What makes an L2 an L2?
Special thanks to Toghrul for reviewing this FAQ.We've all heard Toly say Solana is an Ethereum L2 via the Wormhole Eigenlayer bridge. But is that really true? Does the bridge define the rollup? Do rollups even scale the base layer? Your answers to some of the frequently asked rollup questions:1. What are rollups?Rollups are blockchains, separate ones from the base layer on which they are “deployed”. They are businesses that make a deal with the base layer to use the base layer consensus...
What makes an L2 an L2?
Special thanks to Toghrul for reviewing this FAQ.We've all heard Toly say Solana is an Ethereum L2 via the Wormhole Eigenlayer bridge. But is that really true? Does the bridge define the rollup? Do rollups even scale the base layer? Your answers to some of the frequently asked rollup questions:1. What are rollups?Rollups are blockchains, separate ones from the base layer on which they are “deployed”. They are businesses that make a deal with the base layer to use the base layer consensus...
The Cathedral and Bazaar of Zero Knowledge
Special thanks to Uma, John, Barnabe, Santiago, Toghrul, and Yuki for their valuable inputs and feedback which contributed to this piece. This piece is inspired from Figment Capital’s article on Decentralized Proving. Until about 5 years ago, Zero-Knowledge (ZK) proofs were considered “moon math” - a technology that could not scale because of the complexity involved in generating a proof. Today, you can literally buy proofs from a proof market. The rise of cryptographic proof-based infrastruc...
The Cathedral and Bazaar of Zero Knowledge
Special thanks to Uma, John, Barnabe, Santiago, Toghrul, and Yuki for their valuable inputs and feedback which contributed to this piece. This piece is inspired from Figment Capital’s article on Decentralized Proving. Until about 5 years ago, Zero-Knowledge (ZK) proofs were considered “moon math” - a technology that could not scale because of the complexity involved in generating a proof. Today, you can literally buy proofs from a proof market. The rise of cryptographic proof-based infrastruc...
Rollup Decentralization - Does it matter?
Recently a lot of discourse on Crypto Twitter (Crypto X?) has been around the decentralization of L2s. Are the rollups we’re building decentralized enough? Or are they at least on the path to decentralization? Does it even matter? I’ll explore these topics in this post. Before I dive in, if you’re still wrapping your head around how rollups really work, I’d recommend giving this a quick read: Rollups for Dummies The idea of rollups is simple: We want offchain actors to be able to do transacti...
Rollup Decentralization - Does it matter?
Recently a lot of discourse on Crypto Twitter (Crypto X?) has been around the decentralization of L2s. Are the rollups we’re building decentralized enough? Or are they at least on the path to decentralization? Does it even matter? I’ll explore these topics in this post. Before I dive in, if you’re still wrapping your head around how rollups really work, I’d recommend giving this a quick read: Rollups for Dummies The idea of rollups is simple: We want offchain actors to be able to do transacti...
The Polygon Upgrade: From PoS to Validium
Polygon co-founder Mihailo Bjelic recently published a proposal to upgrade the Polygon PoS network to a zkEVM Validium. This is a post on what this transition means for the network, its security guarantees, and the various network participants (and what it doesn't).Polygon PoS - A “commit” chainBefore diving into the Validium structure, let's first understand how the PoS network works and its various challenges. The PoS network has $2B+ assets bridged from Ethereum, tens of thousand...
The Polygon Upgrade: From PoS to Validium
Polygon co-founder Mihailo Bjelic recently published a proposal to upgrade the Polygon PoS network to a zkEVM Validium. This is a post on what this transition means for the network, its security guarantees, and the various network participants (and what it doesn't).Polygon PoS - A “commit” chainBefore diving into the Validium structure, let's first understand how the PoS network works and its various challenges. The PoS network has $2B+ assets bridged from Ethereum, tens of thousand...
Rollups for Dummies
If you have recently spent time in crypto, you already know this is a sensitive topic. As is true for many other terms in our world, there is no standard definition for the word “rollup”. For those of you who were away from Crypto Twitter last week, let me catch you up: Jon Charbonneau wrote a fantastic technical deep dive on the fundamentals of rollup infrastructure, and it triggered a “debate on semantics” of what exactly it means to be a Rollup. In this post, I will try to present an unbia...
Rollups for Dummies
If you have recently spent time in crypto, you already know this is a sensitive topic. As is true for many other terms in our world, there is no standard definition for the word “rollup”. For those of you who were away from Crypto Twitter last week, let me catch you up: Jon Charbonneau wrote a fantastic technical deep dive on the fundamentals of rollup infrastructure, and it triggered a “debate on semantics” of what exactly it means to be a Rollup. In this post, I will try to present an unbia...
