Ethereum is the world computer. It will become a critical backbone of public internet infrastructure. The decentralized internet will mirror the internet with Ethereum serving as the core root of trust.

Introducing Chain IPs

Facebook.com, google.com, amazon.com - these are websites that people think of when they think about the internet. These human readable URLs are mapped to machine readable IP addresses by way of the Domain Name System (DNS). There’s about 13 “root” DNS servers that serve queries for these mappings.

The Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) oversees the global assignment of IP addresses. It delegates large blocks of IP addresses to Regional Internet Registries (RIR). Internet Service Providers (ISPs) receive IP blocks from RIRs and assign them to end user devices.

Chain IPs is a new term that is analogous to IP addresses. They follow the format of {ChainID}.{L2BridgeAddress}.{L3BridgeAddress}.*. This is a deterministic mapping of rollup blockspace to Chain IP based on how a rollup is deployed.

Ethereum plays the role of the IANA as a global issuer of chain IPs. The address space of chain IPs form a hierarchy where individual L2s and L3s own the issuance of their dedicated chain IP address space. This hierarchy also motivates the next new concept - “blockspace locality”.

Blockspace Locality for Lower Latencies

Today, there is no concept of blockspace “locality”. This means that all blockspace at L1, L2 or L3 level are all accessed globally. However, this means that we’re not taking advantage of the true power of rollups - the ability to serve a limited geography at lower and consistent latencies.

Ethereum has global locality which means that it’s state and nodes are meant to be globally distributed and globally accessed. L2s should ideally have regional locality with lower latencies while L3s should have local locality with negligible network latencies. Below, we compare the proposed locality of blockspace above with their analogous AWS counterparts in terms of p99 latency for the geography they’re intended to serve.

At local blockspace locality, rollups like MegaETH with low block times of 1 ms start to provide significant advantages when compared to other rollups. High throughput low latency rollups provide a horizontally scalable generic compute layer that’s competitive with servers in the cloud.

Verifiable Addressing

Chain IPs also serve as a form of verifiable addressing for cross rollup interoperability. When a packet is sent to a rollup, the chain IP is verifiable on the destination as the bridge contract addresses are unique. A rollup cannot pretend to be another rollup as chain IPs are enforced by the rollup bridge contracts all the way down to the L1. In comparison, chain IDs are non enforceable as many chains can claim to have the same chain ID.

A Tale of Two Internets

On the internet, IPs map to servers which expose a list of ports that can point to a website, API or database. On the decentralized internet, chain IPs map to rollups which expose a list of account addresses which can point to the hash of the website code (raw code in arweave), a smart contract or another rollup.

In this way, the decentralized internet becomes a mirror image of the internet today. One that relies on a decentralized root of trust in Ethereum while being as equally scalable as the internet today. The world computer becomes the entry point into a verifiable internet.