Welcome to Boba

This is the primary place where Boba works on the Boba L2, a compute-focused L2. Fundamentally, Ethereum is a distributed computer. We believe that L2s can play a unique role in augmenting the base compute capabilities of the Ethereum ecosystem. You can learn more about Turing hybrid compute here.

Boba is built on the Optimistic Rollup developed by Optimism. Aside from it focus on augmenting compute, Boba differs from Optimism by:

  • providing additional cross-chain messaging such as a message-relayer-fast

  • using different gas pricing logic

  • providing a swap-based system for rapid L2->L1 exits (without the 7 day delay)

  • providing a community fraud-detector that allows transactions to be independently verified by anyone

  • interacting with L2 ETH using the normal ETH methods (msg.value, send eth_sendTransaction, and provider.getBalance(address) rather than as WETH

  • being organized as a DAO

  • automatically relaying classical 7-day exit messages to L1 for you, rather than this being a separate step

User focused documentation is available on the Boba docs website. If you have questions or feel like something is missing check out our Discord server where we are actively responding, or open an issue in the GitHub repo for this site.

Direct Support

Telegram for Developers Project Telegram Discord

Base Layer (generally similar to Optimistic Ethereum)

  • packages: Contains all the typescript packages and contracts

  • l2geth: Fork of go-ethereum v1.9.10 implementing the OVM.

  • integration-tests: Integration tests between a L1 testnet and the l2geth

  • ops: Contains Dockerfiles for containerizing each service involved in the protocol, as well as a docker-compose file for bringing up local testnets easily

Boba Layer

Follow these instructions to set up your local development environment.

Dependencies

You'll need the following:

Note: this is only relevant to developers who wish to work on Boba core services. For most test uses, e.g. deploying your contracts, it's simpler to use https://sepolia.boba.network.

Clone the repository, open it, and install nodejs packages with yarn:

$ git clone git@github.com:bobanetwork/boba.git
$ cd boba
$ yarn clean # only needed / will only work if you had it installed previously
$ yarn
$ yarn build

Then, make sure you have Docker installed and make sure Docker is running. Finally, build and run the entire stack:

$ cd ops
$ BUILD=1 DAEMON=0 ./up_local.sh

Stack spinup can take 15 minutes or more. There are many interdependent services to bring up with two waves of contract deployment and initialization. Recommended settings in docker - 10 CPUs, 30 to 40 GB of memory. You can either inspect the Docker Dashboard>Containers/All>Ops for the progress of the ops_deployer or you can run this script to wait for the sequencer to be fully up:

./scripts/wait-for-sequencer.sh

If the command returns with no log output, the sequencer is up. Once the sequencer is up, you can inspect the Docker Dashboard>Containers/All>Ops for the progress of ops_boba_deployer or you can run the following script to wait for all the Boba contracts (e.g. the fast message relay system) to be deployed and up:

./scripts/wait-for-boba.sh

When the command returns with Pass: Found L2 Liquidity Pool contract address, the entire Boba stack has come up correctly.

  • Running out of space on your Docker, or having other having hard to debug issues? Try running docker system prune -a --volumes and then rebuild the images.

  • To (re)build individual base services: docker-compose build -- l2geth

  • To (re)build individual Boba ts services: docker-compose build -- builder then docker-compose build -- dtl, for example

To run unit tests for a specific package:

cd packages/package-to-test
yarn test

Make sure you are in the ops folder and then run

docker-compose run integration_tests

Expect the full test suite with more than 110 tests including load tests to complete in between 30 minutes to two hours depending on your computer hardware.

By default, the docker-compose up command will show logs from all services, and that can be hard to filter through. In order to view the logs from a specific service, you can run:

docker-compose logs --follow <service name>

Code forked from go-ethereum under the name l2geth is licensed under the GNU GPLv3 in accordance with the original license.

All other files within this repository are licensed under the MIT License unless stated otherwise.

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