Author: 0xjs@Jinse Finance
Although there have been N Ethereum L2s, new major players are still constantly entering the Ethereum L2 battlefield.
On October 9, 2024, Uniswap announced that it will develop its own L2 Unichain. On the same day, Paradigm announced an investment of $20 million in Ithaca, which has already launched the L2 testnet Odyssey.
It is worth noting that Ithaca and Odyssey can be said to be developed by Paradigm itself. Paradigm CTO and general partner Georgios will lead the Ithaca team as CEO, and Paradigm founder Matt Huang will also join the Ithaca team and serve as chairman of Ithaca.
What is Paradigm pushing Ithaca to do
According to the Ithaca website, Ithaca is a company aimed at accelerating the frontier of crypto technology. Ithaca believes that crypto technology must develop faster, and has raised $20 million to accelerate the development of the entire stack of crypto.
Ithaca says its first step is Odyssey. Odyssey is an open-source L2 testnet from the future, built with Reth, OP Stack and Conduit.
Ithaca also says that building Odyssey is to drive innovation in a broader infrastructure ecosystem, and plans to redeploy new features frequently, calling them Chapters. Each Odyssey chapter is like a development network, with new features being launched, with a limited duration, and no state will be maintained between chapters.
Ithaca also announced that Odyssey Chapter 1 has been launched on the Sepolia testnet.
What is Paradigm pushing Ithaca to do? Ithaca says bluntly that "Crypto must go faster", with the goal of helping other L2s accelerate the adoption of frontier technologies. This move is seen by industry insiders as "holding developers hostage to rule the lords".
Why is this said? Take a look at Odyssey Chapter 1.
What is Odyssey Chapter 1 like
Odyssey Chapter 1 has the following features:
Achieve high performance, stability and scalability through the Reth SDK
New features of the two upcoming Ethereum upgrades Pectra and Fusaka, currently including: EOF, EIP-7702, EIP-2537, RIP-7212.
Frictionless entry into L2, users don't need to understand custom RPCs, bridge ETH or browser extensions.
RETH SDK: Achieving High Performance, Stability and Scalability
Odyssey is built using the Reth SDK. Paradigm's Reth is high-performance, stable and scalable. Reth is not an L1 node or an L2 node, but a library for building high-performance, stable and scalable crypto services, which can be called the Reth SDK, which allows Ithaca to launch Odyssey with a small team at a record speed.
The Reth SDK can bring the following to Odyssey:
Inherits Reth's high throughput and low write latency.
Inherits Reth's fast archiving nodes and RPC read capabilities.
It inherits Reth's stability by sharing the same code running on the Ethereum mainnet.
Due to Reth's scalability, it is very simple,
Odyssey's target is 33 million Gas per second (200 million Gas in OP Stack, with an elasticity coefficient of 6), with a block time of 1 second, and Ithaca plans to increase its target Gas to 1 billion per second going forward. Ithaca also plans to collaborate with the ecosystem to launch new frontier features.
Paradigm says it is very excited to continue pushing the frontier of crypto infrastructure in the coming months, and the Reth SDK is an important tool to achieve this goal.
Experience the features of Ethereum's upcoming upgrades PECTRA and FUSAKA in advance
The next two upgrades to the Ethereum network are Pectra and Fusaka, which will bring many exciting new features to the Ethereum mainnet. But developers don't have to wait until these features are live on the mainnet to start building and testing them.
Paradigm says it has implemented and tested many EIPs in Reth's Pectra and Fusaka, and has released them in Odyssey Chapter 1 for developers to use for building.
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 behave 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, enabling safer, more efficient, and more developer-friendly smart contracts. EOF in particular makes smart contracts more gas-efficient, easier to statically analyze, and eliminates the notorious "Stack too Deep" error in Solidity.
