Ethereum native Rollup is expected to achieve trustless scalability

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

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

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

If you're not technically savvy like me, it can be tedious to keep up with Ethereum's ever-changing landscape of rollup designs - let alone its entire infrastructure stack.

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

This contrasts with 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 back on mainnet.

These proof systems are code-heavy and prone to bugs and other vulnerabilities, which is why Rollup sequencers (the entities that order transactions on L2) have historically been centralized. Complaints about sequencer centralization have in turn spurred “on-chain” Rollup designs like Taiko, which rely on Ethereum L1 validators to perform ordering.

But back to native Rollup. Drake’s proposal suggests introducing an “execution” precompile (a hard-coded function in the EVM) that would verify the EVM state transitions for a user’s transaction. This achieves several breakthroughs:

• Native rollups no longer need to invest in and maintain an expensive network of miner provers, as the proofs will be processed and executed by L1 validators.

• Native rollups no longer need to maintain a complex governance structure, including a trusted security committee to approve contract upgrades to achieve EVM equivalence.

Both of these unlocks effectively make native rollups "trustless" by inheriting the security of Ethereum L1.

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

However, unlike rollups based on rollups, execution of native rollups will not be constrained by the 12 second block time. Due to the “executing” precompile, L1 validators only need to verify zk proofs and do not need to perform the computation themselves.

Will native rollups alleviate ETH’s value accumulation problem? Maybe.

From what I understand, validators will use the new precompiles to enforce execution, which will make ETH a must for transaction settlement.

Secondly, 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 a decentralized ecosystem.