Ethereum Faces Challenges, Puffer UniFi Paves a New Path

The meme coin issued by Trump's team on a certain public chain has caused a stir in the market, not only driving the valuation of that public chain's ecosystem to soar, but also leading a large amount of institutional funds to transfer from the Ethereum ecosystem. This dramatic change in market dynamics has not only shaken the market confidence in Ethereum's position in the public chain arena but also highlighted that the competition in the Layer 1 track is entering a critical turning point: in the face of dual challenges of scalability and user experience, the Ethereum ecosystem urgently needs breakthrough technological innovation.

In this context, the Puffer team launched the UniFi solution based on the Based Rollup architecture, opening up new possibilities for Ethereum's scalability. As a revolutionary Layer 2 solution for Ethereum, UniFi aims to address the four core pain points that constrain Ethereum's development: achieving atomic composability and instant transactions between L1 and L2, resolving the liquidity fragmentation issue in the L2 ecosystem, and introducing a decentralized ordering mechanism to enhance the utility of ETH tokens.

UniFi is innovatively based on the Based Rollup concept, transferring the responsibility of transaction ordering to Ethereum L1 validators, which not only significantly enhances security and neutrality but also provides a new perspective for reshaping Ethereum's competitive advantage. This technological breakthrough may become a key turning point for the Ethereum ecosystem when facing the new market landscape.

Based Rollup: A New Paradigm for Layer 2 Scalability

After the Ethereum Cancun upgrade, Layer 2 scaling solutions have returned to the market spotlight. Current mainstream scaling solutions Optimistic Rollups and ZK Rollups have both exposed significant limitations in practical applications.

Optimistic Rollups dominate the market, but their 7-day challenge window mechanism seriously affects liquidity, and they face high costs for fraud proofs during network congestion. ZK Rollups excel in transaction confirmation speed and data storage efficiency, yet incur higher operating costs due to the computationally intensive nature of zero-knowledge proofs, impacting overall processing performance. More critically, both types of solutions require the maintenance of independent centralized infrastructure, which not only increases the system maintenance burden but also somewhat deviates from the original design intent of decentralization.

To break through these technical bottlenecks, Ethereum Foundation researcher Justin Drake proposed the Based Rollup concept in March 2023. This innovative solution achieves deep collaboration between Layer 2 and Layer 1 by migrating the transaction ordering function to the Ethereum mainnet. In the Based Rollup architecture, the consensus layer, data availability layer, and settlement layer all rely on the Ethereum mainnet, while the Rollup network focuses solely on transaction execution and state updates. This design not only simplifies the technical architecture of Layer 2 but also fully inherits the activity of the Ethereum mainnet (Liveness), marking a significant breakthrough in existing scaling solutions.

The biggest advantage of Based Rollup is that it fully inherits the security of the Ethereum mainnet, eliminating complex designs such as independent sequencer validation and escape pod mechanisms, while significantly reducing system maintenance costs.

However, Based Rollup inherits the limitations of its transaction confirmation cycle while retaining the security of the Ethereum mainnet. Since the transaction ordering power relies entirely on Layer 1, the final confirmation time of Based Rollup is locked within the Ethereum block interval of ( about 12 seconds ). This time span is evidently too long for application scenarios with high timeliness requirements, such as DeFi, severely restricting the practical application prospects of Based Rollup.

To address this core pain point, Puffer has proposed a creative and comprehensive solution.

Pre-confirmation Mechanism: Resolving the Challenges of Based Rollups

In the process of Web3 ecosystem development, high-performance public chains have always faced a deep-seated contradiction between efficiency and decentralization. To resolve this dilemma, many off-chain preprocessing solutions have emerged in the market, achieving millisecond-level trading response through centralized order aggregation while effectively avoiding MEV risks. However, this method of improving efficiency inevitably introduces centralized risks, as it relies on a single entity for trade aggregation and asset custody.

In this context, the pre-confirmation mechanism that the Ethereum ecosystem is exploring provides a new perspective. This mechanism attempts to maintain decentralization while ensuring high performance by adding a preprocessing stage before transactions are on-chain.

