The Modular Renovation of Ethereum's Shopping Mall: Layer2 is Actually Ethereum's Execution Layer
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The Modular Renovation of Ethereum's Shopping Mall: Layer2 is Actually Ethereum's Execution Layer
The transition between Optimistic and ZK has also become highly modular, making the services provided by shopping centers, user experience, economies of scale, and network effects potentially more important.
Navigating Web3 tides with focused insightsAuthor: Mandalorian
The Ethereum mall is bustling and full of stores. Users can trade at shops like Uniswap and Curve, or play games at stores like Axie Infinity.
The Ethereum mall operates on decentralization principles. When users make purchases, there's no centralized institution like a bank to handle unified settlement.
Instead, independently operated cash registers (nodes) jointly maintain a decentralized ledger. This decentralized ledger is the Ethereum blockchain itself.
Since there's no central authority, detailed rules have been established for each independent cash register to ensure that all ledgers remain consistent and prevent malicious tampering by any single cashier.
First, every cash register must download this ledger. From the start, everyone shares the same version of the ledger.
Then, users begin submitting transactions. Each cash register maintains a data packet, capturing submitted transactions and working to fill their packet.
Next, according to specific proposal rules, one cash register’s data packet is selected as the official version (achieving consensus). Naturally, this chosen register now has a new data packet (a new block).
It then broadcasts information about this new data packet to others, who download it. In this way, all ledgers stay synchronized again.
Here comes the critical question!! After downloading the new data packet, how do other cash registers verify whether the transactions inside are legitimate? They do so by simulating and re-executing all transactions within the packet.
To validate transactions, cashiers must also maintain current states (such as user account balances, smart contract statuses) and store historical state data.
In summary, Ethereum mall cashiers are responsible for four key functions: Consensus (ensuring ledger consistency), Settlement (confirming transactions), Data (recording user balances and transaction history), and Execution (processing user transactions).
Therefore, Layer1 is typically divided into four layers:
1) Consensus Layer
2) Settlement Layer
3) Data Layer
4) Execution Layer
This design makes Ethereum highly decentralized and secure, but inefficient—users often face long queues waiting for settlement.
Thus began the "modularization" renovation of the Ethereum mall. (The concept of "modularity" was first proposed by the Celestia team and usually refers to Ethereum scaling.)
The renovation plan is called "Rollup," which involves building additional buildings around the original Ethereum mall to serve as auxiliary shopping centers.
Tall new buildings named Arbitrum, Optimism, zkSync, Scroll soon emerged, along with Manta Pacific built by Manta Network.
These new buildings connect to the main Ethereum building via "bridges."
For example, when users shop inside the Optimism building, after some time, the "cashiers" inside Optimism will compress and bundle the ordered user transactions and submit them to the main Ethereum building.
Cash registers in the main Ethereum building perform final settlement, confirming the validity of user transactions conducted in the Optimism building.
Remember how the main Ethereum building handles consensus (ledger consistency), settlement (transaction confirmation), data (user balances and transaction records), and execution (processing transactions)?
Now, these auxiliary malls take on the execution function—separating the execution layer from the main Ethereum building and reducing its load. In other words, each Layer2 is essentially an execution layer for Ethereum, including Manta Pacific.
The main Ethereum building effectively becomes a "settlement center," confirming finality of transactions from other buildings.
Moving user transactions off-chain and turning the main Ethereum building into a settlement center is quite clever. Compressing transactions from other buildings and submitting them in batches (Batch) to the main settlement center greatly improves Ethereum's transaction processing efficiency.
The problem is: How does the main Ethereum building ensure that transactions submitted by other malls are correct? What if cashiers in other malls cheat or maliciously alter transactions?
To address this, the main Ethereum building verifies transaction correctness in two ways: Fraud Proofs (Fraud Proof / Optimistic Rollup) and Validity Proofs (Validity Proof / ZK Rollup).
Fraud proofs rely on economic incentives—other cashiers can challenge a potentially malicious one by proving they altered transaction data. If the challenge succeeds, the challenger receives a penalty reward from the offending party.
Shopping centers using fraud proofs include Optimism and Arbitrum.
Validity proofs rely on cryptography. When users transact at malls like zkSync, Starknet, Scroll, or Linea, their cashiers aggregate transaction data and generate a cryptographic zero-knowledge proof (commonly known as a ZK proof) to prove changes in user balances and other state data.
The cashier sends this ZK proof to the main Ethereum settlement center, which uses cryptographic methods to verify the proof and thereby confirm the correctness of the underlying transactions.
Thus, Optimistic and ZK refer to how the main Ethereum building verifies transaction correctness from various malls, while Rollup describes how these malls bundle and compress their own transactions before sending them to the Ethereum settlement center.
Additionally, because ZK proofs involve cryptographic and mathematical generation processes, their encryption methods differ significantly from those used in the original Ethereum main building. As a result, Ethereum's existing settlement system doesn't natively support ZK proof verification.
This forces malls like zkSync, Starknet, Scroll, and Linea to modify their own settlement systems.
Such modifications require existing businesses in the main Ethereum building to learn and adapt to these new settlement systems, making it less friendly for legacy applications.
In contrast, Optimistic Rollup-based malls like Optimism and Arbitrum face almost no compatibility issues with Ethereum's settlement system.
Secondly, although ZK Rollup malls are theoretically more secure than Optimistic Rollups, the security of the ZK settlement system itself, the programming language used to write it, and the compiler translating ZK code into Ethereum-compatible formats still need time to be proven reliable.
Moreover, today, the distinction between Optimistic and ZK solutions has become highly modular. Therefore, the services provided by the malls, user experience, scale effects, and network effects may ultimately matter more.
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