Ethereum Second Layers Take the Stage – Trustnodes

Representatives from Arbitrum, ZKSync, Optimism, StarkWare and Fuel (formerly Celestia), all pictured in that order, spoke of the challenges faced as well as potential timelines.

All stated that while they are decentralized in as far as censorship resistance and funds are secured by the ethereum base layer, there are tradeoffs in regards to the upgradability of the contract.

They also use similar governance methods in having some sort of input by different stakeholders while balancing quick upgrades in cases of bugs with allowing users to exit the network either because they don’t agree with the upgrade or for whatever reason.

Somewhat newcomer Fuel however stated they don’t upgrade at all, instead they follow the Uniswap approach in V1, V2, but Arbitrum’s co-founder Ed Felten pointed out that you need to upgrade to keep up with ethereum forks.

John Adler, a former ConsenSys alumni and co-founder of Fuel Labs, also suggested that once data sharding is implemented in eth, there can be what he calls Sovereign Rollups.

That is a second layer that uses ethereum only for data availability, with that second layer then able to soft and hard fork.

In regards to a timeline, none gave a date, focusing on milestones. For Arbitrum, the focus is on opening up validation which should be happening “quite soon.”

Then they need to decentralize the sequencer which Felton said can’t censor, but can manipulate the order of transactions. That will become a distributed sequencer in Arbitrum, with this being the last change they make out of all milestones.

For zkSync, they need to get out zksync v2 which has smart contracts, and then zkPorter, a seperate data availability layer.

zkPorter will need a token, with the focus then being on decentralizing…