One of the main roadmaps and visions of bitcoin base layer is using it as a store of value rather than a payment method. Bitcoin is the most decentralized and robust blockchain out there with small blocks which makes the blockspace highly valuable and increases the gas price. Which is one of the reasons Most of the transactions happen on the lightning network which stores most of the info off-chain and maintains the most important info on chain as there is not much need to keep the regular txn data on chain when we can prove the hash with very little data. One of the same approaches as outlined with Vitalik in his endgame blog post, in the 2021 bull market the gas fee was through and virtually impossible to pay less than $5 just for a little txn blockspace and there was a lot of debate on the viability of ethereum and at the same time, amazing teams were building rollups which are these off chain scaling methods which process the txn and data off the main base layer here in Ethereum and post the proof of operation which is a very small amount of data compared to the full txn.

So the vision of future Ethereum, the base layer has many hyper-scaled rollups which derive their security from the mainnet for just a fraction of the cost of interactions.

Sorry for the bad handwriting, but here’s everything in single page

There are many cool rollups like arbitrum and optimistic who are work on the principal of optimistic rollups where as the name suggests the txns are assumed to be always right and accepted to approve & to make sure that fraud txns are not approved there is a time interval between sending and approval of txn in which if anyone has any objection can ask for cryptographic proofs and there will be a showdown of fraud proofs between the sender and objector. Fraud proofs are run by comparing roots of the Merkle tree and verifying the end roots with computation proofs,but with time intervals and these proofs come to a huge issue of settlement of txns what if I told you there is another path?

One of the most interesting Ideas I have found is of validity proofs(aka zk). Rollups that use validity proofs abstract away most of the data and maintain a root state on the mainnet to update the merkle tree where they post these proofs which is substantially smaller and can settle the signature without revealing anything about the real computation or interaction. They have a better settlement time as they don't need to revert back to blocks if there is a fraudulent transaction proved by the proof.

These are some amazing scaling pathways but with great powers come greater responsibilities. With Ethereum transitioning to pos mev has become a huge part of the debate where validators try to pack txns in a way that increases their profit aka extractable value which in some sense leads us to a more centralized system where the block production is not so distributed but this we can tackle this by building more censorship resistance node implementations. some good thoughts on limiting effect of centralized block production

There has also been debate on having decentralized sequencers and switching the block producer periodically.

a twitter thread where some ogs are calmly roasting each other lol, make sure to read the whole hread

To sum it up, the idea is to have Ethereum as a base layer with many rollups on top of it that maintain their proofs on the base layer making transactions cheaper and in the future having app-specific rollups that maintain root state on L2 rollups with validity proofs making gas fee & execution times even better for users while all the rollups and layers having interconnecting bridges like one big happy family!

PS: This blogpost was heavily inspired and sometimes might even seem dito cause been thinking about it way too much by the endgame and starwares amazing research on rollups and further utilities of rollups.Feel Free to buy me a coffee