Sovereign: Provides a development toolkit for Rollup, simplifying zk-SNARKs applications.

Sovereign Labs recently completed a $7.4 million seed round financing, with the company valued at eight figures. The project is developing a software development kit (SDK), aimed at helping developers create secure and interoperable zk-SNARKs rollups.

Sovereign aims to build an open and interconnected rollup ecosystem that enables all developers to deploy seamlessly interoperable and scalable rollups that can run on various blockchains. The Sovereign SDK will become the easiest framework for creating secure and interoperable sovereign zk-rollups.

The Challenges of Blockchain Scalability

Currently, there are three main ways to scale blockchain applications: dedicated application L1 public chains, optimistic rollups, and zk-rollups.

Dedicated L1 public chains are easy to design and deploy, but they require a large amount of funding to recruit validators, making them suitable only for a few applications with abundant resources. Optimistic rollups, while lowering the development threshold for application chains, suffer from long finality delays, slow bridging speeds, and high costs.

In contrast, zk-rollups are considered a more ideal scaling solution. They retain the advantages of optimistic rollups while avoiding long finality delays. However, building zk-rollups remains a complex task that requires long-term investment from specialized cryptographic engineers.

Features of Sovereign SDK

The Sovereign SDK aims to simplify the development process of zk-rollups, offering the following features:

1. Seamless interoperability: Achieve efficient bridging between Sovereign SDK rollups on shared L1 using a new type of bridging technology based on proof aggregation.

2. Security and Scalability: Each component is optimized for the zk-rollups scenario, providing excellent performance by default.

3. Cross-chain compatibility: Sovereign SDK rollups can run on any blockchain, unrestricted by the underlying L1 public chain.

4. Development convenience: Developers do not need to become cryptography experts; they only need to use common programming languages like Rust to write applications.

Project Roadmap

The development of the Sovereign SDK is divided into three phases:

1. Research Phase (In Progress): Design the default storage module, encryption economic model, and core API, and develop the research prototype.

2. Preliminary Deployment Phase: Conduct remaining research in parallel, deploy the p2p network, RPC nodes, core APIs, as well as the default storage and sorting modules.

3. Hardening Phase: Conduct code cleanup, testing, fuzz testing, and auditing, and develop the first use case of the SDK.

Sovereign Labs' vision is to make blockchain technology serve billions of users. To achieve this goal, they are committed to lowering the application threshold of zk-SNARKs while maintaining verifiability for end users. The Sovereign SDK will remain completely free and open source, and each technical component will be built to the highest standards.