Ethereum’s rollup-centric layer-2 roadmap has successfully tamed the congestion and ludicrous gas fees on the base layer — but at the cost of creating a fragmented ecosystem.
Designed to scale the network, L2s have become little islands on their own, each with its own rules, systems and barriers.
Liquidity is siloed, users are stuck navigating bridges between L2s, and developers are forced to choose whether they want to build on Base, Arbitrum or Starknet.
But in the past year or so, the community has begun to talk more and more about based rollups as a potential answer to the problem. According to reputation, based rollups will bring back interoperability and composability and enable DeFi Summer’s “Money Legos” concept to be resurrected on L2s (this refers to DeFi protocols that can seamlessly interact with one another). In short, if they achieve everything they promise, based rollups will make the Ethereum ecosystem feel like Ethereum again.
The essential problem that based rollups try to address is the use of individual sequencers on L2s — sequencers are the engines that order transactions on blockchains.
“When I first learned about the L2 scaling roadmap from Vitalik [Buterin’s] blog post, it was somewhat difficult for me to accept because it came with trade-offs,” blockchain engineer Teddy Knox tells Magazine.
“Unlike an L1, where you have a very large committee of nodes that are validating Ethereum, L2s in their original form have centralized sequencers that have special permission to sequence L2 blocks.”
Ethereum’s The Surge roadmap to achieve 100,000 TPS. (Vitalik Buterin)
Centralized sequencers fragment Ethereum’s L2s
While centralized sequencers can run very fast and make their operators a lot of money, they contribute to the isolation of different L2s. Transactions processed by one of the L2’s sequencers can’t easily be matched to interact with other L2s, and this…
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