EIP-2537: Implements precompiles for BLS12-381, to enable efficient 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 precompiles for the secp256r1 elliptic curve, which is widely used in protocols like Apple Secure Enclave and WebAuthn. This curve allows users to securely store private keys in hardware modules and use biometric authentication to sign messages. The precompiles can directly and efficiently verify these signatures on-chain, reducing gas costs by up to 50x compared to traditional methods without the precompiles. This is already available on most OP Stack chains, but has not yet seen widespread use.
Frictionless entry into L2
By using EIP-7702, RIP-7212 and the new EIP-5792 wallet_RPC namespace (allowing sequencers to sponsor transactions), Odyssey allows users to enter the Odyssey L2 testnet without installing a wallet, without having gas tokens, without interacting with a bridge, and without setting up a new RPC. This applies across devices and applications, leveraging the user's operating system's keychain or password manager.
Ithaca provides an example on its website. In the example provided on the website, you can simply click "Create" without a browser extension or embedded wallet, and create a smart contract wallet supported by a PassKey signer with test network tokens (note: requires a device that supports PassKey). It uses EIP-7702 and RIP-7212 to send sponsored transactions to mint 100 experimental EXP ERC20 tokens, all in a single click.
You can also directly click the "swap" button to swap EXP test tokens for Odyssey testnet ETH at a fixed 1:1000 ratio, without bridging, without configuring RPC, and without pre-depositing ETH for gas fees. The reverse is also true.
Ithaca's next plan
Ithaca says its future plan is to help other L2s accelerate the adoption of frontier technologies, and this work has already started in Paradigm's collaborations with Optimism, Uniswap, Conduit, Flashbots, Succinct, Base and many other companies.
Some of this work will be done by Ithaca, and most of it will drive the innovation work of others, such as existing collaborators or the broader crypto ecosystem.
Some of the broader areas Ithaca is focused on include:
Wallet Endgame: What should be the ideal functions of a wallet? How to operate from entry, bridging, swapping, signature aggregation, account recovery, light client verification, etc.?
Accelerate the decentralization of the second phase of the OP Stack roadmap, making each rollup a zk rollup.
Use TEE and other emerging technologies to improve the market structure of the MEV market.
Deploy frontier crypto technologies and crypto-supporting applications: zkPassport, FHE, zkEmail, TLS Notary, etc.
Ecosystem-wide interoperability and privacy standards.
Experimental EIPs for frontier researchers and developers: Surprise us!
Innovations at the VM layer through parallelization, bytecode compilation, block-level access lists, new EOF versions, smart contracts using the RISC-V ISA.
New gas cost structures (e.g. multi-dimensional gas) supported by rigorous data-driven benchmarking.
High-performance systems engineering to break through the 1 gigagas per second barrier through new state (e.g. verkle tries), databases, networks and consensus.
Appendix: How to try Odyssey?
The small image is the complete Conduit dashboard of 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 Coefficient: 6
Block Time: 1 second
Gas Asset: ETH
Withdrawal Time: 1 second
You can use Conduit's SuperBridge (https://odyssey-fba0638ec5f46615.testnets.rollbridge.app/) for bridging integration;
Or send Sepolia ETH to the Canonical Bridge contract: 0x9228665c0D8f9Fc36843572bE50B716B81e042BA via wallet
Or via CLI:
cast send 0x9228665c0D8f9Fc36843572bE50B716B81e042BA \
--value 0.1ether \
--private-key \
--rpc-url
How to develop with OdysseyEIP?
Ithaca states that it provides examples and walkthroughs on how to integrate with each feature set on its Github page: anvil --odyssey, for local testing:
Simple example of EIP-7702: Demonstrates how EIP-7702 transactions work.
Delegate account to p256 key: Describes how EIP-7702+EIP-7212 provide the ability to sign messages using P256 keys.
BLS Multisig: Deeply demonstrates how to implement multisig based on BLS signatures verified through EIP-2537 precompiles.
EOF: Instructions on how to deploy and inspect contracts in the new EOF format.
