Can Rollups really scale Ethereum? Or is it deceiving itself?

By Darren Kleine, Blockworks; Compiled: Pine Snow, Golden Finance

To scale Ethereum, developers have been busy building mechanisms called “rollups” that can run more efficiently “on top” of the underlying chain.

But what exactly are rollups? When asked this meaningful question, Jon Charbonneau laughed.

“Oh, it’s going to be tough,” he said. “Everyone has had a big debate over the last few months.”

He said it’s important to build the right mental model in order to determine the true purpose of Rollup, and whether it is a true scaling solution for Ethereum. After all, if it’s just built “on top” of the chain, can it really scale the blockchain?

On the Lightspeed podcast (Spotify/Apple), the co-founder and partner of cryptocurrency investment firm DBA gave a simple definition before elaborating: “Rollup is just some state derived from data published by another blockchain, another data layer.” ”

“So posting some data on Ethereum that I can run some state transition functions on that and it will tell me, ‘Hey, this is the state of my Rollup.’” ”

“That’s all it takes to do a Rollup fundamentally.” Everything else, he said, is important, but it’s just a matter of implementation.

Charbonne explained that the concept can get more complicated when it comes to bridging (or not) back to Ethereum. “If it lacks a bridge from the base layer to the Rollup level, then what’s the point of this thing?”

The researchers point out that if Rollup strictly uses the security attributes of the underlying network, it does not necessarily need to bridge back to the original data layer. He suggested that developers might decide to use the consensus and other security benefits of another chain instead of bootstrapping their own validators, for example, allowing for easier setup.

But Charbono said the use case for such a rollup is “unclear.” “You want to be able to bridge assets,” he said. “That’s most of what we use these things for.”

Define Extension

The central question of the discussion is: do Rollups actually help scale Ethereum, or do they end up just moving activity elsewhere?

Charboneau explains that the crux of the matter lies in the meaning of “extension.” He defines it as “trying to get more throughput from the system, regardless of resource demand.”

With Rollup, he says, “you can create a more efficient execution environment, and for a decent amount of resources, you can really increase throughput.” ”

On the question of whether Rollup will actually be able to scale Ethereum, Charbono admitted that he doesn’t have a “perfect answer.”

The answer is a “blurred line,” he said, “which is why a lot of people are very reasonable to say, ‘Well, rollups don’t scale Ethereum — you just have to think about the base layer itself.’” ’”

“If you somehow use the properties of the underlying system and retain many of the underlying security properties of the system, then you typically extend it.”