Pre-deposits exceed $1.2 billion What is Swell L2 building?

Author: Abi, Swell CSO; Translation: 0xjs@黄金财经

Swell L2 currently has over 1.2 billion pre-deposits. What exactly is Swell building?

Eigenlayer is a security market. LRT is a secure liquidity re-pledge token. When we built LRT, we wanted to be more than just a supplier.

Swell L2 is L2 for re-pledge, unlocking the demand flywheel for security with rswETH.

Swell L2 is a ZK-Validium built on Polygon CDK. It uses the technology created by 3 industry leaders Polygon, Altlayer, and Eigen DA to create the next generation of DeFi center.

Why choose Polygon CDK? Polygon CDK is used by OKX, Immutable, and Gnosis Pay, and is chosen by many project parties because:

1. No fees are charged. Optimism Superchain charges 15% for sorting fees. Polygon charges Chain 0 built on Polygon CDK. What is Polygon's motivation?  

2. Polygon's biggest bet at the moment is the network effect of the aggregation layer. Connecting all chains through unified proof aggregation allows for fast and secure native bridging. This creates unified liquidity, and for Swell, it means that we will become the center of re-staking for the entire aggregation layer ecosystem.

3. Swell has made a larger directional bet on the future direction of ZK. ZK Rollups provide faster finality than the Optimistic chain, whose fraud proofs take 7 days to reach finality, but are often criticized for higher TX fees due to the cost of submitting proofs. This is where Eigen DA is needed.

By building Swell L2 as a ZK-Validium, the fee difference between ZK and Optimistic Rollups (especially post blob) is greatly reduced. ZK-Validiums greatly reduce gas fees by using something that is not a DA mainnet. Before DA solutions like Celestia and Eigen DA appeared, it was necessary to start your own decentralized data availability committee.

But by combining rswETH and Eigen DA, Swell L2 is able to get DA security from its own gas token. We incorporate DA security into the "ETH" of the chain, eliminating the need to launch a completely independent DAC or pay rent to external DA solutions such as Celestia.

We achieve fast finalization, decentralized verification, and decentralized ordering by using Altlayer's AVS stack. rswETH is now directly tied to Swell L2, with the decentralized chain infrastructure built by Altlayer feeding back into rswETH.

Chain activities push fees to the chain infrastructure AVS, which pushes fees to $rswETH, which provides higher returns to users and ultimately brings more users to the chain. Welcome to re(3,3), the re-staking flywheel.