GC Alpha — Project Oxide I

GeniusTeam
3 min readMar 20, 2023

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Part 1 of the Project Oxide series!

Hello Geniuses, you may be wondering about a project that we’ve recently teased on the GC Twitter page. You are in luck!

We are starting our outreach & education campaign around Project Oxide, and we’ll be releasing new information weekly. Be sure to follow Genius Contracts for the important updates!

Lets dive in.

What is Project Oxide?

We’re excited to formally announce that we have started research and development on the Smart Rollup technology that is coming to Tezos in the Mumbai upgrade.

We are using the name Project Oxide as an internal tag for this project, because it is written in the Rust programming language.

Why Project Oxide?

Project Oxide is the first step on the road to Layer 2 for GC & SalsaDAO. Genius Contracts stays at the bleeding edge of Tezos technology, and our goal is to be one of the first to release a production-scale Layer 2 DApp on Tezos.

It is no secret that we’ve been aiming to build on top of Tezos’ Smart Rollups. In our promotional material around SalsaDAO.io, we have clearly registered our intent to bring Rollup DApps to life in our ecosystem.

Project Oxide is our canary project; we will learn from this first test of L2 tech and refine our architecture to bring the best possible experience for upcoming DApps like the Rollup Casino and SpiceWorld.

Project Oxide — The Whole Package

Any experienced blockchain developer will tell you that a smart contract is just one small part of a complete Layer 1 DApp. In the same way, making a custom kernel for a smart rollup is still just one part of a Layer 2 DApp.

We know this well. Project Oxide will be aimed at testing the full end-to-end flow: UI, API, Indexing, L1, & L2. This is not a small undertaking, especially without L2-ready tools and libraries that the Tezos ecosystem sorely lacks.

Still, this issue hasn’t stopped us before and it won’t stop us now.

Project Oxide will be aimed at a testnet release only. Due to the funding requirements (10,000 XTZ) to run a rollup node, we are hoping that our initial work on Project Oxide will show the power of Tezos Smart Rollups and lead to some sort of funding to bring our technology to mainnet.

If we are funded, our plan is to fully open-source our base layer rollup code & libraries, so that others on Tezos have an easier time making their own projects.

This would be a massive win for both GC & the Tezos ecosystem, and we hope that our efforts are not in vain.

This wraps up the first info release around Project Oxide!

As we are scaling up marketing activities around ArtDEX, our new NFT exchange & mintery, we will be posting weekly development updates around Oxide so the Tezos ecosystem can follow along as we build.

Thank you!

GC

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