As we wrap up 2024, we’re reflecting on an incredible six months for our young company, 𝚝𝟷! Earlier this year, we embarked on a journey to solve Ethereum’s fragmentation challenges and bring composable scalability to Ethereum.
𝚝𝟷 is a Trusted Execution Environment (TEE) enabled rollup introducing real-time proofs and instant settlements to unify Ethereum and its rollup ecosystem.
Over the last six months, we’ve grown our team to seven, launched a private devnet, refined our protocol design and roadmap, and built our first dApp proof-of-concept: a frequent batch auction DEX running on 𝚝𝟷.
Our journey to 𝚝𝟷
We’ve been heads-down building 𝚝𝟷, but as we reflect, we realize it’s important to share more about our journeys as co-founders and why we believe we are the right team to deliver on this vision.
I co-founded Enigma (later rebranded to Secret Labs), which developed Secret Network, the first TEE-enabled L1 providing privacy-preserving smart contracts. As Chief Product Officer, I’ve been working with TEEs, exploring and building the application design space enabled by TEEs since 2018.
While we built some groundbreaking applications on Secret Network—and made mistakes along the way—the biggest frustration for me was the inability to connect meaningfully with the Ethereum ecosystem. I left Secret at the end of 2021 and took a two-year sabbatical.
When I decided to build again, I saw Flashbots’s progress with TEEs and EVM environments. What had been the missing link in my earlier work was now solved.
I conducted a research project with Flashbots to explore the application design space in DeFi that TEE-enabled EVM environments would allow. Out of personal frustration - the fact that I needed to use Centralized Exchanges to get better execution, I started exploring how to use TEEs to provide low-cost, fast transactions for Ethereum’s mainnet assets or, in other words, a scalability solution that remained composable with Ethereum L1 ecosystem and assets.
This exploration laid the foundation for 𝚝𝟷.
In this phase, I was fortunate to meet Orest, an early engineer at Scroll. At Scroll, Orest experienced firsthand how Scroll achieved scalability but struggled with composability due to zero-knowledge-proof generation latency.
Before his time at Scroll, Orest co-founded and served as Chief Technology Officer at Knit, a video calling platform, and Cara Care, a mobile health platform recently sold to Bayer. He also co-founded zkWarsaw, a community organising zero-knowledge events.
Orest's critical insights and our shared understanding of the challenges in scaling and composability brought us together to build 𝚝𝟷.
What we accomplished in 2024
After extensive discussions, we officially decided to join forces during ETHDenver.
We spent a few months refining 𝚝𝟷’s positioning and approach to addressing the rollup fragmentation issue. Over the summer, we completed our pre-seed funding round, led by a16z Crypto’s CSX program and supported by exceptional builders in the space.
Team
With money in the bank, we focused on putting together a stellar team. We’re proud to have assembled a team of exceptional individuals passionate about solving Ethereum’s most pressing scalability and composability challenges.
Our team is a blend of experienced developers and researchers with backgrounds in smart contracts, blockchain applications, and TEEs.
We have all previously worked on groundbreaking projects in the crypto space, bringing firsthand experience in launching successful protocols.
KSS is an analytical, agile, and versatile Java native who fell in love with the blockchain domain because of its complexity and constant innovation. He is an early TEE adopter, utilizing Intel SGX since its conception to implement fiat-agnostic CBDCs at Fluency. KSS was in charge of implementing compliant shielded (private) transactions on a public blockchain platform that provided special access rights to authorities. KSS has 11 years of professional experience.
Wojciech is an expert in confidential computing, specializing in the security and integrity of Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs). His career spans industry and academia, including roles at Intel and the University of Oxford. At The Blockhouse Technology Limited—a sister company of the University College Blockchain Research Centre—he has advanced TEE research, focusing on symbolic validation for SGX enclaves and innovative remote attestation protocols integrating SGX and SEV technologies. His work has been featured at prestigious conferences and in leading journals.
Diego has been at the forefront of the decentralized revolution, building on Bitcoin and Ethereum since 2016. From OpenBazaar to Ethereum, he’s bridged the gap between TradFi and DeFi, creating decentralized ETFs on Ethereum along the way. With years of experience, Diego continues to shape the future of blockchain technology.
