Optimism, developer of Optimistic rollups (a second layer solution that facilitates fast and cheap transactions on Ethereum) now allows anyone who wants to develop an application with these rollups to do so.
Initially it was not like that, but there was a white list. Those who wanted to implement Optimistic rollups in their developments, previously had to register and obtain permission from the company. In addition, both parties maintained contact to provide mutual feedback.
This stage of whitelisting, according to what the company reported in a statement, “served so that the projects based on Optimism had a great influence on the direction of the protocol as a whole.”
For example, the comments received prompted the company to provide equivalency with the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM, for its acronym in English) that allows the execution in the rollups, of the same smart contracts that can be carried out in the main network.
But now a new stage opens, which is described as follows by Optimism:
The removal of the whitelist marks a new chapter in Optimism’s history. Decentralization is a challenging and ultimately incremental process. The implementation of non-permissive contracts [‘permissionless’] brings us one step closer to our vision of a truly open, accessible and optimistic Ethereum [‘optimistic’].
Optimism, Ethereum rollup developer
Removing the whitelist too implies that updates that imply “regenesis” will no longer be made, that is, start from scratch, which is equivalent to losing the saved information. “All future updates will keep all the status data, transaction history and events,” explains Optimism and assure: “We are committed to keeping it that way.”
As can be seen from these messages, the aforementioned second layer solution for Ethereum is still largely centralized. It depends a lot on the decisions of your developers or, as in the previous example, on whether they meet their commitments.
The co-creator of Ethereum and the main reference of the community around this blockchain, Vitalik Buterin, is aware of this and left it written in a text that CriptoNoticias reviewed days ago.
According to the Russian-Canadian developer, in the future, the second layers of the network will tend towards centralization to achieve the objectives of scalability and security. Anyway, this shouldn’t be a problem for the Ethereum ecosystem, if you have a strong, decentralized base layer on which transactions sit.
What are rollups on Ethereum and how do they work?
Rollups, as mentioned in this text, are second-layer solutions developed to make Ethereum faster, cheaper, and scalable. Basically make transactions take place outside the main network, without the need to pay gas to miners and without having to suffer from the existing congestion.
Several transactions can be carried out outside the main network and fees must only be paid at the time of entering or exiting the rollups to settle the transactions (since that does imply interaction with the blockchain).
Rollups allow transactions outside the main Ethereum chain. Source: Ethereum Foundation.
Optimism rollups aren’t the only ones. Another company that stands out in the development of these scalability solutions is Arbitrum. These latest rollups were from the beginning compatible with existing developments in Ethereum, without the need for code modifications, which made several relevant protocols – Uniswap, for example – decide to implement them.