Subscribe to Bankless or sign in
That's the bold claim Succinct's Uma Roy has been making for some time now, and it's becoming more and more true by the day. Ethereum's Layer 2s – first Mantle, then World Chain, and now Arbitrum and its ecosystem – are shifting from "optimistic" assumptions to cryptographic certainty through zero-knowledge proofs.
Ethereum's original scaling challenge was simple to understand but hard to solve: the L1 got congested, fees skyrocketed, and users suffered. Rollups emerged as the answer, bundling transactions offchain before settling on Ethereum. But we ended up with two flavors: optimistic and zero-knowledge.
The former, which is the dominant standard for rollups like Arbitrum or Base today, assumes transactions are valid unless someone challenges them within a week, meaning some illegitimate transactions could slip through to mainnet. The latter guarantees transaction legitimacy via cryptography and high-level math.
Subscribe for free to continue reading
- Support the Bankless Movement
- Access to thousands of articles
- Complete archive of Bankless episodes
- Embark on free quests in Airdrop Hunter
- Daily alpha in your inbox
Already subscribed? Sign in
