GM! It's been another exciting week in web3. Welcome to your Monday digest, and here's what we'll cover:

• Arbitrum One fully migrates to Arbitrum Nitro

• Stu from Block Doc: A Mathematical Introduction to ZK Proofs

• U.K. crypto firms must now report sanctions breaches, freeze accounts

• New and improved site performance

Sarah at Layer3

Your Web3 Briefing 📝

An analysis of what you missed in web3 over the past week

Arbitrum One fully migrates to Nitro Stack

Arbitrum, an Ethereum L2, has officially migrated to Nitro, a faster and upgraded version of Arbitrum One mainnet.

After the "Arbitrum Odyssey" was put on hold earlier this summer for causing network congestion and higher-than-normal gas fees, Arbitrum announced that they would wait to resume Odyssey until after migrating to the Nitro stack.

The Odyssey was originally held on a platform that would provide commemorative NFTs for completing certain actions on the L2, much like Bounties on Layer3. A few have speculated that the Odyssey will continue, though Arbitrum has made no official announcement since launching on Nitro that this will the case.

Nevertheless, Nitro's launch has invigorated a wave of heightened interest and total value locked (TVL) in the L2, with many praising its much faster transaction speeds and overall smoothness.

To celebrate Arbitrum's Nitro launch, we're launching Nitro Bounties all week! Maximize your Arbitrum exposure and discover what Nitro has to offer today:

Sarah's Recommended Reads: A Mathematical Introduction to ZK-Proofs

Welcome to Sarah's Recommended Reads! Here, I'll be summarizing well-written articles or threads by web3 thinkers and builders that you should know about.

Up today is Stu (@gryptooo) on Zero-knowledge proofs. I'm no mathematician, but Zero-knowledge proofs (also known as ZK-proofs) are an essential element of crypto architecture that I've always wanted to learn about. They're used in Ethereum ZK-rollups, a type of scaling solution that helps make Ethereum faster and able to handle more transactions.

In the cryptography world, ZK-proofs are a type of problem where one must provide mutually distrustful parties with a means to reveal “predetermined pieces of information." Most cryptographic protocols deal with situations in which the parties trust each other. What about situations where the parties do not?

Stu explains it to me like I'm 5, but also makes me feel like I'm actually learning something about math along the way. He also includes interesting background on what a "proof" actually entails, proof definitions, and ZK mental models.

A slightly challenging read, but worth it for anyone wanting to expand their cryptographic knowledge.

Read more about ZK-proofs in his Substack here!

What else you should know

• UK crypto firms must now report sanctions breaches, freeze accounts

• Aave stops loaning $ETH ahead of The Merge

• Trezor to work with Wasabi on making Bitcoin more private

• Binance to stop listing USDC, will consolidate competing stablecoins into BUSD

What we've been BUIDLing 🏗️

In the past few weeks, we've been busy focusing on performance upgrades and making our site smoother for our Bounty Hunters. Here are just a few of the changes we've made:

• Migrated our site from Vercel to increase user capacity

• Created a "Hold POAP" bounty action

• Optimized backend to handle high # of DB requests

• Upgraded Ethers.js

• Fixed WalletConnect issues

We also launched our first Contest with an NFT reward and received some awesome submissions from the Layer3 community! Take a look at our "Everyone is a Curator" Contest below:

If you haven't checked out our new and improved site, try it out now:

🛣️ Stay up to speed on what we're building: Take a look at our roadmap to see what we've been cooking at Layer3, and a preview of what’s to come.

🚢 And if you want to help decide what we ship next: You can submit a feature request here and vote on your favorites! Some top community requests have already made it onto our roadmap.

Web3 101: Cosmos💡

Each week we’ll cover an essential web3 concept in simple terms. This week we’re looking at Cosmos Blockchain ✨

What is Cosmos?

Cosmos is also known as the "internet of blockchains." Anyone can create their own application-specific blockchain on Cosmos, and communicate with other blockchains using its IBC (Inter-Blockchain Communication) protocol.

How does Cosmos work?

There are currently more than 262 apps and services in the Cosmos network. Using Cosmos' IBC and base application components, developers can build entirely autonomous application-specific blockchains that can easily interconnect.

How can I start using Cosmos?

To start using Cosmos, you'll need a Cosmos-specific wallet like Keplr. The native currency for Cosmos is $ATOM, so you'll also need to acquire some of it before exploring its 260+ apps and services.

Layer3 isn't on Cosmos just yet, but why not explore the potential of other Layer1 blockchains via Bounties?

Thanks for reading!

Join our Discord and follow us on Twitter to stay up-to-date on the latest Bounties, communities, and more!

That's all for this week! Until next time, frens.

Cheers,

Sarah at Layer3

Let us know how we did👇

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