The Gibraltar Testnet, Espresso System’s fourth testnet launch, is now publicly available to Arbitrum developers.
The blockchain scaling and infrastructure company is known for its decentralized sequencer solution.
Sequencers are responsible for processing and organizing transactions from a mempool into blocks that are then sent to a virtual machine. They can be compared to validators on monolithic blockchains or layer 1 networks, and play an important role in securing the network.
The problem with sequencers today is that many rollups use their own sequencers with their own execution environments, and zero-knowledge solutions use their own provers. Thai introduces trust assumptions and centralization concerns – which many argue are at odds with crypto.
Espresso’s solution to this problem lies in its shared sequencer network – a distributed consensus system shared between rollups – which has already been integrated via testnets with Optimism, Cartesi and Polygon zkEVM.
Read more: First shared sequencer technology to go live on the Polygon zkEVM testnet
Ian Sagstetter, the community and marketing lead at Espresso, told Blockworks that this latest Arbitrum stack integration via Gibraltar will allow users to submit transactions for rollups between the different networks using the Espresso sequencer.
“It also paves the way for enabling improved interoperability between rollups, as shared sequencing can provide better atomicity guarantees and economically secure pre-confirmations compared to cross-chain transaction rollups that do not share a sequencer,” Sagstetter said.
This will not be the first time that Espresso Systems has collaborated with Arbitrum. It previously worked with Offchain Labs, the infrastructure team behind Arbitrum, to develop a roadmap for transaction ordering technology Timeboost.
Read more: Offchain Labs and Espresso Systems collaborate on transactional ordering technology
In addition to allowing Arbitrum developers to test their dapps using the shared sequencer network, the Gibraltar testnet will also allow remote node operators to manage the network for the first time.
These remote nodes will be managed by the Blockdaemon team, which told Blockworks that this infrastructure will support “hyperscaling and seamless interoperability across the Ethereum ecosystem.”
As part of the release, Caldera and AltLayer, protocols that facilitate the deployment of rollup solutions, will also ensure that any rollup deployed on Gibraltar will be fully integrated with Espress’s shared sequencer network.
“Shared sequencing will be a huge enabler for rollup interoperability and decentralization, and it’s great to see Espresso Systems leading the way in making this a reality,” said Matt Katz, CEO of Caldera. “We are excited to support the Espresso Sequencer by deploying numerous rollups integrated with the shared sequencer.”
Espresso Systems isn’t the only team currently building a shared sequencing network. Astria is another team hoping to enable developers to implement censorship-resistant rollups, although much of their work is focused on bootstrapping Celestia’s rollup ecosystem.
Josh Bowen, Astria’s co-founder, told Blockworks in an interview that Astria has not put resources into supporting alternative data availability layers and has no plans to do so in the near future.
“Overall, the project has been a very Celestia-focused project from day one,” Bowen said. The decision to focus solely on the Celestia ecosystem was made by Bowen, one of the first employees at Celestia.
Read more: Celestia, the first modular data availability network, launches on Mainnet
“Celestia is very much trying to increase growth, they have a goal they want to work towards – with one gigabyte blocks they want to maximize the throughput you can get in a theoretical network, and that appeals to me, and has been very . drove on to Astria,” he said.
The Espresso sequencer works with several established layer-2 solutions on Ethereum. Bowen, on the other hand, notes that Astria’s shared sequencer work focuses on a different aspect. It aims to provide developers with the opportunity to take advantage of the abundant block space available on Celestia.
“What we essentially see as Astria’s goal is to provide all the developer tools necessary to enable people to build rollups on top of Celestia,” he said.
