An Incomplete Guide to Ethereum Rollups
vitalik.ca
An Incomplete Guide to Ethereum Rollups
1–10 of 24 posts
Re: An Incomplete Guide to Ethereum Rollups
#2Fruit Rollups?
Re: An Incomplete Guide to Ethereum Rollups
#3Great write-up, concise and very clear. I just started learning dapp development and was able to easily grasp the different forms of L2-scaling.
I am especially excited about recursive ZK-Rollup smart contracts even though they are complex and computationally expensive. They seem to be more trustworthy than Optimistic Rollups and I can see them becoming the standard eventually.
It is great to follow this dapp tech at its frontier, so much potential and new breakthroughs every few months it seems!
Re: An Incomplete Guide to Ethereum Rollups
#4As someone who's active in the Blockchain space since 2015, I found rollups to be a really cool invention. The idea of simply compressing data with a zero knowledge proof is quite simple and beautiful.
A year ago, I've worked at a company that tried making Plasma work (https://leapdao.org). We even had shipped a Plasma chain to the mainnet. As Vitalic points out correctly, a major problem (apart from not having guaranteed data availability for the Plasma's chain data) was that in order to transact "off-chain", a user had to transfer some money into a bridge. Only then, the Plasma chain credited this money to the user.
That was a major usability problem, as it took a really long time and since the user was then anyways subjected to really high transaction costs at least once. Hence, we had really low liquidity and the project never took off.
With rollups, I imagine this could become less of a burden as there's no double accounting. The single source of truth is the smart contract checking the "batches". I can imagine having a contract interface that's the equivalent of "depositing into a rollup and immediately send it to person X". I could even imagine an ERC-20 V2 standard that makes any token a rollup. Then you simply never leave L2, meaning the "on-boarding problem" would be solved.
I'm not a cryptographic expert, but to me zkp are still somewhat scary and opaque. They're really hard core concepts that still seem to be in development and have not proven themselves. As an engineer with 5 yrs of experience in the field of blockchain, I'd still be really hesitant to build something with zkps without having a sort of cryptography consultant by my side.
Optimistic rollups seem to be a better fit here. Still, I have the feeling that much of this can still be significantly simplified once a well-matching use case comes into sight. But that's just a feeling for now...
Re: An Incomplete Guide to Ethereum Rollups
#5Fruit Rollups?
Not as delicious, but sure to be just as sticky
Re: An Incomplete Guide to Ethereum Rollups
#6Great write-up, concise and very clear. I just started learning dapp development and was able to easily grasp the different forms of L2-scaling. I am especially excited about recursive ZK-Rollup smart contracts even though they are complex and computationally expensive. They seem to be more trustworthy than Optimistic Rollups and I can see them becoming the standard eventually. It is great to follow this dapp tech at…
I just read through the whole thing and have no idea what it says. It sounds smart but it’s pseudo-science to me.
Re: An Incomplete Guide to Ethereum Rollups
#7Great write-up, concise and very clear. I just started learning dapp development and was able to easily grasp the different forms of L2-scaling. I am especially excited about recursive ZK-Rollup smart contracts even though they are complex and computationally expensive. They seem to be more trustworthy than Optimistic Rollups and I can see them becoming the standard eventually. It is great to follow this dapp tech at…
I just read through the whole thing and have no idea what it says. It sounds smart but it’s pseudo-science to me.
You can run that pseudoscience yourself with Zokrates. They have really good documentation, which makes it a lot more concrete. I didn't get zksnarks at all but that cleared it up for me.
The basic idea is that you have functions with both public and private parameters. You can do two things:
1) Pass in all parameters, get back the output and a proof that the output is correct.
2) Pass in just the proof, the output, and the public parameters, and get verification that the function ran correctly; i.e. that the public parameters and some private parameters you don't know generated that output.
So on chain, you can skip storing all the private parameters, as long as you store the proof, and have a contract verify the proof before storing the public data.
Re: An Incomplete Guide to Ethereum Rollups
#8As someone who's active in the Blockchain space since 2015, I found rollups to be a really cool invention. The idea of simply compressing data with a zero knowledge proof is quite simple and beautiful. A year ago, I've worked at a company that tried making Plasma work ( https://leapdao.org ). We even had shipped a Plasma chain to the mainnet. As Vitalic points out correctly, a major problem (apart from not having gua…
The Hermez Network (zk-rollup L2) will launch a little later this year:
Re: An Incomplete Guide to Ethereum Rollups
#9Great write-up, concise and very clear. I just started learning dapp development and was able to easily grasp the different forms of L2-scaling. I am especially excited about recursive ZK-Rollup smart contracts even though they are complex and computationally expensive. They seem to be more trustworthy than Optimistic Rollups and I can see them becoming the standard eventually. It is great to follow this dapp tech at…
I just read through the whole thing and have no idea what it says. It sounds smart but it’s pseudo-science to me.
> it’s pseudo-science to me
Maybe do some background reading?
For example: https://arxiv.org/abs/1906.07221
Re: An Incomplete Guide to Ethereum Rollups
#10As someone who's active in the Blockchain space since 2015, I found rollups to be a really cool invention. The idea of simply compressing data with a zero knowledge proof is quite simple and beautiful. A year ago, I've worked at a company that tried making Plasma work ( https://leapdao.org ). We even had shipped a Plasma chain to the mainnet. As Vitalic points out correctly, a major problem (apart from not having gua…
The Hermez Network (zk-rollup L2) will launch a little later this year: https://hermez.io/
How does this compare to something like arbitrum which I think is also L2 rollups but could be wrong.