Rollups alone won’t unlock blockchain’s true potential

Opinion by: Adrian Brink, co-founder of Anoma

Rollups have become the go-to solution to Ethereum’s scalability issues. As the ecosystem expands, however, the challenges created by rollups — including continued state and liquidity fragmentation and their inability to create a unified user experience — are becoming critical barriers to Ethereum’s evolution. 

Rollups alone do not unlock any fundamentally new functionality or capabilities for developers. We need new approaches to blockchain architectures to unlock Ethereum’s true potential rather than continuing to innovate at the margins.

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. It is the same for alternative virtual machines (altVMs), as they provide developers with new programming language options. However, altVMs do not fundamentally bring new functionality to the ecosystem. Rollup usage has primarily been dominated by points farming schemes, lacking practical applications to move the space forward.

Rollup proliferation results from a broken, 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. While this improves transaction processes, it does little to increase Ethereum’s base layer capacity in the long run. 

Although zero-knowledge (ZK) rollups provide significant cryptographical advancements and are moving us away from the need to do everything onchain. The ecosystem does not need 200 different copies or slight moderations 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 and spark innovation.

The only viable solution currently for true scalability is Plasma-like constructions. Plasma eliminates reliance on a single data availability layer. It enables a world where significant data and computing can be kept offchain — 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. That’s where intent-centric architectures come into play. 

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.

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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.

Unlocking blockchain’s true potential with intents

The blockchain space needs to evolve beyond its current infrastructure focus to build user-friendly applications that offer real utility. Rollups are essential to Ethereum’s evolution, but intents can help them uncover a new wave of innovation. It’s time to question if we are building technology that solves real problems or simply creating more complex systems that ultimately serve the same limited functions. 

With new approaches like intent machines, coupled with the scalability potential of Plasma, we can start to unlock a new paradigm of innovation for developers and a better experience for users, bringing the space more in line with the usability of Web2. This evolution benefits rollups and the space as a whole.

Rollups, while a step in the right direction, have led to a more complicated Web3 experience. To unlock blockchain’s potential, we need to be bolder in our innovations and more focused on solving fundamental issues. Only then can we hope to realize the ultimate vision of blockchain technology, which is to bring sovereignty and resilience to the systems we rely on daily.

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.

This article is for general information purposes and is not intended to be and should not be taken as legal or investment advice. The views, thoughts, and opinions expressed here are the author’s alone and do not necessarily reflect or represent the views and opinions of Cointelegraph.