As the Ethereum ecosystem expands, it has become increasingly clear that rollups have become a crucial solution to addressing scalability issues. However, despite their benefits, rollups also introduce new challenges, such as state and liquidity fragmentation, which can hinder innovation and limit user adoption. In this article, we will explore why rollups alone are not enough to unlock Ethereum’s true potential and what new approaches are necessary to achieve true scalability and innovation.
The Limitations of Rollups
Rollups have become the go-to solution for addressing Ethereum’s scalability issues by moving computation off the main chain. However, they do not fundamentally bring new functionality or capabilities to the ecosystem. Most rollups are essentially copies or slight modifications of the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM), which means that they still rely on Ethereum for data availability and security. While this improves transaction processes, it does little to increase Ethereum’s base layer capacity in the long run.
Rollup proliferation has primarily been driven by points farming schemes, lacking practical applications to move the space forward. This has resulted in a fragmented state and liquidity landscape, which limits user and developer experience and adoption. To unlock innovation, we need new approaches to application development that enable true scalability.
The True Scalability Challenge: Data and State
Rollups alone are not proper scaling solutions. It would be more accurate to define them as an execution-sharding solution. Scaling computing is not a complex problem – the complicated problem is scaling state and data access and distribution. Rollups still rely on Ethereum for data availability and security, which means that they do not fundamentally address the need to scale state.
Although zero-knowledge (ZK) rollups provide significant cryptographic advancements and are moving us away from the need to do everything onchain, the ecosystem does not need 200 different copies or slight modifications of the EVM, each with its decentralized exchange (DEX). Rollups currently don’t do enough to address the real bottleneck in blockchain scalability: data storage and state management. We need solutions that can scale data and state.
The Need for Plasma-like Constructions
Plasma-like constructions are the only viable solution currently for true scalability. Plasma eliminates reliance on a single data availability layer, enabling a world where significant data and computing can be kept offchain – e.g., on users’ edge devices. The amount of data a rollup needs to post to the main chain is proportional to the amount of usage it gets, which is not a proper scaling solution.
With Plasma, we can post a constant amount of data to the main chain regardless of user throughput. This is a fundamental shift in how we approach scalability and enables us to build systems that can truly scale.
Intent-Centric Architectures: Unlocking Innovation
Scalability is not the only challenge. We also need to ignite innovation at the application layer. New approaches to blockchain architectures and new primitives for application development are necessary. That’s where intent-centric architectures come into play.
Intents provide a new paradigm for building decentralized applications that abstract away the complexity of blockchain infrastructure for users. Intents only care about the ‘what’ and are less concerned with the ‘how,’ requiring users to define what they want to achieve without prescribing the intermediate steps needed.
Building DApps on an intent-centric operating system enables developers to tap into state and liquidity from anywhere in the Ethereum ecosystem (including layer 2s) and use the Ethereum main chain (or any layer 2) as the settlement layer. Generalized intents can facilitate the shared sequencing of Ethereum rollups, defragmenting states across chains and allowing developers to treat the entire multichain landscape as a unified development environment.
Unlocking Blockchain’s True Potential with Intents
The blockchain space needs to evolve beyond its current infrastructure focus to build user-friendly applications that solve real-world problems. Intent-centric architectures provide a new way of building decentralized systems that can unlock true innovation and scalability.
We need to be bolder in our innovations and more focused on solving fundamental issues. Only then can we hope to realize the ultimate vision of blockchain technology, which is to bring sovereignty and resilience to the systems we rely on daily.
Conclusion
In conclusion, while rollups have become a crucial solution for addressing Ethereum’s scalability issues, they alone are not enough to unlock Ethereum’s true potential. We need new approaches that can scale data and state, eliminate reliance on a single data availability layer, and provide a new paradigm for building decentralized applications. Intent-centric architectures offer a promising solution for achieving true scalability and innovation in the blockchain space.
About the Author
Adrian Brink is co-founder of Anoma, a distributed operating system for intent-centric applications. He also co-founded Cryptium Labs, a PoS infrastructure operator, and worked as a core protocol engineer on the Cosmos stack at Tendermint. Adrian currently serves on the Anoma Foundation Council.
Disclaimer
This article is for general information purposes only and is not intended to be and should not be taken as legal or investment advice. The views, thoughts, and opinions expressed here are the author’s alone and do not necessarily reflect or represent the views and opinions of Cointelegraph.
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