Ethereum researcher Justin Drake discusses "native rollups", promising to achieve trustless scaling
On January 23rd, Ethereum researcher Justin Drake posted on the ethresearch forum to discuss a new rollup design "native rollups". In short, it relies on the Ethereum L1 validator for proofs, namely state transition functions and validations. This is in contrast to Optimism Rollup (e.g. Optimism, Arbitrum) or zk-Rollup (e.g. Starknet, ZKsync), which pushes the computational burden of execution to L2 and then relies on a fraud or zk proof system to generate state roots and proofs and return to the mainnet.
Drake's proposal proposes the introduction of "execute" precompilation (the hardcoding function in the EVM), which will validate EVM state transitions of user transactions. Native rollups achieve the following two breakthroughs:
It is no longer necessary to invest in and maintain expensive miner prover networks and dedicated GPU hardware, as proofs will be handled and executed by L1 validators; it is no longer necessary to maintain complex governance structures, including trusted security boards, to approve contract upgrades to achieve EVM equivalence.
This actually makes native rollup "trustless" by inheriting the security of Ethereum L1.