Recently, Composable and its Picasso Network have been achieving many “firsts” in the Solana ecosystem. This includes establishing the first connection between Solana and the Inter-Blockchain Communication (IBC) Protocol and the first instance of restaking on Solana.

Now, with the Mantis rollup, we are pleased to be introducing the first rollup on Solana. We hope that this can set a new standard, where the benefits of rollups are merged with the benefits of the Solana ecosystem. Intents can be submitted from anywhere to the Mantis rollup, with Solana as the settlement layer. As a result, the Mantis ecosystem is more performant and scalable, and the user experience is improved through increased security and speed as well as reduced cost.

Why Solana?

At the time of writing, Solana is the 4th largest blockchain in terms of total market capitalization, which is around $74.5 billion. Solana is also home to a flourishing DeFi ecosystem. Solana is popular for good reason: it offers a number of unique advantages over other blockchains. Below, we have highlighted some of these benefits, which drove us to build Mantis with Solana as its settlement layer:

Fast Finalization:

TowerBFT is the consensus mechanism used on Solana. Helius provides a deep dive on the Solana consensus mechanisms here for those interested in the technical details. TowerBFT delivers a number of benefits to Solana. One notable benefit is fast finality. Because of TowerBFT, transactions on Solana are finalized much faster than transactions on other blockchain ecosystems. For Mantis, this fast finality helps ensure that rollup transactions being sent to Solana for settlement are finalized quickly and rendered immutable.

Privacy Control:

Solana’s consensus is leader-based. Specifically, there is only one lead validator (the “slot leader) at a time. Their role is to  build and propose blocks. Then, all other validators can attest to the validity of these blocks and are able to replay identical copies of these blocks themselves. This slot leader rotates every 4 blocks (around 1.6 seconds total) according to the leader schedule, which is randomized relative to validators’ stake amounts. This ensures that transactions on Solana are secure and private. Helius provides a deep dive on the Solana consensus mechanisms here for those interested in more information.

On the Mantis rollup, we use a validator client to make order flow private. Since Mantis will run the only validator on the Mantis rollup, we will be able to preserve the privacy of transactions. This protects against frontrunning and other malicious forms of MEV that can result from transactions not being private.

Custom VM Components:

The Solana Virtual Machine (SVM) is Solana’s execution environment. Developers can create custom SVM components. This was important for us on Mantis, as we wanted to build an ecosystem tailored to the functionality of our protocol. For example, we were able to build SVM components that provide us with modular control over orderflow. On Mantis, it is important for us that orderflow is properly managed as it is sent to and from various blockchains and apps.

Native IBC Integration:

Through developments from the Picasso Network, Solana has been integrated with the Inter-Blockchain Communication (IBC) Protocol. Mantis is able to use Picasso’s Solana IBC connection to trustlessly interoperate with apps and protocols on all other IBC-enabled ecosystems (Ethereum, Cosmos/the Interchain, Polkadot, Kusama, and soon Bitcoin and more). Utilizing IBC to move assets between the Mantis layer 2 (L2) and various L1s ensures quick and easy transfers without the long withdrawal times typically seen in other rollups. Moreover, the IBC provides a highly secure, trust-minimized mechanism for cross-chain transfers. Read more about how the Mantis rollup uses IBC for interoperability here.

Why a Rollup

Rollups are layer 2 blockchains that enable transaction processing off of the main layer 1 chain. Their name is derived from their ability to “roll up” a number of transactions into a single piece of data that is sent to the L1 chain. Benefits of rollups are as follows:

Scalability:

Rollups were created as a scaling solution to address the computational overload on Ethereum that resulted in significant delays and skyrocketing transaction costs. Rollups and other L2 scaling solutions successfully lessened these issues on Ethereum, mitigating delays and lowering transaction costs.

Security, Decentralization, and Native Interoperability of the L1:

Rollups leverage the security and decentralization of the underlying L1. That is because the transactions from rollups are settled and recorded on the L1. Rollups are further natively interoperable with their L1 and any other ecosystems and applications built on that network.

Additional Security from Proofs:

Security on rollups is further enhanced by their use of proofs that ensure the state root is correct. For optimistic rollups, these are fraud proofs. For zero knowledge (ZK) rollups, they are ZK proofs. If these proofs find that the state root is incorrect, all batches dating back to the incorrect batch can be reverted.

Independent Liveness:

Importantly, rollups do not go down when the base L1 chain goes down. This is important to help us maintain liveness of the Mantis ecosystem.

Sovereign Blockspace:

Rollups also have sovereign blockspace from the underlying base chain. This means that Mantis can manage the blockspace of its own rollup. For example, Mantis blockspace could easily be sold in a blockspace marketplace. This would result in more efficient blockspace allocation.

Customizability:

Another major advantage of rollups is that they are extremely customizable. This feature was very important to Composable in its creation of Mantis: the Mantis rollup is a complex design that is carefully tailored and optimized for facilitating cross-chain user intent settlement.  For example, rollups can have their own fee structures independent from their underlying L1 blockchains. This was particularly important given that we are building Mantis within the Solana ecosystem. The existing Solana fee structure has been largely regarded as the cause for the network’s recent congestion issues. Therefore, we can implement our own fee structure to protect against these issues occurring on Mantis.

Privacy:

L2s act as an additional layer for processing. This allows for selective preprocessing auction rights to various searchers or other entities. As a result, intents and solutions on the Mantis rollup are able to remain private.

Why a Solana Rollup: The Best of Both Worlds

Creating a rollup on Solana allowed us to combine the strengths of rollups with those of the Solana ecosystem. A number of other projects such as Nitro and Eclipse have been working to launch SVM rollups, underscoring the exciting opportunity that rollups on Solana represent. Composable is pleased that it is the first to successfully deliver a rollup on Solana. We believe this is the optimal platform for our Mantis framework thanks to its many benefits including privacy, interoperability, customization, scalability, speed, security, and lowered costs.