Sovereign: Providing development tools for Rollup to make blockchain applications more scalable.

Sovereign Labs recently completed a round of financing. The company is developing a software development kit called Sovereign SDK, aimed at helping developers create secure and interoperable zero-knowledge rollups. The goal of this project is to establish an open and interconnected rollup ecosystem that allows all developers to deploy rollups that are seamlessly interoperable and scalable, and run on various Blockchains.

Current Challenges in Blockchain Application Expansion

Currently, there are three main ways to scale blockchain applications: dedicated L1 public chains, optimistic rollups, and zk-rollups. Although dedicated L1 public chains are easy to design and deploy, they require significant funding to recruit and incentivize validators, which limits their applicability.

Optimistic rollups lower the development threshold for application chains, but due to their reliance on fraud proof mechanisms, there is a longer finality delay, making cross-chain operations slow and expensive. This forces developers to make a difficult choice between building a dedicated rollup and a general rollup, both of which have obvious flaws.

In contrast, zk-rollups are considered a more promising scaling solution. They retain the advantages of optimistic rollups while significantly reducing transaction confirmation times. However, building zk-rollups is still a complex task that requires highly specialized cryptographic knowledge and long-term investment.

Sovereign SDK Solution

The Sovereign SDK aims to simplify the development process of zk-rollups, similar to the contribution of the Cosmos SDK to L1 public chain development. It provides commonly used foundational components of blockchain, such as p2p networks, databases, and RPC nodes, allowing developers to focus on the business logic of their applications. Additionally, the SDK includes several default modules that operate efficiently in zero-knowledge environments, such as token deployment, data storage verification, and bridging modules.

Most importantly, the Sovereign SDK will be the first rollup framework that shields complex zero-knowledge details. Developers do not need to become cryptography experts; they can simply write applications using common programming languages like Rust (with potential future support for C++) and the SDK will automatically compile them into an efficient zk virtual machine.

Main Features of Sovereign SDK

1. Seamless interoperability: Utilizing a new bridging technology based on proof aggregation to achieve efficient and secure bridging between Sovereign SDK rollups on shared L1.

2. Security and Scalability: Each component is optimized for the use cases of zk-rollups, providing excellent performance by default. Leveraging advancements in parallel technology, proof generation time can be reduced to a few seconds.

3. Cross-chain compatibility: Sovereign SDK rollups can run on any Blockchain, as they delegate the responsibility of proof verification to the end users, rather than the underlying L1 public chain.

Project Development Roadmap

The development plan for the Sovereign SDK is divided into three phases:

1. Research Phase (In Progress): Design core components and APIs, develop research prototypes. Expected to be completed in the second quarter of 2023.

2. Initial Deployment Phase: Deploy basic network infrastructure, core API, and default modules.

3. Hardening Stage: Conduct code optimization, testing, and auditing, while developing the first practical application case of the SDK. This stage is expected to last about six months, after which the SDK will officially launch on the mainnet.

Sovereign Labs' vision is to enable blockchain technology to support billions of users. To this end, they are committed to lowering the barriers to the use of zero-knowledge technology, allowing ordinary developers to easily build rollups. At the same time, they emphasize that they will not sacrifice the verifiability of end users and promise to keep the SDK completely free and open source, building each technical component to the highest standards.