China’s lockdown censorship inspired Ethereum ‘based rollup’ Taiko

At the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, China plunged its economic capital, Shanghai, into a two-month lockdown in an attempt to outlast the virus — but it also wanted to eradicate any dissent regarding its zero-COVID policies, sparking one of Ethereum’s so-called “based rollups.”

“I lived in my apartment in the Shanghai COVID shutdown. I lived in my small apartment for almost three months without going out once,” Daniel Wang, co-founder and CEO of Taiko Labs — creator of the Ethereum layer 2 based rollup Taiko — told Cointelegraph at DevCon in Bangkok.

“I felt like I wanted to say things in China, but it’s not allowed. So my first idea is to build a decentralized publishing network,” he said.

“It’s not going to be censored. Anyone can publish anything without revealing their true identity and the government cannot do anything. It’s just unstoppable.”

The idea was simple, but it had to count on a scaling solution — a problem, Wang said, as solutions at the time, like Optimism’s OP Stack and StarkWare, required signature verifications.

“They can all be shut down by someone,” he said. “Maybe not by the Chinese government, but it will be shut down by other governments, if possible — if it’s needed.”

“True freedom of speech should be empowered by some more solid technology. It’s not there,” Wang said.

He then later came to make Taiko with fellow co-founder and operating chief Terence Lam.

Taiko is a based rollup, a layer-2 chain that uses validators from a layer 1 like Ethereum to handle processing instead of its own sequencers — and it doesn’t use signature verifications.

“When we designed this based rollup, we had a single objective: to remove any central sequencer or centralized component from our rollout and make it what I call ‘ownerless,’” he said.

Wang said his goal for Taiko was to show the feasibility of based rollups — whether it’s the most used is second to demonstrating that such networks “can beat the centralized signature-based rollups.”

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“I am open to copycats — just copy my code and just improve it as long as you share your improvements with us,” he said. 

“Let’s scale Ethereum in the right way, and if Taiko happens to be a successful L2, that would be great. If Taiko is just lessons learned for future rollups, which are successful, that’s also great.”

“Let’s help each other,” Wang said. “Together, we are stronger.”

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Additional reporting by Andrew Fenton.