What is different

It is worth emphasizing that there are slight differences in the behaviour of Titan compared to Ethereum. When building applications on Titan, it is important to be aware of these discrepancies and consider them during development.

Opcode Differences

Modified Opcodes

Opcode
Solidity equivalent
Behaviour

COINBASE

block.coinbase

Value is set by the sequencer. Currently returns the OVM_SequencerFeeVault address (0x420...011).

DIFFICULTY

block.difficulty

Always returns zero.

BASEFEE

block.basefee

Currently unsupported.

ORIGIN

tx.origin

If the transaction is an L1 ⇒ L2 transaction, then tx.origin is set to the https://www.notion.so/ENG-75342b0432fc478dac546787fa49c2cf?pvs=21 of the address that triggered the L1 ⇒ L2 transaction. Otherwise, this opcode behaves normally.

Added Opcodes

Opcode
Behavior

L1BLOCKNUMBER

Returns the block number of the last L1 block known by the L2 system. Typically, this block number will lag up to 15 minutes behind the latest L1 block number.

Block Numbers and Timestamps

Block production is not constant

  • On Ethereum, the NUMBER opcode (block.number in Solidity) corresponds to the current Ethereum block number. Similarly, in Titan, block.number corresponds to the current L2 block number. However, each transaction on L2 is placed in a separate block and blocks are NOT produced at a constant rate.

  • This is important because it means that block.number is currently NOT a reliable source of timing information. If you want access to the current time, you should use block.timestamp (the TIMESTAMP opcode) instead.

Timestamps

  • The TIMESTAMP opcode (block.timestamp in Solidity) uses the timestamp of the transaction itself.

Using ETH in Contracts

  • The process of using ETH on L2 is identical to the process of using ETH in Ethereum.

  • For tooling developers and infrastructure providers, please note that ETH is still represented internally as an ERC20 token at the address. 0xDeadDeAddeAddEAddeadDEaDDEAdDeaDDeAD0000

  • As a result, user balances will always be zero inside the state trie, and the user's actual balance will be stored in the aforementioned token's storage.

It is impossible to call this contract directly; it will throw an error.

Address Aliasing

  • Because of the behaviour of the CREATE opcode, a user can create a contract on L1 and on L2 that share the same address but have different bytecode. This can break trust assumptions because one contract may be trusted and another be untrusted (see below).

  • To prevent this problem, the behaviour of the ORIGIN and CALLER opcodes (tx.origin and msg.sender) differs slightly between L1 and L2.

  • The value of tx.origin is determined as follows:

Call source
tx.origin

L2 user (Externally Owned Account)

The user's address (same as in Ethereum)

L1 user (Externally Owned Account)

The user's address (same as in Ethereum)

L1 contract (using CanonicalTransactionChain.enqueue)

L1_contract_address + 0x1111000000000000000000000000000000001111

  • The value of msg.sender at the top-level (the very first contract being called) is always equal to tx.origin. Therefore, if the value of tx.origin is affected by the rules defined above, the top-level value of msg.sender will also be impacted.

In general, tx.origin should not be used for authorization (https://docs.soliditylang.org/en/latest/security-considerations.html#tx-origin). However, that is a separate issue from address aliasing because address aliasing also affects msg.sender.

Last updated

#106: Create Thanos Guide_Steven

Change request updated