Interpretation of the future development and common misunderstandings of Rollups in one article

Edit: Southwind

Edit: Southwind

nice to see everyoneArbitrum Oneenthusiasm. I admit I was too pessimistic at first, but Arbitrum One's growth was exponential last weekend, with its TVL (Total Value Locked) increasing from $300 million to $2 billion in 48 hours. In just 12 days since its launch, Arbitrum One has largely propelled itself to become the second largest smart contract platform in the industry after Ethereum.

I think,

I think,A lot of misconceptions about Rollups stem from people clinging to the old idea that a single blockchain can do everything.secondary title

1. Rollups are a temporary emergency solution. A certain blockchain has high scalability on L1, so Rollups are not needed

Rollups are the present and future of the blockchain industry.

In contrast,

In contrast,Rollups are blockchains that focus on one thing, and one thing only: execute transactions as fast as possible, while “outsourcing” the hard work of security and data availability to another L1 that is better at it chain(like Ethereum). This is simply division of labor or specialization of action. Just as the division of labor led to exponential growth in the Industrial Revolution, Rollups will lead to exponential growth in scalability for the blockchain industry.

Nowadays, some L1s blockchains may make great sacrifices in terms of decentralization and security to achieve higher scalability; Ethereum and Bitcoin compromise in scalability to achieve higher security and decentralization. andRollups are a simple structure capable of high scalability, security, and decentralization at the same time.

The point is, whether it is the L1s chain or the Rollups chain, there is no difference for users.they're just with an executive layer(Whether it is L1s chain or Rollup chain) interaction. Solana and Avalanche are not competing with Ethereum, they are competing with Rollups like Arbitrum One and StarkNet, unless they move to a Rollup-centric roadmap like Ethereum and Tezos.

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2. So-and-so blockchain is faster than Rollups

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3. Lack of composability is bad

This is a common argument against Rollups, but it's practically untenable. As mentioned earlier, whatever L1s can do, Rollups can do better. I also don't see anyone complaining about the lack of composability between L1s?

A single Rollup is fully composable, even if it needs to settle across multiple data shards or external data availability.

Just as L1s cannot be combined with each other, there is no composability between Rollups. But there are already many interoperability solutions such as Hop Protocol, Connext, cBridge, and Biconomy, with many more in development. Also, there are amazing innovations like dAMM that allow liquidity to be shared between multiple zkRollups!

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4. Fragmentation of liquidity sucks

As mentioned above, liquidity may not be shared between Rollups, but neither between L1s. However, unlike the L1s, theLiquidity can be shared between Rollups through innovative solutions such as dAMM.

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5. Rollups are centralized

All transaction data (in compressed form) and proofs of Rollups will be published on the L1 main chain, so that users can withdraw from the Rollup directly from the L1 main chain, even if the Rollup itself is attacked. therefore,Security and decentralization of Rollups = security and decentralization of L1.

In the early stages of Rollups, there will indeed be some centralized vectors(such as the development team behind Rollups controlling the network in its early stages), but most Rollups projects aim to gradually achieve decentralization. The ultimate form of Rollups is: with decentralized sequencers (sequencers), decentralized provers (provers), decentralized L1 smart contracts and light unassisted exitzkRollups。secondary title

6. Ordinary users will never be able to complete the CEX--Ethereum mainnet--Rollup journey, because it is too expensive

Top CEXs (centralized exchanges) such as OKEx, Huobi, and Coinbase have pledged to support users being able toat very low costat the same time,

at the same time,for example,for example,cBridgeAllow users to passOptimism, Polygon PoS, Binance Smart Chain, xFai, Avalanche or FantomDirect access to Arbitrum One, without going through the Ethereum network. So there are already a lot of options to get into Rollups, and there will be more in the future.

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7. The withdrawal wait time of Rollups is too long

For Optimistic Rollups, this is true: if you use the default cross-chain "bridge", you need to wait about 7 days to withdraw assets from Optimistic Rollups to L1. However, as mentioned earlier,secondary title

first,

first,"Eth 2.0"This term has been deprecated. The next major upgrade of Ethereum is the merger, which is to merge the consensus layer (beacon chain, formerly known as "Eth2") with the execution layer (the current Ethereum chain, formerly known as "Eth1"). After the merger We will have only one Ethereum chain again! The next major upgrade of Ethereum after the merger isData Sharding at the Consensus Layer. Data sharding will actually focus on accelerating Rollups. therefore,In the foreseeable future, the scalability of Ethereum L1 will be limited, and Rollups will bring the highest scalability to Ethereum!

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9. Rollups are still too expensive

In the short term it does.Optimistic Rollups like Arbitrum One and Optimistic Ethereum are reducing transaction fees by 90%-95%, which while a big improvement over Ethereum mainnet, is still too expensive.Through some optimization measures, such as signature aggregation, better batching and calldata compression, its transaction fee can be reduced by 99%. In fact, zkRollups have reduced transaction fees by 99% to $0.10-$1, even when L1 transaction fees are high.

But Rollups don't stop there!When Ethereum releases data sharding, the cost of Rollups will plummet, and its capacity will instantly increase by an order of magnitude,And long-term scalability will increase by several orders of magnitude.

We can get a glimpse of this from Validiums such as Immutable X, where it costs less than 1 cent to mint an NFT! In fact, Immutable X’s subsidies make its NFT minting so cheap, it now costs $0 to mint an NFT using your Ethereum wallet! You can try it out automatically at SwiftMint (swiftmint.io/). Note that Validiums are not as secure as Rollups, but they are more secure than sidechains and some other L1s. Additionally, Volitions takes its security a step further by allowing users to choose between Rollup and Validium.

