Rollups, especially the optimistic rollup, are being considered by the community as the most promising short to medium term Ethereum scaling solution at the moment. The reason is that fundamentally, rollup solutions use data on-chain techniques instead of data off-chain techniques used by other scaling solutions such as Plasma. This choice removes the need for semi-trusted operators and enables generalized scalable side chains.

Currently, there are a number of teams developing rollup solutions either optimistic rollup or zk rollup, and more teams are coming. Unfortunately existing rollup solutions don’t have a viable business model YET to fund the standalone operation of this Dapp infrastructure for the long-term. This will become the critical obstacle for mainstream Dapps to consider and eventually adopt one of the solutions. At the end of the day, no product or service will take the risk to adopt an infrastructure that will go away tomorrow.

On the bright side, the permissionless and merged consensus characteristics of rollup technologies make it easy for Dapp developers to incorporate rollup technologies into their products or services and solve the scaling issue by combining the operations of both Dapps and the rollup infrastructure. It is not an ideal approach since it will add additional unnecessary technical complexities into Dapps. But Dapps have incentives to absorb the cost of operating the rollup infrastructure.

90% Dapps won’t need to worry about scaling challenge

As we all know, scaling is a hard challenge due to the Blockchain Trilemma, e.g. satisfying all three properties: security, decentralization, and scalability, is very hard. Does rollup solve the trilemma and if it does, what is the tradeoff? It kind of does and it has to scarifice “on-chain settlement time”, an implicit assumption in the Blockchain Trilemma.

If the new property: on-chain settlement time, is added into the ring, the Blockchain Trilemma will transform into the Blockchain Tetralemma as shown in Figure-1. In Tetralemma, a system can have three out of the four properties. Rollup solutions incur delays in on-chain settlement time and these delays come from waiting for transactions to aggregate, challenge period in optimistic rollup, proof generation time in zk rollup, withdrawal latency, etc.

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