Launching Odyssey Testnet Chapter 1

·release

Table of Contents

Odyssey Chapter 1 is live on testnet!

Crypto needs higher performance, new bleeding-edge developer features, and seamless onboarding to unlock the next generation of applications.

To advance those goals, our team has been working closely with leading L2s and infrastructure providers like Optimism, Uniswap, Conduit, Flashbots, Succinct and Base to max out EVM performance and improve developer and user experience.

The next step in that journey is Odyssey Chapter 1, an open-source testnet Layer 2 with:

  1. High Performance, Stability, Extensibility through the Reth SDK
  2. Features from Ethereum’s Pectra and Fusaka upgrades, today: EOF, EIP-7702, EIP-2537, RIP-7212.
  3. Frictionless L2 onboarding, without the user knowing about custom RPCs, bridging ETH, or browser extensions.

Odyssey Chapter 1 is live on Sepolia and is built with Reth, the OP Stack, and deployed on Conduit.

High Performance, Stability, Extensibility through the Reth SDK

We built Reth to be performant, stable and extensible. Reth is not an L1 node, it’s not an L2 node, it’s a set of libraries for building high performance, stable and extensible crypto services. We call it the Reth SDK and is what allowed us to ship Odyssey with a small team in record-time.

What does the Reth SDK give you?

Odyssey is built with the Reth SDK which means a few things:

  1. It inherits Reth’s high throughput and low latency for writes.
  2. It inherits Reth’s fast archive node and RPC capabilities for reads.
  3. It inherits Reth’s stability due to sharing the same code that runs Ethereum mainnet.
  4. It’s extremely simple due to Reth’s extensibility, <1000 LoC of Rust; including tests.

Odyssey targets 33 megagas per second (200 megagas gas limit with an elasticity factor of 6 in OP Stack), and 1 second block time, and we plan to increase its target gas in the upcoming chapters in our journey to gigagas per second. We also plan to introduce new bleeding edge features in collaboration with the ecosystem. More soon.

We are super excited to continue pushing the frontier of crypto infrastructure in the coming months, and the Reth SDK is an essential tool for doing this.

How do I try out Odyssey?

You can view the full Conduit dashboard here. We’re also sharing the most useful links in-line:

  1. Throughput & Latency: 33megagas/s
    1. Gas Limit: 200,000,000 gas
    2. Elasticity Factor: 6
    3. Block Time: 1 second
  2. RPC: https://odyssey.ithaca.xyz
  3. Block Explorer: https://odyssey-explorer.ithaca.xyz/
  4. Gas Asset: ETH
  5. Withdrawal Period: 1 second (for you to test out the withdrawal quickly)

You can bridge in using Conduit’s SuperBridge integration, or by sending Sepolia ETH to the Canonical Bridge contract: 0x9228665c0D8f9Fc36843572bE50B716B81e042BA either via your wallet or via CLI:

cast send 0x9228665c0D8f9Fc36843572bE50B716B81e042BA \
    --value 0.1ether \
    --private-key <your private key> \
    --rpc-url <your sepolia rpc url>

Build with features from Pectra & Fusaka, today.

We are contributors to the Ethereum L1 core protocol, which typically rolls out new features once a year with hard forks. We regularly engage with the core dev process and plan to continue doing so as it is one of the most important venues of open conversation for the future of crypto.

The next two network upgrades are called Pectra and Fusaka, and they include a lot of exciting new features for Ethereum mainnet. But developers shouldn’t have to wait until these features are on mainnet to start building and testing them.

We have already implemented and tested many of the EIPs in Pectra & Fusaka in Reth, and we are releasing them on Odyssey Chapter 1 for developers to build with them today.

What are the EIPs included in Odyssey Chapter 1?

Specifically, Odyssey ships:

  • EIP-7702: Paves the way for account abstraction, which will revolutionize on-chain user experience. This EIP introduces a new transaction type, allowing Externally Owned Accounts (EOAs) to function like a smart contract. This unlocks features such as gas sponsorship, account recovery, transaction bundling or granting limited permissions to a sub-key.
  • The EVM Object Format (EOF): Represent a series of EIP’s aiming at improving the EVM. EOF introduces a versioned container format for EVM byte code, allowing for more secure, efficient and developer-friendly smart contracts. EOF specifically makes smart contracts more gas efficient, easier to statically analyze and gets rid of the infamous “Stack too Deep” error in Solidity.
  • EIP-2537: Implements precompiles for BLS12-381 for performing cryptographic operations on the BLS12-381 curve. This EIP aims to improve efficiency of operations used in protocols like BLS signature aggregation and zero-knowledge proofs.
  • RIP-7212: Introduces a precompile for the secp256r1 elliptic curve, widely used in protocols like Apple Secure Enclave and WebAuthn. This curve allows users to securely store private keys in hardware modules and sign messages using biometric authentication. The precompile enables efficient verification of these signatures directly on-chain, reducing gas costs by up to 50x compared to conventional methods that don’t leverage a precompile. This is already available on most OP Stack chains but not widely used.