In short, in the long run,Rollups + Data Shardingsecondary title

10. Finality of Rollup transactions is too slow

The Rollup Sequencer brings users almost instantly"Soft Confirmation"(soft confirmations), traded through Uniswap on the Arbitrum or Optimism networkThe average time is about 0.3 seconds. For most people, the time required for this soft confirmation is acceptable. But in fact, the finalization of Rollups transactions on L1 is often delayed, especially for zkRollups.

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11. Rollups are an Ethereum thing and are constrained by the EVM (Ethereum Virtual Machine)

Rollups are definitely not just an Ethereum thing. In fact, Tezos has shifted to a Rollup-centric roadmap. Arthur Breitman, founder of Tezos, makes a good argument thatRollups combined with data sharding is the ultimate scalability solution.

Additionally, Rollups has a broad design space to experiment with in areas such as VMs (virtual machines), fee models, collaboration mechanisms, governance, and more. In fact,Rollups have much more room for innovation than L1, because they always have a retreat on the safest L1. Want a quantum-resistant VM? Can use StarkNet; like LLVM and Rust? zkSync 2.0 is available; want your Rollup chain optimized for only one specific application? Of course, Immutable X for NFTs is a good example; want a private chain without MEV (miner extractable value)? Aztec can be used.

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12. What’s so special about Ethereum if you can deploy Rollups elsewhere?

Rollups will be deployed on the most secure, decentralized and highest data availability L1.

It is clear that Ethereum is orders of magnitude more secure and decentralized than any other smart contract platform. In fact, Bitcoin is the only comparable blockchain, but apparently, Bitcoin lacks the ability to host Rollups.

Ethereum does not currently have the highest data availability, butWith data sharding, Ethereum will have the highest data availability.Data sharding reverses the trilemma—the more decentralized your network is, the more data shards you can deploy, and the more scalable your Rollups will be. This is how Rollups deployed on Ethereum will scale to millions of TPS in the next few years,It is expected to reach 15 million TPS by 2030.The only thing that Ethereum can improve is the execution layer, which is to make the execution layer more friendly to verify zk-SN(T)ARKs. I believe this will happen, once the merge is done, data sharding and statelessness will come.

By then, obviouslyEthereum will be defined as the best place to deploy Rollups。But that doesn't mean there are no other competitors. If Ethereum's data sharding saturates, we will likely see data availability chains such as Celestia and Avail fill the void. For other L1s chains that shift to Rollup-centricity, such as Tezos, they may also benefit if there is an excess demand for Ethereum-based Rollups. Of course there are unexpected competitors, but really, the only real competition is whether Bitcoin will somehow add the ability to verify zk-SNARKs and implement data sharding,

Of course, for Rollups, this doesn't really matter. Rollups will only leverage the best of security, decentralization, network effects, and data availability that L1 offers them.

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13. Rollups are Stealing Ethereum Traffic

The current Ethereum execution layer (i.e. the PoW Ethereum chain) is fully saturated, and blocks have been full for years. therefore,All activity on Rollups is a net increase. Some might think that sharding will expand the capacity of Ethereum, butsecondary title

14. Rollups are too complicated for anyone to understand

I would like to point out that, as I write this, Arbitrum One has proven to be the fastest growing smart contract platform in history. In fact, as mentioned earlier,The user experience with Rollup is the same as with L1. Users do not need to care about the underlying architecture of Rollups. For users, Rollup is just another smart contract platform.

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15. When Rollups grow big enough, they will ditch the main chain and create their own blockchain

Technically, it's possible. However,What makes Rollups special is that they rely on the most secure and decentralized L1 main chain.secondary title

16. No Rollup native token, so people will not invest in its ecosystem

This is not entirely true.While there are many Rollups projects that are in the early stages without issuing native tokens, I expect most Rollups will eventually issue tokens.secondary title

17. zkRollups zero-knowledge proofs are too computationally expensive

This is true, but by amortizing this cost over many transactions, the computational cost of zero-knowledge proofs is negligible relative to the Gas cost paid for transaction calldata. certainly,We are still in the early days of zero-knowledge technology, and we will see the cost and time to compute zero-knowledge proofs plummet over time.secondary title

18. Can NFTs be transferred between L1 and Rollups, or between Rollups?

This is an important issue that I overlooked. As mentioned above, while there are already multiple "bridges" for the transfer of ETH and ERC-20 tokens, NFTs are more complicated because there cannot be a liquidity bridge for NFTs.

Currently, you can transfer NFTs between L1s and Rollups,But the solution is certainly early. For example, in zkSync 1.x, you can mint an NFT on it, and when you want to withdraw it to L1, the NFT will be destroyed on zkSync 1.x and minted as an ERC-721 on L1 . but,The transfer of NFTs between Rollups is an unsolved problem.

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19. You’re talking about the future, execution risk remains

Indeed. Rollups are an emerging technology that will take several years to mature and reach their potential. Things can go wrong. But I explained above what the current shortcomings of Rollups are, and how they will be addressed in the future.

For more discussion on the Rollups misunderstanding go to:

https://www.reddit.com/r/ethereum/comments/pmvbbh/addressing_common_rollup_misconceptions/

**This article only represents the views of the original author and does not constitute any investment opinion or suggestion.

[1]:https://ethresear.ch/t/cross-rollup-nft-wrapper-and-migration-ideas/10507

[2]:https://ethresear.ch/t/cross-rollup-nft-wrapper-and-migration-ideas/10507/28

**This article only represents the views of the original author and does not constitute any investment opinion or suggestion.