Ethereum’s native rollups promise trustless scalability

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The Ethereum Foundation is going through a bit of civil unrest, but work on the world computer continues.

Ethereum researcher Justin Drake published on the ethresearch forums yesterday a compilation article on a new rollup design known as “native rollups.”

If you’re non-technical like I am, keeping up with Ethereum’s ever-changing landscape of rollup designs is tedious — let alone keeping up with its entire infrastructural stack.

But the simplest way to think about native rollups is that it relies on Ethereum L1 validators for proving, i.e., state transition function and validation.

This contrasts with optimistic rollups (e.g., Optimism, Arbitrum) or zk-rollups (e.g. Starknet, ZKsync) that push the computational burden of execution to an L2 before relying on a fraud or zk proof system to generate a state root and proof which settles back on mainnet.

These proof systems are code-heavy and subject to bugs and other vulnerabilities, which is why rollup sequencers — the entity that orders transactions on an L2 — have historically been centralized. Complaints about sequencer centralization in turn have spurred “based” rollup designs like Taiko that rely on Ethereum L1 validators to perform sequencing (you can read all about it here).

But back to native rollups. Drake’s proposal suggests introducing an “execute” precompile — a hardcoded function into the EVM — that will verify EVM state transitions of users’ transactions. This achieves a few breakthroughs:

• Native rollups no longer need to invest in and maintain expensive prover networks of miners with specialized GPU hardware since proving would be handled and enforced by L1 validators.
• Native rollups no longer need to maintain complex governance structures involving trusted security councils to approve contract upgrades in order to achieve EVM-equivalency.

Both of these unlocks in effect make native rollups “trustless” by inheriting the security of Ethereum L1.

Finally, like based rollups, native rollups would enjoy “synchronous composability,” which refers to the ability of onchain transactions to be composable across different rollup chains, rather than being fragmented. The return to seamless fungibility of assets across L1 and L2 chains would solve the longstanding UX problem of constant bridging across chains.

Unlike based rollups, however, native rollup execution will not be constrained by the 12-second block time. Thanks to the “execute” precompile, L1 validators will only need to verify zk proofs without having to perform computation themselves.

Could native rollups mitigate the problem of ETH value accrual? Perhaps.

As I understand it, validators would enforce execution with the new precompile, which would make ETH necessary for transaction settlement.

Second, the elimination of L2 governance (and its tokens) could redirect value back to ETH as the primary value sink.

Native rollups represent yet another incremental but pivotal step toward reinforcing Ethereum’s value proposition and ETH’s role as the foundation of the decentralized ecosystem.