Ethereum researcher Justin Drake publishes article discussing “native rollups”, which is expected to achieve trustless expansion

Odaily reported that Ethereum researcher Justin Drake posted on the ethresearch forum to discuss a new rollup design called "native rollups". In short, it relies on Ethereum L1 validators to perform the proof of state transitions. This contrasts with Optimism Rollup (e.g. Optimism, Arbitrum) or zk-Rollup (e.g. Starknet, ZKsync), which offload the computational burden to L2 and then rely on fraud or zk proof systems to generate the state root and proof, and then return to the mainnet. These proof systems have complex code, prone to errors and other vulnerabilities, which is why Rollup sequencers (entities that order transactions on L2) have historically been centralized. The concern over centralized sequencers has in turn spurred "based" Rollup designs like Taiko, which rely on Ethereum L1 validators to perform the ordering. Drake's proposal suggests introducing an "execution" precompile (a hardcoded function in the EVM) to verify the EVM state transitions of user transactions. Native rollups achieve two breakthroughs: no longer needing to invest in and maintain an expensive miner-prover network and specialized GPU hardware, as the proofs will be handled and executed by the L1 validators; and no longer needing to maintain a complex governance structure, including a trusted security council to approve contract upgrades for EVM equivalence. This effectively makes native rollups "trustless" by inheriting the security of Ethereum L1. Finally, like based rollups, native rollups will enjoy "synchronous composability" and not be subject to the 12-second block time constraint. Thanks to the "execution" precompile, L1 validators only need to verify the zk proofs, without having to execute the computations themselves.