Feels like the right moment for this thread with the Robinhood L2 chain just announced. Rollups were first conceived as a "scaling solution" for Ethereum. This framing is wrong imo. It's a new paradigm for the future of Web3 that will win out against monolithic chains (1/8) 🧵

2/ Pretty much everything visible in “crypto”—smart contracts, NFTs, AMMs, tokens, etc—can all be run within the Web2 framework. Hyperliquid and Binance Smart Chain are essentially examples…maybe Web 2.5? What's "onchain"? The divide between Web2 and Web3 is all about security.

3/ We're a space full of marketing terms. What the hell is “onchain”? It lies on a spectrum but comes down to a system having: - fewer points of failure (many servers need to be hacked for the service to violate its promises) - measurably high cost of carrying out such an attack

5/ Rollups simplify the critical security services that need to be run through a decentralized protocol underneath (aka "blockchain" or "layer 1" or "base layer"). These are: - data availability (data is recoverable) - finality (tx ordering does not change once confirmed) How?

6/ DA and transaction order finality is all apps really need from the baselayer. Everything else about state can be proven to end users or external protocols via zero-knowledge proofs! Once talked about as a thing of the future, ZKPs are fast and cheap enough to do this today.

7/ Rollups are closer to the architecture of Web2. Every webapp is already a “chain”—this funny term used in crypto to mean the same thing. It's easy to turn a webapp written in any framework into a rollup! Not to rearchitect it into a system of smart contracts on, e.g., Solana.

8/ So much attention is on the rollup bridge to L1 and how it's secured...fraud proofs or zk etc. But this isn't the main thing long term. Assets will move to rollups. What matters most in a baselayer for webapps? Data finality and availability. Faster is better all else equal.