EthCC Activity Review: Chain Abstraction and Pre-Confirmation Theme Discussion

Author: The Rollup Source: X, @therolupco Translation: Shan Oppa, Bitchain Vision

In EthCC “Sequencing & CAKE Day”, OneBalance hosted a panel discussion on chain abstraction and pre-confirmation, which The Rollup reviewed and summarized.Team members include:

• Ethereum’s @VitalikButerin

• @arjunbhuptani by Everclear.org

• @hxrts by Skip Protocol

• Anomatica’s @cwgoes

Here are the complete review notes for the discussion

Pre-confirmation changes the dynamic mechanism of block builders.

Searchers now take on most of the heavy lifting on each transaction.Yes, that means heavier proposers, but lighter builders.

PBS (Proposer-Builder Separation) separates the proposer and builder, introducing the concept of builder, but now they have more work to do.

However, Vitalik believes that some form of PBS is better even for Layer2, which is not based on Ethereum.Of course, the more dependencies the Rollup-based solution will bring to L1.

The discussion quickly turned to pre-confirmation, noting that there are two types: performing pre-confirmation and including pre-confirmation.

Performing pre-confirmation is a stronger type that guarantees sorting and provides a state root.

This is important for Rollup users who want security and quick certainty.

On the other hand, including pre-confirmation does not make any guarantees about transaction sorting except that the transaction is included before other given transactions arrive at the same state.

An important difference needs to be paid attention to here.

If there is a market where solvers are willing to buy stronger execution guarantees, they will buy it.

Are ordinary users or even DeFi users?Do they care about what the state root is?

We certainly want the payment confirmation time to be reduced from 12 seconds to 1 second, but for all practical users, including pre-confirmation seems to be good enough (and it is also easier to build on L1).

Vitalik is concerned about over-optimization to cater to “advanced” users.

Yes, an entity that trades $100 million may not be satisfied with including pre-confirmation because pre-confirmation itself requires a lot of collateral.

How do these pre-confirms be executed?Even in the presence of collateral?

One approach is to reach an off-chain agreement between the user and the sorter, setting penalties for the sorter to ensure that the transaction is included and executed.

In short, the group reached a consensus that the purpose of pre-confirmation was to make the Rollup-based scheme work properly.

Additionally, the purpose of the Rollup-based scheme is to make the shared sort work.

The sorter needs to agree on who the next sorter is.Therefore, there is a strong Schelling point for the shared sorter (for sorting), which can fix the fragmentation problem of Ethereum (atomic composability across Rollup).

As Arjun said,As the discussion turns to intention, his vision is that users no longer operate the chain directly, but interact with the solver.

The solution that provides assurance needs to be sure that the funds on the source chain are secure and will not be reorganized.

Sam mentioned that Skip has an IBC repeater and supports Hyperlane, but there is no solver and can connect directly to the target chain.

Verifiers pick up messages in both networks and pass them on the other end, a typical bridge design in the current era.

The discussion has been going on for a longer time, but here are some of our key points:

1. Vitalik is not a major proponent of single-slot certainty.

2. We are trying to use Rollup based solutions because shared sorting can be implemented based on Rollup, thus solving the fragmentation problem of Ethereum.

3. There is a lack of consensus on “fast blocks and no pre-confirmation” or “slow blocks and fast pre-confirmation”.

Overall, it was a very technical and high-quality group discussion that kicked off this week’s work.