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9 Jan, 7 tweets, 2 min read
An opportune reminder for why I think it'll take till 2023 for smart contract rollups to be a mature endgame solution for the blockchain industry, and what remains to be implemented:

- Decentralized contract upgradeability
- Decentralized sequencing & proving

(contd.)
- Data compression (applies to ORs, most ZKRs have this)
- Battle-testing novel ZK primitives
- Scalable DA layers
- Applications optimized for rollups
- ASIC provers (ZKRs)
- Recursive proofs
- General battle-testing, exiting beta
- State management (eg. expiry)

(contd.)
Most importantly, infrastructure for end users to run light clients (see: Durin for Ethereum), or even stateless rollup full nodes; have easy access to L1 transaction submissions or escape mechanisms, for truly equivalent security to L1.

All of this will take time.
By maturity, I mean maturity - when they are ready to replace Bitcoin & Ethereum for global scale consumption. I'm not talking about alt-L1s, most (but not all) of whom are also beta products and will also take years to mature. I do expect rollups to gain traction in 2022.
Interestingly, I wrote about this topic 6 months ago and was even looking into early 2024. A lot of progress has been made, and some of my concerns then are much milder than I thought. So, I'm actually more optimistic than ever!

polynya.medium.com/why-the-transi…
Let it be very, very clear: I strongly believe rollups & scalable DA layers are the only way the blockchain industry can scale to global ubiquity. At the same time, this is bleeding edge tech & will take time to mature. FUDing rollups now is like FUDing smart contracts in 2016.
Also, I'm talking about smart contract rollups. Many application-specific rollups have been live and battle-tested for a long while now. Loopring, the first rollup, released almost 2 years ago now! Finally, you're very welcome to use alt-L1s, no need to send me hateful messages.

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More from @epolynya

polynya Profile picture
8 Jan
This is the best argument against full modularity yet: reddit.com/r/ethereum/com…

@aliatiia_ has also made some of these arguments before.

Justin Drake argues for what I have previously called a "modular L1" as the ideal architecture in favour of a "fully modular" system.
What's a "modular L1?" - implementing rollups and data sharding, but all of these are enshrined within one protocol with one consensus. So, the rollups are all part of the L1. (I've previously called this "canonical rollups")

Thus, the ideal architecture is actually starting with the most secure & liquid L1, build rollups and enshrine them into the L1, alongside a scalable DA layer. Alternatively, build a new modular L1 and see if it can gain security before the incumbent builds rollups & data shards.
Read 7 tweets
polynya Profile picture
5 Jan
The Polygon PoS & Solana situations are more interesting data points in the transaction quality trilemma discussion.

By optimizing for low fees & censorship resistance, they suffer from spam and very low-quality transactions.

polynya.medium.com/transaction-qu…
In addition to network instability, they lead to state bloat and socializing transactions that may be parasitic to the ecosystems.

I had often conjectured the min transaction fee should be in the $0.01 to $0.10 range. But Polygon PoS's gas fees are now ~500 gwei...
...yet the low quality transactions have kept coming even though AMM swaps have now actually exceeded $0.10. Of course, this will eventually stop, but I think this is important evidence that $0.01 to $0.10 is actually still too low long term. Perhaps $0.50 is a better target?
Read 7 tweets
polynya Profile picture
3 Jan
So, here's a tangential and embarrassing rant I always wanted to make! My blog and tweets are never about financial stuff, but I do morbidly indulge in it on the Into the Cryptoverse telegram channel. My thoughts on short-term markets are often polar opposite to my thoughts on..
...long-term tech, which is what my blogs & twitter focus on.

Into the Cryptoverse users will know I was high on ADA through 2020 till September 2021, and still believe it's due one last pump. I was bullish on SOL all thru 2021, and actually was surprised it took so long.
All the while, I was highly critical of both Cardano and Solana, despite their tokens being my top picks. I know this can be confusing, but here's my general philosophy:

Bull markets have always been ass backwards when it comes to valuing technology.
Read 7 tweets
polynya Profile picture
3 Jan
Execution sharding is still kind of monolithic, or as I call them, proto-modular. It was a necessary step, but rollups & DA layers supersede them. I agree NEAR is the best execution sharded chain yet: though I'll point out "ETH 2.0 sharding" no longer exists as John suggests.
With the new sharding design proposed by Dankrad, we will likely never see fraud-proven execution shards on Ethereum. So why is Ethereum abandoning execution sharding? Because fully modular architectures like rollups + data sharding is simply superior in the long term.
Rollups+DAL have several advantages over sharding:

1) Retains atomic composability even if it settles across multiple data shards, while execution shards break composability between each other. So, you can have a super duper rollup with gazillion TPS with full composability.
Read 12 tweets
polynya Profile picture
1 Jan
There's a real usecase for sovereign L1 chains with their own consensus & data availability. Rollups or their primitive predecessors shards/parachains & multi-chain/subnets do not accomplish this.

The answer: a validity proven execution layer(s) with a DAS proven DA layer.
There are multiple ways to accomplish this. Start with Mina and fork Polygon Avail or Celestia. I bet Polygon's next-gen SDKs will look like this - Polygon's ZKRs + Polygon Avail sharing a consensus mechanism.

The great advantage of validity proofs is they can be verified on...
...a different settlement layer. So even if the above is an alt-L1, Ethereum can verify it's full state. As long as this sovereign chain isn't compromised, it basically behaves like a ZKR. To be clear, rollups are superior: their bridges will continue working even if compromised!
Read 5 tweets
polynya Profile picture
30 Dec 21
Some showerthoughts on what I'd like to see from rollup tokens:

- Vampire attack L1s to oblivion, and yes, this includes Ethereum. Smartly target active users across different L1s. Fewer tokens dropped to the yield farming chasing chain hoppers & high value Ethereum users.
- Have canonical bridges on all L1s being targeted, make it free (or very cheap) to bridge from them

- Leverage token issuance to have transaction fees cheaper than (most) L1s. Need much less subsidies than L1 inflation to get it done due to rollups' inherent long-term advantage
- Permissionless token incentives to developers, paid out to developers determined by activity of their contracts*

- Distribute at least ~70% of the tokens to the community/treasury, and at least ~70% of tokens to active circulation, have a clear long-term plan for incentives
Read 5 tweets

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