How can I develop with these EIPs?

We provide examples & walkthroughs on how to integrate with each feature, using anvil --odyssey to test locally:

  • Simple Example for EIP-7702: Showcases how EIP-7702 transactions work.
  • Delegate an account to a p256 key: Describes how EIP-7702+EIP-7212 provide the ability to sign a message with a P256 key.
  • BLS Multisig: In-depth walk-through how to implement a Multisig based on BLS signatures verified through precompiles from EIP-2537.
  • EOF: Instructions on how to deploy and inspect contracts in the new EOF format.

When you’re done learning how these features work, get ready to deploy to testnet!

L2s must innovate faster than the L1, and this is just our first chapter in contributing to that acceleration.

Frictionless L2 Onboarding

Using EIP-7702, RIP-7212 and a new EIP-5792 wallet_ RPC namespace which allows the sequencer to sponsor transactions, we allow you to onboard to Odyssey without having a wallet installed, without owning a gas token, without interacting with a bridge, and without setting up a new RPC. This works cross-device and cross-application, leveraging your operating system’s keychain or password manager.

Try it now by simply pressing the buttons below on this page. This is against the real deployed Odyssey testnet instance.

Firstly, you sign up. Name your wallet below, and click “Create”.

Your Wallet
Loading...

You now have a wallet with testnet coins, no browser extension or embedded wallet required! Under the hood, this created a smart contract wallet powered by a PassKey signer. Then it sent a sponsored transaction to mint 100 EXP (Experimental) ERC20 tokens, using EIP-7702 and RIP-7212, all in one step. In production, you could replace this flow with a consumer purchase using Apple Pay that sends the transaction in the background, or sponsor a daily amount of gas to the user based on an identity primitive.

Now let’s send our first transaction. Click “Swap” below and populate how many tokens you want to swap for Odyssey testnet ETH at a fixed 1:1000 ratio.

Swap EXP (ERC20) → ETH
Create a wallet to swap EXP

You have sent a swap transaction on a new network that started with an ERC20 token and ended in ETH, without bridging, without configuring an RPC, without needing any ETH ahead of time. In production, this could be an AMM interaction, or any other valuable flow where the user possibly does not have the chain’s native gas token.

Click below to swap that ETH back to EXP tokens.

Swap ETH → EXP (ERC20)
Create a wallet to swap EXP

You can transfer over the EXP or ETH you just received from your onboarding to any other account.

Transfer EXP or ETH
Create a wallet to send ETH/EXP

This is just the beginning of new wallet flows we’d like to explore with Odyssey, and we are super excited to share the above interactive demo with you.

What are Odyssey Chapters?

We built Odyssey to innovate, and we plan to frequently redeploy it with new features; we’re calling these Chapters.

Odyssey will focus on helping propel innovation from the broader infrastructure ecosystem, and each chapter will introduce new features that push us closer to the endgame.

Each Odyssey Chapter has a finite duration, and might not persist state across each chapter, similar to a devnet.

What’s next?

We plan to help other L2s accelerate their adoption of frontier technologies, work that has already started in our collaborations with Optimism, Uniswap, Conduit, Flashbots, Succinct, Base and many others.

Some of this work will be done by Ithaca ourselves. Much of it will be propelling innovative work done by others, like our existing collaborators or the broader crypto ecosystem.

Some broader areas we are excited by:

  • Wallet endgame: What are the ideal functionalities a wallet should have? How do we go from onboarding, to bridging, to swaps, to signature aggregation, account recovery, light client verification and more? We’ll find out!
  • Accelerating the OP Stack’s roadmap, Stage 2 decentralization, make every rollup a ZK rollup.
  • Improving MEV market structure with TEEs and other emerging technologies.
  • Deploying bleeding-edge cryptography and crypto-enabled applications: zkPassport, FHE, zkEmail, TLS Notary, etc.
  • Ecosystem-wide interoperability and privacy standards.
  • Experimental EIPs for researchers & developers at the frontier: Surprise us!
  • Innovating at the VM layer with parallelization, compiled bytecode, block-level access lists, new EOF versions, smart contracts using the RISC-V ISA.
  • New gas cost structures (e.g. multi-dimensional gas) powered by rigorous data-driven benchmarking.
  • High-performance systems engineering work to break through the gigagas per second barriers with new state commitments (e.g. verkle tries), databases, networking and consensus.

If you are an engineer, researcher or company interested in working on any of these, please reach out to us.

If there is something you want us to add to an Odyssey Chapter, ask by filling this form. We will listen.

The time is now. Join us in our journey to accelerating crypto and unlock the next generation of applications to onboard the next billion users.