Round 3: Doubleup to Rollup

Clr.fund Round 3 launched on Jan 9th, it’s been going for a few weeks already, so this post is a little late.

Sorry ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Round 3 marks the start of our plan to start scaling clr.fund, both in terms of the matching pool and the number of contributors. Our plans had always been to take clr.fund back to mainnet after our first few test rounds on xDai. While we’re confident we could scale the matching pool on mainnet, the gas costs to participate as a contributor, and to process the contributions, make mainnet uninhabitable for clr.fund currently.

Rollups to the rescue!

In October last year, Vitalik posted a rollup-centric ethereum roadmap, detailing a vision for an ecosystem of rollup-based layer 2 networks that extend the capacity of the Ethereum network without significantly changing the underlying trust assumptions for users.

Because of MACI’s huge gas consumption, it was obvious that we needed to run clr.fund somewhere that gas prices were less of an issue. Rollups are the natural choice, but not wanting to wait until an EVM compatible rollup was ready before we started running rounds, we settled on xDai as the temporary home for clr.fund. We’ve been really happy with the xDai network and the support of their community, and we hope the xDai instance of clr.fund can live on to fund xDai public goods.

But for the canonical instance of clr.fund, we now have our sights set on a rollup. Exactly which rollup is as-of-yet undecided. The two likely networks are Arbitrum or Optimism, and it will likely come down to which is live first, with a bridge back to mainnet so our contracts can read from our Kleros TCR on mainnet.

While we wait for the right rollup solution to be ready, we’re continuing to run funding rounds on xDai and plan to double the matching pool each round until we migrate. Rounds will run once per month, starting with round 3, which has a matching pool of ~2,000 wxDai and is already live!

If you know of any Ethereum public goods projects in need of funding, you can permissionlessly add them to our Kleros Curate TCR. To learn more about or contribute to clr.fund, check out our constitution and join our forum or telegram.