Bankless: What are Native Rollups?

Author: David C Source: bankless Translation: Shan Ouba, Golden Finance

Has the final solution for Ethereum expansion finally arrived?

Despite the fierce debate around the expansion roadmap, Ethereum's expansion still relies on Rollups. Rollups have undoubtedly driven the success of Ethereum's expansion, but the problem of their being out of sync with the main chain still exists.

Rollups require the maintenance of a dedicated proof mechanism, adding a lot of complexity and operating costs to each Rollup team.In addition, they rely heavily on security committees or governance votes to follow up on Ethereum upgrades, which leads to lags and disconnects. The security assumptions and degree of centralization adopted by different Rollups vary, resulting in ecological fragmentation and reduced interoperability. At the same time, every time Ethereum undergoes a hard fork, the Rollup team needs to manually update to maintain compatibility, increasing the governance burden and introducing new risks.

Against the backdrop of debate over Ethereum’s scaling path, many have begun to wonder if there is a simpler solution—a L2 solution that requires no heavy maintenance and is always synchronized with Ethereum.

This is the idea of ​​Native Rollups—a new Rollup design framework that makes it fundamentally consistent with Ethereum, taking full advantage of the security of the main chain without relying on external supervision or custom logic. Let’s take a deeper look at this concept and its related principles.

Analysis of Native Rollups

Native Rollups were proposed by Ethereum community members such as Justin Drake and Dan Robinson, and they are directly integrated into Ethereum’s core transaction rules, enabling Ethereum itself to verify transactions instead of relying on external proof systems.

Currently, most L2 solutions execute transactions off-chain and use complex proof mechanisms to verify withdrawals and state changes. Native Rollups take a different approach, leveraging EXECUTE precompilation, a function built into Ethereum that allows Rollups to process transactions directly using Ethereum's validation rules without the need for an independent proof system.

Under this architecture, Native Rollups publish transaction data directly to the Ethereum mainchain, and their correctness is enforced by Ethereum itself. In this way, they can automatically adapt to Ethereum's network upgrades without the need for governance votes or security committee intervention, eliminating many of the current complexities and interoperability issues.

By eliminating the need to repeatedly build Ethereum logic, Native Rollups reduce maintenance costs, simplify security mechanisms, and make it easier for L2 to adapt to Ethereum's continued evolution while maximizing the security guarantees of the mainchain.

Native Rollups vs. Other Rollups

To better understand the importance of native Rollups, we can compare them with other Rollup solutions currently being explored.

▪️ Based Rollups

Based Rollups were first proposed by Vitalik Buterin in 2021 and formally defined by Justin Drake in 2023. This type of Rollups relies entirely on Ethereum L1 validators to sort transactions, thereby increasing the decentralization of transaction sorting.

Although there are no fully launched Based Rollups yet, teams such as Taiko and Spire Labs are actively promoting their deployment. Although Ethereum's participation enhances decentralization, Based Rollups still need to manage their own proof system. Due to the long block time of Ethereum L1, the user experience may be affected, but improvements in the pre-confirmation mechanism are alleviating this problem.

▪️ Booster Rollups

Booster Rollups enhance scalability by replicating the execution and storage process of Ethereum L1 as much as possible on Layer 2, enabling applications to scale without major reconstruction.

While this approach makes it easier to scale existing applications, it is more complex than traditional Rollups because it requires more complex engineering design and unique proof mechanisms. Although Booster Rollups aims to achieve stronger composability and simpler application deployment, it still faces challenges in economic incentives and user experience.

▪️ Native Rollups

As mentioned earlier, unlike the above two solutions, Native Rollups do not require a separate proof framework or external verifier because all verification is done by Ethereum itself. This greatly reduces the complexity of L2 and simplifies its interaction with L1.

Main advantages of native Rollups:

Greatly improved security: Users can hold assets on native Rollup and trust it as they would Ethereum L1. The risk of attacks on multi-signatures or security committees that traditional Rollups rely on will be greatly reduced.

Easier development: Custom fraud proofs or zero-knowledge proofs are no longer required, reducing the complexity of deployment and maintenance.

Closer alignment with Ethereum: Native Rollups automatically inherit Ethereum upgrades to ensure consistency and improve interoperability. At the same time, they will also benefit from Ethereum's future quantum security mechanisms.

More efficient ZK proofs: Native Rollups can efficiently bundle multiple zero-knowledge proofs, reducing the verification cost of ZK Rollups.

Applicable to new application chains: For decentralized applications that want to obtain the highest level of security, they can choose to become "native" and avoid redeveloping EVM, but only need to add their own features.

If a Rollup is both native and Based - that is, Ethereum manages both transaction ordering and transaction verification, then it becomes an "ultrasonic Rollup". This type of Rollup makes full use of Ethereum's security and is fully in line with Ethereum's long-term expansion roadmap. It is the most ideal Rollup form.

Problems that Native Rollups Cannot Solve

Although Native Rollups solve the challenges of governance and security, they cannot completely eliminate Ethereum's expansion limitations, and even impose additional constraints on ecological diversity in some aspects.

L1 Gas Limit Still Exists: The Gas limit of the Ethereum mainnet is still valid, and if every transaction must be re-executed on L1, it may cause inefficiencies. Therefore, zero-knowledge or optimistic solutions need to be additionally combined to scale more efficiently.

Lack of support for diverse virtual machines: Native Rollups must strictly adhere to the EVM model, which means that they cannot support other emerging virtual machine architectures such as SVM or MoveVM, which are gradually gaining market attention.

Increased data availability costs: The EXECUTE precompilation that native Rollups rely on will significantly increase the data availability cost, which may cause the L2 overhead to increase by 5–10 times, thus affecting its economic feasibility.

In addition, many Rollups are currently only compatible with EVM, but are not completely equivalent to EVM. Converting to native Rollup requires large-scale architectural adjustments, which is difficult. The design of native Rollups may not support certain custom transaction formats or gas calculation methods, such as the model where the user's gas fee is subsidized by the application or wallet. This brings certain trade-offs in user experience (UX).

An important step forward

Although native Rollups is a major advancement in the Ethereum expansion roadmap, not all Rollups will adopt this model. On the contrary, industry insiders (such as Cyber ​​Fund's Dogan) believe that the future Rollup ecosystem may form three main types:

• Enterprise-grade Rollups: Customized and controlled by enterprises to meet their specific needs, such as transaction ordering, privacy protection, etc.

• Performance-optimized Rollups: Increase transaction speed and reduce costs through alternative data availability solutions (such as EigenDA).

• Native Rollups:Fully integrated into Ethereum, inherit L1 security, and automatically upgrade without the need for external governance or independent proof mechanisms.

This classification method both encourages the coexistence of multiple expansion solutions and allows different Rollups to carry out technical innovation while retaining the trust and security of Ethereum. Justin Drake predicts that the first batch of native Rollups may be launched next year. However, to achieve full technical maturity (such as native support for ZK proofs and increased L1 Gas limits), broader community coordination and verification are still required, and the full implementation may be further postponed to the distant future.

Although native Rollups may not be the only solution for Ethereum expansion, they provide a simpler, more secure, and deeply integrated way of expansion with Ethereum. Ultimately, native Rollups provide a clear development direction for L2s, enabling them to always keep pace with the Ethereum main chain, thereby bringing a smoother and more secure experience to users, developers, and the entire ecosystem.