Puffer is based on this concept and has developed an innovative UniFi AVS pre-confirmation solution in collaboration with EigenLayer. In its architectural design, Layer 2 transactions first enter a pool of validator nodes registered by Native ReStaking for processing. These validators, as native Ethereum nodes, can complete transaction pre-confirmations within 100 milliseconds, allowing users to obtain reliable predictions of transaction status without waiting for the full confirmation cycle, significantly enhancing the user experience.

UniFi AVS implements a strict economic penalty mechanism through EigenLayer, constraining validator nodes to fulfill their pre-confirmation commitments. This means that any node violating the pre-confirmation commitment will face the loss of staked assets, thereby ensuring the credibility of pre-confirmations at the system level. Through this dual-layer guarantee mechanism, Puffer cleverly addresses the efficiency bottleneck of Based Rollup, achieving millisecond-level transaction response while maintaining high security.

The pre-confirmation mechanism is expected to become a key technology driving the evolution of the Web3 ecosystem. It not only provides the necessary performance support for Based Rollup but, more importantly, creates a new paradigm that balances efficiency and decentralization.

TEE+Multiprover: Reconstructing Cross-Layer Atomic Interactions

Puffer's technological innovation is not only reflected in the pre-confirmation mechanism but also in the seamless integration between Layer 1 and Layer 2 achieved through the TEE( trusted execution environment) + Multiprover dual verification architecture. The core value of this architectural design lies in achieving cross-layer atomic composability(.

The so-called atomic composability refers to the ability of interactions between smart contracts to be completed in a single transaction, ensuring that either all operations are successfully executed or all fail and roll back. This feature is relatively easy to achieve in a single-chain environment, but has always been a challenge in cross-layer scenarios. Traditional Layer 2 solutions often require long confirmation periods, which severely restricts the development of cross-layer DeFi applications.

Puffer cleverly solves this problem through the TEE + Multiprover architecture. TEE provides an independent secure execution environment that can isolate the verification process, ensuring that the computation is free from external interference. On this basis, the Multiprover mechanism introduces multiple verification nodes to participate in transaction verification, forming a decentralized fast consensus network. This design allows cross-layer transactions to obtain trusted pre-confirmation from the TEE node cluster before waiting for final confirmation from Layer 1, controlling consensus delays at the millisecond level.

TEE+Multiprover not only enhances finality speed but also brings atomic composability with Layer 1 for UniFi rollup. This means that DApps deployed on the rollup can directly access the liquidity pools of the Ethereum mainnet, enabling cross-layer atomic transactions. This seamless cross-layer interaction capability provides unprecedented possibilities for DeFi innovation. At the same time, by introducing a permissionless validator participation mechanism and an anti-slashing system )anti-slashing(, Puffer maintains the decentralization characteristics of the system while ensuring high performance.

The significance of this innovative architecture goes far beyond the technical level. It essentially redefines the boundaries of Layer 2, evolving rollups from merely scaling tools into bridges for inter-layer value transfer. As the Web3 ecosystem deepens and develops, it is believed that this infrastructure, capable of enabling cross-layer atomic interactions, will play an increasingly important role.

Summary

Puffer's technical vision directly addresses the core pain points of the Ethereum ecosystem, such as liquidity fragmentation, fragmented user experiences, and dispersed narratives.

On the technical implementation level, Puffer fully leverages its technological accumulation in the field of re-staking verifiable node networks and trusted execution environments )TEE(, launching the most comprehensive Based Rollup solution to date, Puffer UniFi, which ensures decentralization while maintaining high performance. This innovative technical architecture not only provides a new technical solution to Ethereum's existing scalability challenges but also paves the way for the healthy development of the Layer 2 ecosystem.

At the same time, with the gradual improvement of innovative technologies such as the pre-confirmation mechanism and TEE multi-prover, the benefiting application scenarios are not limited to the single track of Rollup, but are widespread in Web3. For example, Trading Bots and DEXs can be upgraded due to these technological advancements. As a leader in multiple technological innovations, Puffer may also play an important role in these processes.