As a hip-hop fan, really enjoyed this one. It was also the first time I've heard about based/booster rollups, and this Google Chrome-like option for more advanced users looks interesting. Wondering what are the potential risks of this solution and what would need to happen for L2s to follow this path as they'd have to share their liquidity with others.
Thank you so much! Yeah, I really had fun with the titles! Well, there are multiple challenges: - A Based Rollup has to follow the Ethereum block time and post a block every 12 seconds. At first, validators didn’t have enough transactions to post to be profitable, so Taiko had to sponsor validators and lost a bit of money. - Based Rollups need pre-confirmations to be able to confirm a transaction instantly instead of every 12 seconds, but this needs to be implemented, and most early designs include some centralized entity. Wait and see. I might want to add this part to the article since these are real drawbacks. As for what L2s need to do, basically, to be Based, you just have to get rid of your sequencer and use L1 validators (I can't be more specific than that because it's way above my pay grade, but I can check, lol). To be Boosted, I think it's more drastic, as you have to be "mostly" Type 1, so very Ethereum-compatible. I'm not 100% sure, but Type 4 rollups like zkSync and Starknet wouldn’t work. And I think Optimistic Rollups wouldn’t work as they have no validity proofs, only fraud proofs. But again, it's quite a technical field, and I'm still learning!
Thanks for answering the questions! And if L2s get rid of the sequences, who makes the money for running the network? L1 validators?
AFAIK yes exactly. The Based Rollup would give up this source of revenue. In this video: https://x.com/therollupco/status/1829566988387332189 They explain that the Booster Rollup can keep a base fee to themselves and the rest to the L1 validators, but not sure about the details.