As the Ethereum ecosystem continues to expand, it’s becoming increasingly clear that rollups alone cannot unlock its true potential. While they’ve been touted as a solution to scalability issues, their limitations are starting to hinder innovation and adoption.
The Problem with Rollups: Fragmentation and Limited Functionality
Rollups have become the go-to solution for addressing Ethereum’s scalability challenges. However, 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 don’t address the need to scale state or drive new use cases or innovation.
In reality, rollup usage has primarily been dominated by points farming schemes, lacking practical applications to move the space forward. The proliferation of rollups is a result of a broken, fragmented state and liquidity landscape that limits user and developer experience and adoption.
The True Scalability Challenge: Data and State Management
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.
Although zero-knowledge (ZK) rollups provide significant cryptographic advancements and are moving us away from the need to do everything on-chain, the ecosystem doesn’t need 200 different copies or slight modifications of the EVM, each with its decentralized exchange (DEX).
The Limitations of Rollups: Data Storage and State Management
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: Unlocking True Scalability and Innovation
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.
With Plasma, we can post a constant amount of data to the main chain regardless of user throughput. This approach addresses the need for scaling state and data management, providing a more robust solution than rollups alone.
Intents: A New Paradigm for Blockchain Architectures
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.
Unlocking Blockchain’s True Potential with Intent-Centric Architectures
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.
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.
The Future of Blockchain: Bolder Innovations and Focus on Solving Fundamental Issues
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 – to bring sovereignty and resilience to the systems we rely on daily.
Conclusion
Rollups have been a step in the right direction, but they’ve led to a more complicated Web3 experience. It’s time to rethink blockchain scalability and focus on intent-centric architectures that can unlock true innovation and adoption.
Adrian Brink is co-founder of 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.
This article is for general information purposes only and is not intended to 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.
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