The blockchains trilemma has been talked about for way to long now. The term coined by Vitalik Buterin, Co-founder of Ethereum has turned 5 years old but not yet mature enough to be found a solid solution for.
As the concept of blockchain trilemma states, the challenges faced by developers in creating a blockchain are Decentralization, Scalability and Security. While scalability provides for the upside, security prevents the downside and Decentralization provides for the middleware which acts as a trustless consensus based ownership.
Coming together all the three create a limitation factor for each other. Scalability and decentralization do no go hand in hand and while trying to make them both work in tandem, security is compromised.
There have been several concepts floated in order to make all three work in tandem. Some of the innovations that came as a result of these experimentations were:
Layer 1 Consensus
Layer 2
Relay Chains
Sidechains
Rollups
Sharding
Nested Blockchains
State Channels
While multiple projects are trying these approaches, Vitalik has written out a new concept in his recent article called ‘What kind of layer 3s make sense?’
In the article, Vitalik talks about Layer 2’s being a general purpose scaling layer and Layer 3’s for customized scaling. Customized scaling might come in different forms: specialized applications that use something other than the EVM to do their computation, rollups whose data compression is optimized around data formats for specific applications, etc.
In comes Stackr Labs, SDK for building application-specific optimistic rollups on a decentralized network of sequencers.
What is Stackr Labs aiming to solve?
App Specific Customizability leading to Efficiency It has been proven time and again that app-specific rollups can be optimized to a great degree for the particular objective they fulfill. For Example: Hubble Optimistic Rollup that has been optimized for ERC-20 transfers making it the cheapest solution for token transfers
Saving real estate in Developer time bank Currently, In a see-saw devs need to choose building their own project and building it’s infrastructure layer for deeper optimizations. They are forced to buidl upon the general purpose infra layer thereby sacrificing optimizations. Example: dYdX L2 which uses StarkWare’s StarkEx solution for optimizing trading is a living example for efficiently buidling without compromise.
Native EVM storage isn’t needed by all As mentioned above, most specialized applications do not need native EVM storage but end up clogging the blockchain because of no other option. Stack Network rethinks application development by abstracting out EVM and having the developer only write applications in a web2 focussed way, that is using common languages using JS or Rust only.
Why is App specific rollups a better idea than other older concepts?
General purpose developments in Layer 1, Layer 2, Sharding & Rollups are great but with Web3 expanding in such a rapid pace all the DeFi, NFT, P2E, Metaverse projects of the future will need custom optimization to provide the best experience to users.
While some would argue all the mentioned problems can be solved by building App specific chains. Well to some extent you are correct because app chains provide high level of customisations and are cheaper to run but where they lack is decentralization and Lack of composability. These ultimately lead to 51% attacks and bridging risks.
With it’s design Stackr Network is able to harness Ethereum’s security while making customizations an opportunity to the developers.
Using Stackr SDK, the developers only need to worry about these 2 things -
How they define the state
How they define the state transition function
With majority of time consumption being brought down with the SDK, Devs will have more power to build customised infrastructure that integrates with their Dapps in the best way possible. This ultimately leads to streamlined end user experience.
What Stackr isn’t?
Stackr presentation at ETHOnline states that Stackr isn’t a ETH Killer or isn’t isolated from ETH, it isn’t a separate EVM Rollup and nor a separate new blockchain.
But these are just top of the line thoughts for the masses, while diving deep into Stackr and Layer 3 article by Vitalik at the same time, I realized that Stackr isn’t a layer 3 solution. Reason?
’Data can be compressed once, but it cannot be compressed again - if it can, then there's generally a way to put the logic of the second compressor into the first, and get the same benefit by compressing once. Hence, "rollups on top of rollups" are not something that can actually provide large gains in scalability - though, as we will see below, such a pattern can serve other purposes.’ Other purposes is exactly what Stackr aims to solve for.
Ps: For anyone sticking by, I love you and I hope this article added value to you in anyway possible. This is my first time trying hands at long form content and I shall be pursuing this more.
For any feedback feel free to contact me over my Farcaster/twitter username: @nmnsth I would highly appreciate your reviews.
See ya at my next attempt to long form content!
