Unlocking Blockchain’s True Potential Requires More Than Just Rollups
As the Ethereum ecosystem continues to expand, the challenges created by rollups are becoming increasingly evident. While rollups have become a popular solution for addressing Ethereum’s scalability issues, they alone do not unlock new functionality or capabilities for developers. In this article, we will explore why rollups are not enough and what we need to move beyond them.
The Dangers of Rollup Fragmentation
Most rollups are essentially copies or slight modifications of the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM). While they reduce transaction fees by moving computation off the main chain, they do not address the need to scale state or drive new use cases or innovation. Alternative virtual machines (altVMs) provide developers with new programming language options, but they too do not fundamentally bring new functionality to the ecosystem.
Rollup usage has primarily been dominated by points farming schemes, lacking practical applications that move the space forward. Rollup proliferation is a result of a broken and fragmented state and liquidity landscape that limits user and developer experience and adoption. To unlock innovation, we need new approaches to application development. To enable true scalability, we need better state and data management approaches.
The True Scalability Challenge Lies in Data and State
Rollups alone are not proper scaling solutions. It would be more accurate to define them as an execution-sharding solution. Scaling computing is not a complex problem – the complicated problem is scaling state and data access and distribution. Rollups still rely on Ethereum for data availability and security, which improves transaction processes but does little to increase Ethereum’s base layer capacity in the long run.
While zero-knowledge (ZK) rollups provide significant cryptographic advancements and move us away from the need to do everything on-chain, we don’t need 200 different copies or slight modifications of the EVM, each with its decentralized exchange (DEX). Rollups currently don’t do enough to address the real bottleneck in blockchain scalability: data storage and state management. We need solutions that can scale data and state.
Plasma and Intents Will Unlock True Scalability
The only viable solution for true scalability is Plasma-like constructions. Plasma eliminates reliance on a single data availability layer, enabling a world where significant data and computing can be kept off-chain – e.g., on users’ edge devices. The amount of data a rollup needs to post to the main chain is proportional to the amount of usage it gets, which is not a proper scaling solution.
With Plasma, we can post a constant amount of data to the main chain regardless of user throughput. Scalability is not the only challenge; we also need to ignite innovation at the application layer. New approaches to blockchain architectures and new primitives for application development are necessary.
Unlocking Blockchain’s True Potential with Intents
Intents provide a new paradigm for building decentralized applications that abstract away the complexity of blockchain infrastructure for users. Intents only care about the ‘what’ and are less concerned with the ‘how,’ requiring users to define what they want to achieve without prescribing the intermediate steps needed.
Building DApps on an intent-centric operating system enables developers to tap into state and liquidity from anywhere in the Ethereum ecosystem (including layer 2s) and use the Ethereum main chain (or any layer 2) as the settlement layer. Generalized intents can facilitate the shared sequencing of Ethereum rollups, defragmenting states across chains and allowing developers to treat the entire multichain landscape as a unified development environment.
Combining Plasma and Intents for True Scalability
By combining the scalability potential of Plasma-like approaches with the advantages of intent-centric systems, we can unlock new functionality and use cases for rollups, ending stagnation and fragmentation. This evolution will bring us closer to a new paradigm of innovation for developers and a better experience for users.
Conclusion
To unlock blockchain’s true potential, we need to be bolder in our innovations and more focused on solving fundamental issues. Rollups have led to a more complicated Web3 experience, but with Plasma and intents, we can create a future where scalability is no longer an issue. We owe it to ourselves and the next generation of developers to strive for something greater than what we have today.
About the Author
Adrian Brink co-founded Anoma, a distributed operating system for intent-centric applications. He also co-founded Cryptium Labs, a PoS infrastructure operator, and worked as a core protocol engineer on the Cosmos stack at Tendermint. Adrian currently serves on the Anoma Foundation Council.