Evan is a systems engineer who’s moved progressively lower in the stack - from building DeFi primitives at Struct Finance to designing custom VMs. At Struct Finance, Evan designed and implemented structured yield derivatives to tranche GMX and Trader Joe LP positions into fixed and variable-rate products, processing over $30M in volume. He built a comprehensive infrastructure stack, including smart contracts for yield tranching, automated vault rebalancing, and real-time data indexing via The Graph. Evan has also contributed to Paradigm’s core Ethereum infrastructure, including Reth and Foundry.
Dasha is heading our Operations and brings a wealth of experience to 𝚝𝟷, having previously worked at Kraken and Stashh Labs, a project on Secret Network. As a seasoned operations lead with a background in commercial law, Dasha builds a robust operational foundation to help 𝚝𝟷 thrive as a business.
United by our mission to unify Ethereum and its rollup ecosystem, our team combines technical expertise with a user-first mindset to deliver pragmatic and scalable solutions that elevate the Ethereum experience for everyone.
Development
Over the last few months, our team launched our first private devnet. We currently have a custom Reth environment that runs inside a TEE. Leveraging RethExEx (Reth extensions), we can send 𝚝𝟷 devnet state updates (stateRoot) and TEE proofs to a testnet (that represents Ethereum) every 12 seconds.
That means a user, Alice can use an application on 𝚝𝟷 and receive her funds in her Ethereum wallet in the next L1 block. This is a tremendous improvement over the 7-day or hour(s) long waiting time of Optimistic and ZeroKnowledge rollups, or risky third party bridges.
If you’d like to get access to our private devnet and deploy your own Solidity applications, fill out this form and we will be in touch.
In collaboration with Tokka Labs, we’ve been building T-DEX, the first application on 𝚝𝟷. T-DEX is a frequent batch auction (FBA) DEX that executes every second.
Powered by 𝚝𝟷’s real-time proving and instant settlement, T-DEX enables low-cost, low-latency asset swaps on 𝚝𝟷 while allowing users to withdraw funds back to Ethereum in a single block—maintaining full composability with the Ethereum DeFi ecosystem. Designed to be the most efficient on-chain spot EVM orderbook, T-DEX leverages standards like ERC-7683 to meet swapper demand across rollups.
T-DEX aims to improve retail LP profitability, empower market makers to offer more competitive bids and enhance execution quality for swappers. Stay tuned for more updates on T-DEX!
Research and protocol design
At CSX, we collaborated with phenomenal researchers and engineers at a16z to finalize our protocol design.
I thank Guy Wuollet, Joachim Neu and Noah Citron for their invaluable contributions. Our architecture integrates a defense-in-depth strategy, combining multiple layers of security and trust to enable a seamless transition into a fully permissionless system:
TEE-Enabled Real-Time Proving: Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs) provide verifiable computation and cryptographic proofs, ensuring integrity and security without compromising high performance.
Crypto-Economic Security via AVS: Leveraging EigenLayer’s Actively Validated Services (AVS) and restaked ETH, 𝚝𝟷 reinforces TEE security with replicated computations and consensus-backed crypto-economic guarantees. This approach paves the way for a fully permissionless TEE-enabled validator network, eliminating reliance on a centralized foundation or trusted parties to run TEEs.
Bespoke Zero-Knowledge Proofs (ZKP): While crypto-economic security offers robust protections, it has budgetary limitations. An attacker will exploit the system if an attack is more valuable than the value at stake (crypto-economic security). Our bespoke ZKP mechanism addresses this by requiring ZKP generation only when the crypto-economic security budget is nearing its limits rather than on a fixed schedule. This pragmatic approach achieves an optimal balance between trust minimization and cost efficiency.
You can read more about our architecture here.
Looking ahead to 2025
While 2024 was an incredible year, we’re just getting started. In 2025, we will launch our first testnet and mainnet, continuously advancing towards a more permissionless and credibly neutral infrastructure.
On the application side, we’ll deepen collaborations with partners to build seamless cross-chain applications that enhance the lives of Ethereum users. Improving user experience is our guiding north star— it’s what drives us forward!
None of this would be possible without our incredible team, supporters, and the Ethereum community.
Together, we’re building towards a future where scalability and composability are no longer trade-offs. Here’s to an even more impactful 2025! Stay tuned and join us on this journey:
• Follow us on Twitter
• Check out our latest blogs on our substack
• Get involved in the 𝚝𝟷 community by filling out this form
Let’s build the future of Ethereum together. 💪
Comments
Nothing yet. Say the first thing.
Sign in to join the conversation.