bkiepuszewski

Are alt-DA L2s a failed experiment at scaling Ethereum ?

Few months ago @l2beat announced that having an abysmal DA setup where one or two addresses can rug all users' funds, a practice that became prevalent in the space, will result in change of the classification of these systems. They will no longer be considered Validiums/Optimiums.

I strongly believe that we, as the community, want systems that give users some minimum security and decentralisation assurances, and that means having a proof system and - if data is not posted to Ethereum - have some basic guarantees about data availability.

Turns out project don't care. They don't care because their only goal was to grab some VC money, and get minimum user's attention just to launch a token in a way that's as cheap as possible. In practice this means using one of the RaaS providers and certainly not paying Ethereum for data. If they used @celestia, @AvailProject or @eigen_da they did not bother "informing" Ethereum bridge about it making all funds in the bridge from Ethereum easily ruggable. These projects will soon fade away - most are already ghost chains w/out any activity.

But maybe some projects are legitimate but users simply don't care. In this case the decision not to secure Ethereum bridge is a conscious design choice - however there are much better architecture designs than launching a completely insecure "L2" on RaaS.

Two years ago all signs suggested we will have thousands of rollups and @l2beat won't be able to keep up. Now it seems more likely that we might be seeing an opposite trend - just a couple of dozens of really good ones and a huge graveyard of failed projects that nobody wanted in the first place.

While 7702 introduced a lot of exciting new use cases we need to make sure that the transparency of Ethereum blockchain is not lost in the proces. Tracers (@BlockSecTeam , @TenderlyApp , etc...) - please show clearly the address of the delegated address code that is being executed as part of the transaction trace. More importantly - wallets should make sure that their code is verified - delegating to an unverified wallet is a crime, really (e.g @WhiteBit EIP-7702 Delegator)

For some time now @l2beat is tracking DA usage for various DA layers and projects. If you are interested how the recent Pectra upgrade affected Ethereum blob space, check out https://l2beat.com/data-availability/projects/ethereum/ethereum#throughput