Ethereum Gas fees have decreased, what core issues are L2 solving?

Different L2 solutions have their own merits.

Written by: Todd

From the current results, after the gas fee on the Ethereum L1 mainnet has dropped to its lowest level in 5 years, many projects feel that deploying on L1 doesn’t seem so impossible. So many people will ask, what core issues are the current L2 solutions addressing?

There is an old topic called the impossible triangle of blockchain. According to Vitalik’s explanation, it means that you can only choose two out of the three: 【security】, 【decentralization】, and 【scalability】.

Returning to the essence of technology, this is the problem that L2 should solve:

First, the status summary is placed on L1, maintained by the mainnet for 【security】;

Secondly, make an effort in the sorter to maintain [decentralization] as much as possible;

Finally, [scalability] is implemented as cleverly as possible by L2 off-chain.

Different L2 solutions have their own merits, and everyone is familiar with OP Rollup and ZK Rollup. Today, I want to talk about something different, such as Based-Rollup.

The Based L2 solution was also proposed by Vitalik Buterin first, and L2s like Taiko have been pushing the Based Rollup approach.

PS: Note that it is Based, which has nothing to do with Coinbase’s Base; Base is also part of the OP system.

As we all know, in a standard OP system, the sequencer has a lot of power. It can decide whose transactions come first and whose transactions come later, and even without malicious intent, it can profit through MEV. This is also why, for example, Metis proposes to create decentralized sequencers.

Different L2s handle MEV differently: for example, Arb advocates for fair treatment of MEV (strictly first-come, first-served), while OP is more encouraging and views MEV as a free market behavior, thus taxing MEV. However, regardless of the approach, L2 sequencers hold a significant position.

So Based-Rollup chooses to take a knife to the sorter—its philosophy is to let ETH L1 do the sorting directly, thereby limiting the power of the L2 sorter.

Referencing a chart from @taikoxyz’s document:

You can see that it is a three-step process:

In the first step, the L2 seeker packages the L2 transactions and sends them to the L2 block Builder.

The second step, the L2 block Builder constructs the block;

In the third step, L1 seekers will include the L2 block in the block they built on L1.

The L1 seeker and L2 builder here can be the same person.

This is another clever idea of “working two jobs”. In fact, the device performance of L1 searchers has redundancy, and doing an additional block construction for Taiko L2 is no pressure at all.

To use an inappropriate analogy, if we compare ETH and L2 to the relationship between a province and a city, then the idea of Based Rollup is: making the mayor (L2 builder) also serve as the vice governor (L1 searcher), which actually utilizes L1’s resources to protect L2’s security.

It has been exactly a whole year since Taiko’s TGE, and the Token Unlock will soon begin, so Taiko has also been brewing a new idea over the past year, called Based Booster Rollup/BBR.

Booster Rollup can also serve as a mirror for L1, which is quite an interesting idea. However, due to space limitations, the analysis of Booster Rollup will be expanded in the next article.