they have their own scalability issues, but they also fail to support the full range of diverse functionality that application chains can create.

Zk-Rollups are the future

For the reasons above, we expect zk-rollups to become the dominant scaling paradigm. It has the benefits of optimistic rollups without the long finality delays. Instead of waiting days to see if a fraud proof has been created, users can be confident that a transaction has been finalized as soon as a validity proof is created (which can take just seconds).

So, if zk-rollups are a better scaling solution, why haven’t they become widely available? The reason is that actually building zk-rollups is a difficult task that requires years of work by very professional cryptography engineers.

Sovereign was born

What is the Sovereign SDK?

Sovereign SDK aims to do for zk-rollups what Cosmos SDK did for L1 public chains.

It will provide various boilerplate components usually provided by blockchains, such as p2p networks, databases, and RPC nodes, allowing builders to focus on the business logic of their own blockchains. In addition, it will provide a set of default modules that run efficiently in a zero-knowledge environment: token deployment, verified data storage, and bridge modules. Developers can integrate these primitive components into application chains, or build their own state-transition functions completely from scratch by deploying a set of standard APIs.

Moreover, Sovereign SDK will be the first rollup framework that abstracts away the complex details of zero-knowledge. To take advantage of its power, developers do not need to be cryptography experts, they only need to write applications in idiomatic Rust (or eventually C++), and the SDK will automatically compile them to an efficient zk virtual machine.

Bridging based on proof aggregation

What are the features of Sovereign SDK?

1. Sovereign SDK rollups interoperate seamlessly. We use a new bridging technology based on proof aggregation to bridge back and forth Sovereign SDK rollups on a shared L1 without the need for a trusted third party. zk-proofs enable aggregation, and rollups will be able to maintain as many bridges as possible with minimal cost. Off-chain relays aggregate proofs from all concurrent rollups into a single proof, which can then be verified on-chain. And because state transitions are proven to be valid, there is no need to pay fees to liquidity providers or wait a week for transactions to complete. Instant bridging, flawless.

2. Sovereign SDK rollups will be secure and scalable. By tailoring each component to the use case in zk-rollups, Sovereign SDK will provide excellent performance by default. Thanks to advances in parallelism, our proofs will have only seconds of latency. With the magic of zero-knowledge proofs, blockchains will be able to scale without sacrificing end-user verifiability.

3. Sovereign SDK Rollups can run on any blockchain. The SovereignSDK chain delegates the responsibility of checking proofs to the end user, not the underlying L1 public chain. That’s why they are called “sovereign” rollups, not smart contract rollups. Since the data availability layer does not need to have the ability to verify proofs, Sovereign SDK rollups can be automatically ported to any L1.

Project Progress

We are currently working hard to develop the Sovereign SDK, and the roadmap is divided into three phases.

Phase 1: Research (ongoing)

The Sovereign SDK is a work in progress. We are designing the default storage module, cryptoeconomic model, and core API. We are also developing a research prototype. The SDK will support a wide range of data availability layers and proof systems, but our current prototype integrates Celestia for data availability and Risc0 for proofs. We expect this phase to be completed around Q2 2023.

Phase 2: Initial deployment

The initial deployment of the Sovereign SDK will be carried out in parallel with the rest of the research. During this time, we will deploy the p2p network, RPC nodes, core APIs, and default storage and sorting modules.

The third stage: hardening experience

Once the SDK is fully functional, we will invest a lot of time in code cleanup, testing, fuzz testing, and auditing. At the same time, we will also develop the first use cases of the SDK. It is expected that the hardening of the initial deployment will last about six months, after which the SDK will be launched on the mainnet.

Make expansion easier

Sovereign Labs hopes to see blockchain support billions of users. To achieve this, the threshold of zero-knowledge technology must be lowered: developers no longer need to be PhDs in cryptography, and professional protocol engineers are no longer needed to build Rollups.

But infinite scalability means nothing if it comes at the expense of verifiability for end users. We can’t claim victory if building, running, or viewing the state of a blockchain still requires cooperation with a centralized entity. That’s why the Sovereign SDK will always remain completely free and open source, and we are committed to building every component of our technology structure with the highest standards of resilience. Finally, we can’t just say it, we build it in the open.