Ethereum native Rollup promises trustless scalability

Author: Donovan Choy, Blockworks; Compiler: Baishui, Golden Finance

The Ethereum Foundation is experiencing some civil unrest, but work on the world's computer continues.

Ethereum researcher Justin Drake published a compilation article on the ethresearch forum yesterday about a new rollup design called "native rollups".

If you're like me and aren't tech-savvy, it can be tedious to keep up with Ethereum's ever-changing rollup design landscape - let alone keep up with its entire infrastructure stack.

But the simplest way to think about native rollup is that it relies on Ethereum L1 validators for attestation, i.e. state transition functions and verification.

This is in contrast to Optimism Rollup (e.g. Optimism, Arbitrum) or zk Rollup (e.g. Starknet, ZKsync), which push the computational burden of execution to L2 and then rely on fraud or zk proof systems to generate state roots and proofs, and back again to mainnet.

These proof systems are code-heavy and prone to bugs and other vulnerabilities, which is why the Rollup sequencer (the entity that sorts transactions on L2) has historically been centralized. Complaints about sorter centralization have in turn spurred “based on” Rollup designs such as Taiko, which rely on Ethereum L1 validators to perform sorting.

But back to native Rollup. Drake's proposal suggests introducing an "execution" precompiler (a hard-coded function in the EVM) that will validate EVM state transitions for user transactions. This enabled several breakthroughs:

• Native rollup eliminates the need to invest in and maintain an expensive miner-certifier network because the proofs will be processed and executed by L1 validators.

• Native rollups eliminate the need to maintain complex governance structures, including trusted security committees approving contract upgrades to achieve EVM equivalence.

Both unlocks actually make native rollup "trustless" by inheriting the security of Ethereum L1.

Finally, like rollup-based rollups, native rollups will enjoy "synchronous composability", which refers to the ability of on-chain transactions to be combined on different rollup chains, rather than being fragmented. Restoring seamless fungibility of assets on L1 and L2 chains will solve the long- standing UX problem of continuous bridging across chains.

However, unlike rollup-based rollups, the execution of native rollups is not limited by the 12-second block time. Since precompilation is "performed", L1 verifiers only need to verify zk proofs without performing the computations themselves.

Can native aggregation alleviate the problem of ETH value accumulation? Maybe.

From what I understand, validators will use the new precompile enforcement, which will make ETH necessary for transaction settlement.

Second, eliminating L2 governance (and its tokens) can redirect value back to ETH as the primary source of value.

Native rollups represent an incremental but critical step towards strengthening Ethereum’s value proposition and ETH’s role as the foundation of the decentralized ecosystem.