Scott Sunarto Built a Toy L2

My guest today is Scott Sunarto. Scott is the founder of Argus Labs, a decentralized gaming company. He was contributor to Dark Forest.

On this episode, Scott joins me to discuss his Cookie Clicker Rollup, a toy L2 he built to better understand and demonstrate the architecture of optimistic rollups. We discuss optimistic and zk rollups, censorship resistance, offchain execution, sovereignty, the spectrum of EVM equivalence, and much more. If you're interested in learning more about L2 architecture from first principles, this episode is for you.

My thanks to FirstMate who provided the recording studio for today's episode. If you're creating NFTs and want to run your own branded secondary market that aggregates listings across all NFT marketplaces and enforces NFT secondary royalties, check out FirstMate at firstmate.xyz.

Links

• Guest: @smsunarto
• Hosted by @nnnnicholas
• NeverEnding Game - a16z
• OPStack Bedrock
• Starknet: What are Storage Proofs
• Verifying Ethereum Smart Contract State with Proof - Leo Zhang
• The Open Problems of Onchain Games - Charlie Noyes & Doug Feagin
• Brandon Gomes
• l2beat
• Vitalik's An Incomplete Guide to Rollups
• Vitalik's The different types of ZK-EVMs
• Pete Horne's 4th energy
• barrywhitehat
• Scott’s research day talk "How I Learned to Stop Worrying & Love Execution Sharding" Introducing World Engine by Argus
• Argus’s Agar.io game (private beta, ask Scott)

Chapters

(00:00:00) Intro (00:01:30) Interview start: Scott in Jakarta for Argus (00:03:15) A Toy L2: Cookie Clicker Rollup (00:08:00) What is an L2? (00:12:25) Sovereign rollups & fraud proofs (00:14:30) What happens when there’s a fraud proof? (00:16:40) Cascading rollbacks & bridges (00:21:10) Verifying with ZK (00:25:25) Finality and Instant finality (00:27:45) Can you verify L1 rollup state roots before the fraud proof period (00:29:45) Cookie clicker rollup: architecture (00:33:00) Nicholas attempts to make Cookie clicker clicks tradable (00:35:00) Proof systems (00:36:20) Data AvaIlability (00:38:00) Validiums and data availability committees (00:41:00) L2 Calldata posted to L1 (00:47:50) Proving systems are too opaque (00:48:00) EIP-4844 and data availability (00:50:00) Cost of proving should be public (00:52:40) Cookie clicker block step by step (00:57:40) What happens in a Fraud Proof? (01:01:00) L1 trapdoor forcing rollback of soft confirmed L2 txs (01:03:00) Red Team: Hypothetical attacks on L2s (and dapps) today (01:06:40) Cookie clicker’s fraud proof (01:09:30) Gas attacks on fraud proofs and Interactive verification game (01:11:20) Single shot fraud proof (01:17:55) Specialized settlement layer L1 could support gasless fraud proofing to enable Single shot fraud proofing (01:19:45) L2 Specificity: EVM Equivalence vs Prover performance spectrum (01:25:00) Argus’s World Engine Game Shards (01:30:00) World Engine is like a shared sequencer — multiple execution layers share one sequencer (01:36:30) Argus is building game engine and games (01:40:40) World Engine game UX: embedded chain native AA wallets (01:43:40) Realtime interaction AA Bundler signature batching (01:46:45) L2 gaming scene: Argus, 0xParc Autonomous Worlds, and Lattice (01:49:30) Try today: Primodium, SkyStrife (01:50:35) Outro