One of the themes of the competitive scaling market in 2023 will be Rollup devouring the TVLs, users, and ecological Dapps of Alt L1. Arbitrum, Optimism, Zksync, Starknet, and others owe a great deal to the Ethernet ecosystem as the Knights Templar guarding it.

But when Arbitrum tried to build a hub-and-spoke structure of the L1-L2-L3 Rollup scalable route to consolidate its Rollup leadership position and vested interests, things started to go wrong.

Fortunately, neither Optimism nor Zksync followed Arbitrum’s brutal actions, but instead chose the Stacks parallel structure and demoted themselves to the first instance of the Stack structure.

Moreover, even the Ethereum sidechain Polygon, which is not an Ethereum sidechain, did not choose the route of Arbitrum. Instead, it chose to follow the route of Optimism and Zksync and launch the Stacks-like parallel structure Polygon CDK. However, the settlement layer of Polygon CDK is the Polygon PoS mainnet, not the Ethereum mainnet.

However, Rollups deployed using the Stacks SDK mostly lack true parallelism and sovereignty, despite needing to share data availability and settlement layers with them.

This is still far from the vision of Ethereum DankSharding, which envisions 1024 shards +1 shard for n Rollups, providing a decentralized scalable architecture.

Entering 2024, stimulated by new primitives such as modularity and restaking, Rollups began to differentiate into four types: Orthodox Rollup, Sovereign Rollup, Modular Rollup, and Restaking Rollup:

Orthodox Rollup

Orthodox Rollup actively seeks to be one of the subcontractors of the Ethereum execution layer, pursuing EVM equivalence or even Ethereum equivalence. Optimism, Linea, and Scroll belong to this category. The Arbitrum architecture is similar to them but is less radical in pursuing Ethereum equivalence and focuses more on developers.

Sovereign Rollup

Sovereign Rollup, represented by Metis (run by Vitalik’s mother), and Vitalik and Eli’s Starknet, have a common architectural feature of having a decentralized sequencer network and a sovereign verification network (settlement layer).

Their common architectural feature is a decentralized sequencer network and a sovereign verification network (settlement layer)

Metis uses the Op Rollup mechanism and Starknet uses the Zk Rollup mechanism. Although their sovereignty verification network architectures both adopt the design idea of ​​PBS (separation of block submitters and block builders), there are differences:Starknet’s sovereign verification network architecture adds some node roles, such as Provers responsible for generating zero-knowledge proofs (ZKPs).

And due to the lower cost of verifying ZKPs submitted to the Ethereum mainnet compared to fraud proofs, Starknet still uses Ethereum as the consensus layer and data availability layer.

On the other hand, Metis simply treats the Ethereum mainnet as a memo storage or bulletin board. Its relationship with the Ethereum mainnet is similar to the relationship between most Bitcoin L2s and the Bitcoin mainnet, achieving maximum sovereignty.

Modular Rollup

Modular Rollup is currently divided into two subtypes: universal-purpose Rollups like Manta and Dapp Rollups like Aevo and Lyra.

The current state of Modular Rollup gives the impression of simply replacing the DA layer from Ethereum with modular blockchain DAs like Celesita and Avail.

However, this idea overlooks the deeper meaning of Modular Rollup, which is to innovate and challenge the hub-and-spoke structure of mainstream Rollups.

Modular Rollup empowers Dapp developers to escape the control of Ethereum and universal L2s, alleviating the phenomenon of building Rollups focused on Ethereum Foundation and VCs and returning to a user-centric product paradigm.

Restaking Rollup

Restaking Rollup is a new primitive introduced by RaaS service providers AltLayer and EigenLayer.

Compared to Metis in Sovereign Rollup, its verification network and consensus network are guided by the EigenLayer AVS node network, and its economic security comes from restaking ETH and LST, which provides higher security than native L2 protocol tokens.

Restaking Rollup inserts a relay layer named AltLayer Vital before the settlement layer, and inserts a relay layer named Altlayer Mach before the consensus layer and data availability layer, which carry some functions of the settlement layer, consensus layer, and data availability layer.

This architecture can enhance the security and finality of Rollup and reduce the cost of data availability verification.

Restaking Rollup also significantly reduces the threshold and cost of deploying Rollup. Currently, Altlayer supports deploying a Rollup in 5 minutes with zero code.

Among the four types mentioned above, Orthodox Rollup and Sovereign Rollup dominate the market as general Rollups. However, their deployment and operating costs are very high and not suitable for Dapp developers.

On the other hand, the modular Rollup and Restaking Rollup paradigms provide new choices for Dapp developers in 2024.

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