As we recently announced, Mantis is partnering with MagicBlock to bring ephemeral rollups (ERs) to our ecosystem. This will allow Mantis to become even more performant and scalable. Moreover, this will allow for the creation of Layer 3s (L3s) atop Mantis, unlocking enhanced utilities for AI agents, bots, privacy protocols, prediction markets, gaming platforms, and more. These L3s will be able to handle high levels of throughput with minimal latency - all while being natively interoperable with the Inter-Blockchain Communication (IBC) Protocol via Mantis and the Picasso Network.

What are ephemeral rollups?

To understand ephemeral rollups, one must first understand Layer 1s, Layer 2s, and rollups in general. We give a brief explainer of each of these technologies below:

• Layer 1 (L1) chains like Solana are the foundational blockchains validating and finalizing transactions, without reliance upon any other network.

• Layer 2 (L2) chains are secondary frameworks created atop these existing L1 chains, generally in order to resolve issues with scalability by acting as a secondary location for transaction processing. L2s rely upon L1s for security and finality.

• Rollups are a popular type of L2. 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. We have already discussed the benefits of rollups in detail in this blog. To summarize, benefits include scalability, security, decentralization, independent liveness and blockspace, customizability, and privacy.

Ephemeral Rollups are a specific type of rollup created by MagicBlock and detailed in their paper by Picco and Fortugno, 2024. ERs are a configurable dedicated runtime and auxiliary layer on the Solana Virtual Machine (SVM). Essentially, ERs function by leveraging the SVM’s parallelizability to break up an application’s state into clusters, temporarily transferring the state to the ER. Picco and Fortugno summarize the utility of ERs as follows: “these dedicated runtimes can be customized to provide higher operational speed, configurable ticking mechanisms, provable sessions and gasless transactions without composability-scalability tradeoffs”.

Because of their unique structure, ERs overcome limitations of L2 horizontal scaling and result in the following benefits:

• Base Layer Deployment: ER programs are deployed on the Solana L1 directly instead of a separate L2, avoiding the fragmentation created by other L2 solutions.

• Use of Solana’s Infrastructure: ERs inherit many benefits from Solana including the existing parallelization, speed, security, and developer tooling.

• Customization: Ephemeral rollups have a specialized, customizable runtime.

• Straightforward Developer Experience: Ephemeral rollups have a much lower developmental burden compared to other L2 scaling solutions.

How do ephemeral rollups support L3s on Mantis?

Layer 3 (L3) chains are an advanced scaling solution that are built on rollups and other L2. By implementing ephemeral rollups on Mantis, it becomes easy for developers to build their own layer 3s atop Mantis. They will be able to do this by using MagicBlock’s Engine. Developers can delegate any account from existing Solana smart contracts into the MagicBlock Engine to access faster performances, customizable runtimes and/or dedicated blockspace associated with ERs. This allows developers to easily create new L3s for their applications, while tapping into the simultaneous benefits of Mantis and ERs.

What types of protocols will benefit from Mantis L3s?

Any protocol seeking scalability, security, interoperability, and/or intent centricity can benefit from deploying on an L3 on Mantis. Specific examples are provided below:

Games: On-chain games building on Mantis using ERs will have many benefits:

• Persistence & Autonomy: L3s built using ERs do not rely on any centralized infrastructures, meaning they cannot be stopped.

• Permissionless Composability: With ERs, game data and logic is open. This means that players and developers are able to add onto games or even interoperate with other games.

• Interoperability & Chain Abstraction: Mantis uses the Picasso Network’s IBC connections to provide interoperability between Solana, Ethereum, Cosmos, Polkadot, Kusama, and even more chains in the future. Games built on Mantis L3s will be able to leverage this trust-minimized interoperability.

• Scalability: L3s are the ultimate scaling solution, handling the immense amounts of data processing often associated with games.

Orderflow Destinations: These are DeFi protocols that orderflow goes to. Examples include decentralized exchanges, lending protocols, derivatives platforms, or Telegram bots. Benefits these protocols will receive from building on Mantis via ERs include:

• Increased Order Flow/Liquidity: All of these protocols can receive orderflow via Mantis, acting as solutions to users’ intents.

• Interoperability & Chain Abstraction: Protocols built on Mantis are able to natively interoperate over the IBC to Solana, Ethereum, Cosmos, Polkadot, Kusama, and more chains in the future.

• Scalability: Protocols that need to manage large amounts of data such as trading bots, prediction markets, and popular exchanges are easily able to handle this significant throughput of information.

• Privacy/MEV Protections: Ephemeral L3s can provide an isolated transaction environment so that sensitive user data is confidential. This can protect against negative types of MEV such as frontrunning.

Overall, any sort of protocol can benefit from the advantages of the Mantis cross-chain intent settlement framework and ephemeral L3s. If you’re a developer interested in building on a Mantis ephemeral L3, we encourage you to reach out to our team. We can’t wait to see what sort of innovations the community comes up with!