Rollup is a good business, and there are two models in it.
One is a project dedicated to Rollup , the purpose of which is to attract other applications to deploy on their own Rollup, and they can earn the difference in miner fees. For example, the current OP and Arb are like this.
The other is that it is a project itself. In order to provide better user experience and more complete chain sovereignty, it made a Rollup by itself, which is mainly used to deploy its own applications and serve its original customers.
Last week, I heard someone predict that more than 20 Rollup will be born in the industry within half a year. I think this prediction is plausible.
Now it is not difficult to build a Rollup technology. The core technology components can be built with Opstack or Arbitrum Orbit, which is equivalent to having a complete open source solution. The difficulty is definitely lower than sending a chain with the SDK of the deployment chain.
In addition to the core components of Rollup, it is also necessary to develop a Cross-chain bridge to facilitate assets from other links into its own Rollup.
The other is the block explorer.
I think the most difficult and costly thing to deploy a Rollup should be these three things.
The resulting benefits are very obvious.
The miner fee is reduced, the upper limit of transaction throughput is increased, and the transaction confirmation time is more timely.
I think there will be a lot of investment opportunities when the process of doing Rollup business emerges in the ecology. Which projects will do Rollup?
I think cex will definitely do it.
First there is coinbase as a template, and other exchanges will follow suit.
But now the largest exchanges already have their own chains, like Binance has bsc, ok has okchain. The transaction throughput of these chains is not fully used, and the Gas fee is not high, so there is no need to do Rollup based on these chains.
As far as the current situation is concerned, the applications, assets, and ecology of their own chains are all concentrated on L1, which can exert a better composability effect. If these resources are split by Rollup, it may not be an optimal solution.
If there is a transaction on the own chain that needs to be Rollup, there is a high probability that it will be done based on Ethereum. I don’t know whether this will form a competitive relationship with the own chain.
As far as the data of the exchange's own chain is concerned, I think only BSC has the need to do its own Rollup.
For those transactions that have not been issued on their own chain, it is a very good choice to do Rollup, which can make up for the ecological defect of not having a chain.
For the DeFi project itself, I think there is no need to do Rollup.
DeFi projects need better composability and extremely high security requirements, and doing your own Rollup will hurt both.
DeFi projects are more willing to deploy their projects on mature Rollup, such as arb, which are the targets of Rollup competition, and there is no need to do it yourself.
It is difficult for me to understand why compound wants to build a chain by itself.
GameFi projects, especially GameFi platform projects, may have great incentives to do their own Rollup.
The GameFi project can first eliminate the need for composability, users will not be as sensitive to security as DeFi, and the demand for capital is not high. Therefore, the threshold for the Game project party to create a Rollup to obtain initial users will not be too high.
The most direct benefit of GameFi doing its own Rollup is that the Gas fee policy can be completely autonomous, including at least the following two items.
The Gas fee can be set by yourself. Although there are fluctuations in the cost of uploading packaged transactions to ETH-L1, in the long run, you can find a way to smooth it out and give users a stable and relatively low gas.
You can choose the currency of the Gas fee, and you can use your own platform currency.
The autonomy of these two Gas fee can even make the gamefi project a major profit item, earning the gas price difference.
The user experience of the GameFi project and the block confirmation time are highly correlated. Rollup can make the block confirmation time very short, and arb achieves it within 0.5 seconds. But what is even more amazing is the OP . The Rollup of OP itself has no concept of blocks, and each transaction on it is a block. OP's sorter sorts the transactions, and then each batch is packaged and uploaded to L1, which is regarded as a block.
If GameFi can obtain this power to sort all transactions, it is actually very conducive to designing better games.
For example, in fighting games, if shooting is a deal, if you and I shoot at almost the same time, who will die first? This is the result of sorting the two transactions.
For gamers, the autonomy of the chain is also very important. The so-called autonomy refers to whether the chain itself can make some modifications to the game, such as providing an interface and the like.
Those platform-based GameFi projects, such as Magic, Ape, and sandbox, are more suitable for Rollup.
Will those less successful public chains go to the Ethereum chain to do a Rollup to integrate into the Ethereum ecosystem?
have no idea.
This theme is worth continuing to think about in the next six months.
