Ethereum

Helios is becoming a multichain light client for Ethereum.

Light clients are fundamental to Ethereum scaling. A future with thousands of rollups doesn’t feel far away, and the closer we get, the more critical rollup interoperability will become.

🧵👇

building open source public goods @a16zcrypto

Right now, rollup operators need to run full nodes for every chain with which they interoperate. With Helios for L2s, they can run an efficient light client instead.

We’ve started by implementing a light client for the OP Stack based on signed sequencer preconfirmations, meaning Helios can now sync on Optimism, Base, Unichain, World Chain, and anything else within the Superchain ecosystem.

The OP Stack is just the beginning. We’re going to be exploring more robust verification mechanisms, building better tooling for using Helios on the browser, mobile devices, or anywhere else we could imagine someone needing a light client.

We can’t achieve the full scale of crypto’s potential – trustless interactions between billions of people around the world – unless every user and node is able to efficiently verify their data regardless of blockchain, hardware, or internet speed.

If any of this excites you, please reach out. Whether you’re building a wallet and want a light client to support your users, work on an L2 that's in need of a light client, or are a talented engineer interested in contributing, we want to hear from you.

Check out our demo, which shows Helios syncing on Ethereum, Optimism, and Base, all from within the browser:
helios.a16zcrypto.com/demo

For the full blog post, head to:

Check out our demo, which shows Helios syncing on Ethereum, Optimism, and Base, all from within the browser:
helios.a16zcrypto.com/demo

For the full blog post, head to:
https://a16zcrypto.com/posts/article/scaling-ethereum-rollups-with-helios/

Current proposals to make rollups interoperable — such as Optimism’s Superchain and zkSync’s Elastic Chain — will rely on the existence of secure light clients for rollup operators to validate incoming cross-rollup messages scalably.

Opacity

I’m bullish as fuck on Helios 🚀

I get asked about Solana support for the /opacity all the time. Funny enough just this morning to.

Eth Light client on Solana is a simple way to open up our AVS to those users without trust me bro-ing it

Contributing to OP Labs. Come join me on the track if you’re in /austin @ atxsprint.club

Yes many things. We're pretty well connected with the team, but would love to work even closer with you all.

Hey @ncitron.eth anything we can do to from the OP Stack side to help y'all iterate faster?

is this a bit like ibc or superchain L2's?

Could light clients help event indexers when you need do an ETL process over a big amount of chains? RPC providers become a bit too expensive and full clients are sometimes a bit too cumbersome to run with many chains at the same time