While everyone wasn't looking, the initial deployment of ethereum's layer 2 scaling strategy has *basically* succeeded. What's left is refinement and deployment. A thread:
First, the systems that are near-ready today are by and large limited to payments and DEX.
There *is* @optimismPBC's Synthetix demo medium.com/ethereum-optim…, which is a *full EVM* inside an opti-rollup, but their work is still earlier-stage than the payments/DEX stuff.
There *is* @optimismPBC's Synthetix demo medium.com/ethereum-optim…, which is a *full EVM* inside an opti-rollup, but their work is still earlier-stage than the payments/DEX stuff.
But even still, token transfers / DEX are a large part of ethereum activity. See tether #1 here ethgasstation.info; also *many* ETH and other ERC20 transfers: etherscan.io/tokentxns
Can we move at least some of these into rollups/plasmas?
Can we move at least some of these into rollups/plasmas?
The challenge is that users would need to have wallets where their coins are stored in a rollup (or plasma). This is an adoption challenge, not a technical challenge (CC @metamask_io @ethstatus...).
Though part of that adoption challenge is tightening the guarantees so users will feel comfortable "living" inside an L2 system.
The operator can't steal; that's the point of L2s instead of sidechains. If it's correctly designed, the operator also can't disappear and permanently freeze the funds. But the L2s should be designed so that if the L2 disappears, you can withdraw funds *as fast as possible*
So if the wallet detects that the operator is offline, it withdraws your coins and seamlessly switches to being an on-chain wallet. ZK rollups in particular can theoretically allow withdrawals even in the uncooperative-operator case within minutes; imo they should do this.
And the various optimistic systems (incl plasmas) can achieve fast in/out movement with a liquid secondary market for withdrawals-in-progress. We need to start setting up this infrastructure!
Also a suggestion: every L2 should do a drill where the team suddenly shuts down all centralized components that they are running. Verify that the ecosystem can seamlessly recover from such a situation.
Look forward to the future of ethereum scaling!
(Including sharding supercharging all of these techniques 100x further down the line)
(Including sharding supercharging all of these techniques 100x further down the line)
