Optimism RetroPGF Round 2 Nominations

Quick Take

• Ethereum’s KZG Ceremony is now live.
• MetaMask adds liquid staking to its portfolio dapp.
• Polygon depreciates its initial zkEVM public testnet.
• OP RetroPFG Round 2 nominations open next week.

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Optimism Highlights 🔴✨

Optimism RetroPGF Round 2 Nominations
Nominations for Optimism’s second RetroPGF round open next week on January 17th. Users can nominate a project or person for funding until January 31st. A group of 90 selected Optimism community members who receive a voting badge will then vote for nominated projects starting in February. A total of 10 million $OP tokens are set to be distributed to projects as part of RetroPGF Round 2.

Ethereum KZG Ceremony Goes Live

Ethereum’s KZG Ceremony is now live. The KZG Ceremony, or trusted setup, is an exercise that collects entropy from contributors and uses it to generate a final output known as a structured reference string (SRS). The SRS is used as part of the commitment scheme that is required for proto-danksharding EIP-4844. Once implemented, proto-danksharding will introduce temporary calldata storage, enabling lower transaction fees for rollups that use L1 for data availability. Anyone with an active Ethereum wallet or GitHub account with an established history can participate in the ceremony, which is open for the next 58 days. To participate, a contributor enters a random number into one of the ceremony interfaces and submits a participation request to the Sequencer. The Sequencer will then send the "Powers of Tau" data. A contributor’s computer will mix their random number into the Powers of Tau and send it back to the Sequencer for verification.

BRØK Cap Table Solution Built On Arbitrum

Symfoni Protocol founder Jon Ramvi announced new developments for BRØK, a solution made for the Norwegian Government to test on-chain cap tables. According to Ramvi, company shareholder information is considered public in the county and must be made available to anyone upon request. A BRØK demo and SDK have now been released. The platform is being built on Arbitrum for its scalable and low-cost transactions. Stock shares are also represented using the ERC-1400 security token standard. Ramvi first introduced BRØK in 2022, however, no official documents have been published by the Norwegian Government.

MetaMask Portfolio Dapp Supports ETH Staking

MetaMask now supports liquid ETH staking on its Portfolio Dapp. The integration includes a direct connection to Lido and Rocket Pool smart contracts. Liquid staking tokens represent ether staked on the Beacon Chain and earn a share of the staking rewards. Pooled assets are used to spin up validators on behalf of users. rETH, the liquid staking token for Rocket Pool, is temporarily unavailable on MetaMask since Rocket Pool’s deposit contract is currently at capacity. Lido’s stETH token is rebasing whereas rETH accrues value. Users can currently earn upwards of 5% APY on staked ether. MetaMask Staking is currently in a beta phase.

Polygon Depreciates Initial zkEVM Public Testnet

The initial Polygon zkEVM testnet is now deprecated. The initial testnet reached 86,142 transactions from over 20,000 wallets. Polygon’s second zkEVM public testnet has been live since December and marks the final public testnet ahead of a mainnet release. Polygon plans to release its zkEVM to mainnet by the end of Q1. The latest zkEVM public testnet features aggregation, recursion, and batch size improvements. The upgrades allow for higher gas throughput to fit within a batch. According to Polygon, transaction fees are currently less than $0.04 on its implementation. Polygon zkEVM aims to achieve bytecode-level compatibility with Ethereum.