Roll-ups to preserve Ethereum’s DeFi monopoly despite competitors: Messari

Crypto data aggregator Messari believes that roll-ups will beat out Layer 1 solutions in the race to scale Ethereum.

Although Eth2’s beacon chain genesis successfully took place on Dec. 1, analysts predict the upgrades spanning the Ethereum 2.0 overhaul will not be completed until 2022. As such, Messari recently asserted the wait for Eth2’s completion “leaves an opportunity for other low-fee, low-latency competitors to eat into Ethereum’s monopoly.”

“Those snake-bitten by rising fees will inevitably explore alternative platforms with better transaction throughput and lower fees if they haven’t already.”

Despite praising efforts from Near, Cosmos, and Solana to build interoperable bridges with Ethereum, and move to develop scalable chains compatible with Ethereum’s virtual machine from Polkadot and Avalanche, Messari predicts the second-layer solution of roll-ups will beat out Layer 1 networks as the crypto community’s interim scaling solution of choice.

Messari describes roll-ups as “new blockchains that process transactions independently of Ethereum” before submitting the transactions to the main chain in batches. Unlike Layer 1 solutions, Messari claims that roll-ups can fulfill computational processes “without bogging down the underlying network with excess data and computing requests.”

Messari also asserts that Ethereum’s robust community will deter developers from wandering elsewhere, tweeting:

“While Ethereum competitors will offer similar technical advantages, Ethereum’s strong community will continue to serve as its biggest moat.”

Despite roll-ups still being several months away from being “production-ready,” Messari notes that “a burgeoning ecosystem” has already formed around various roll-up projects, including protocol development from Optimism, Offchain Labs, and Matter Labs, and plans for early implementations by Synthetix and Uniswap.

If combined with sharding and proof-of-stake consensus, Messari predicts that roll-ups could allow the Ethereum network to process up to 100,000 transactions per second, an increase in transactional throughput of more than 10,000 times:

“If rollups pan out, Ethereum should be able to maintain its virtual monopoly on DeFi applications while Eth2 remains in its incubation stage.”