Motivations
Radius builds with three key motivations: sustainability, interoperability, and ensuring data availability for rollups.
Sustainability
Rollups have emerged as a promising solution for improving blockchain scalability and throughput. However, rollups face the challenges of harmful MEV (Maximal Extractable Value) and censorship when relying on centralized sequencers. These practices not only result in financial losses for users, both directly and indirectly, but also undermine trust in the entire ecosystem.
Although decentralizing sequencers through consensus can partially mitigate these risks, it often comes at the expense of scalability and increased operational costs. But most importantly, even in a decentralized environment, transactions remain transparent which allow the sequencers to engage in transaction reordering like frontrunning and sandwiching to extract profit.
While rollups hold immense potential for the future, they need to recognize the importance of prioritizing user protection. The goal of Radius is to create a sustainable rollup ecosystem where harmful MEV and censorship are eliminated with encrypted mempools, removing the centralizing power of sequencers for a fair trading environment.
Interoperability
Interoperability is a critical aspect in the realm of the rollup world. Currently, each rollup operates independently within its own sequencer, prover, and execution environment. This fragmented structure of the rollup ecosystem undermines the benefits of composable blockchains and creates siloed ecosystems. It also creates numerous challenges for users who interact with multiple rollups, including high fees and poor user experience.
The diagram below illustrates one potential solution to address the issue of rollup silos.
The shared sequencer can be leveraged as an effective communication tool that improves cross-rollup interoperability enabling data synchronization and helping achieve ‘consistent state’ across different rollups.
Additionally, we’re exploring the benefits of atomic composability through the use of shared sequencer. Atomicity ensures that transactions from different rollups can be combined into a single transaction, guaranteeing that all transactions within a bundle either succeed or fail together. This eliminates scenarios where tokens are minted in one rollup before being burned in another, a situation that could arise when using independent sequencers.
By leveraging Radius, rollups can overcome the challenges of siloed environments and improve the potential of cross-rollup interoperability.
Ensuring Data Availability
In L1s, the transaction flow involves the process of transaction generation, block production, and finalization. In L2s, the transaction flow involves the sequencer, rollup, then data availability layer (DA). In these examples, the data availability ensured depends on the trusted layer.
When the rollup serves as the trusted layer, users can only trust and utilize the data once it has been executed by the rollup. In this scenario, data availability depends on the rollup’s execution. On the other hand, when the sequencing layer is the trusted layer, the transaction order becomes known shortly after it is submitted for faster confirmations. This allows state updates and ensures data availability with minimized delays, even before finalization occurs on L1.
Last modified 2mo ago