Author: Donovan Choy, Blockworks; Compiled by: Bai Shui, Golden Finance

The Ethereum Foundation is experiencing some civil unrest, but the research and development of the world's computer continues.

Ethereum researcher Justin Drake published a compilation article on the ethresearch forum yesterday about a new rollup design called "native rollups".

If you're as non-technical as me, it can be tedious to keep up with Ethereum's ever-changing rollup design landscape - let alone keep up with its entire infrastructure stack.

But the simplest way to think about native rollup is that it relies on the Ethereum L1 validator for attestation, i.e. state transition functions and verification.

This is in contrast to Optimism Rollup (e.g. Optimism, Arbitrum) or zk Rollup (e.g. Starknet, ZKsync), which push the computational burden of execution to L2 and then rely on fraud or zk proof systems to generate state Root and prove, and get back on mainnet.

These proof systems are code-heavy and prone to bugs and other vulnerabilities, which is why Rollup sequencers (the entities that sequence transactions on L2) have historically been centralized. Complaints about sorter centralization have in turn motivated “rollup-based” designs such as Taiko, which rely on Ethereum L1 validators to perform ordering.

But back to native Rollup. Drake’s proposal suggests introducing an “execution” precompiler (a hard-coded function in the EVM) that will validate EVM state transitions for user transactions. This enables several breakthroughs:

Native rollup eliminates the need to invest in and maintain an expensive miner-certifier network, as the proofs will be processed and executed by L1 validators.

Native rollups eliminate the need to maintain complex governance structures, including trusted security committees approving contract upgrades to achieve EVM equivalence.

Both unlocks actually make native rollups “trustless” by inheriting the security of Ethereum L1.

Finally, like rollup-based rollups, native rollups will enjoy "synchronous composability", which refers to the ability of on-chain transactions to be combined on different rollup chains instead of being fragmented. Restoring seamless fungibility of assets on L1 and L2 chains will solve the long-standing UX issue of continuous bridging across chains.

However, unlike rollup-based rollups, the execution of native rollups is not limited by the 12-second block time. Since precompilation is "performed", the L1 verifier only needs to verifyzk proof without having to perform the computation yourself.

Can native aggregation alleviate the problem of ETH value accumulation? Maybe.

From what I understand, validators will use the new precompile enforcement, which will make ETH necessary for transaction settlement.

Secondly, eliminating L2 governance (and its tokens) can redirect value back to ETH as the primary source of value.

Native rollups represent an incremental but critical step toward strengthening Ethereum’s value proposition and ETH’s role as the foundation of a decentralized ecosystem.