Puffer: Strategic upgrade from LRT leading to Based Rollup pioneer

Author: Biteye Core Contributor Mingyue

Foreword

The Trump team's launch of meme coins on Solana has caused a market shock. The team's choice to issue meme coins on Solana not only drove up the valuation of the Solana ecosystem, but also triggered a large amount of institutional funds to shift from the Ethereum ecosystem, putting Ethereum to its most severe market test since its inception.

The shift in this market landscape has not only reshaped the competitive situation of Ethereum in the public chain track, but also brought new thinking to the Layer 1 ecosystem: in the competition of scalability and user experience, the Ethereum ecosystem urgently needs technological breakthroughs.

This dramatic change in the market landscape not only undermines the market confidence in Ethereum in the public chain track, but also highlights that the competition in the Layer 1 track is entering a critical turning point: facing the dual challenges of scalability and user experience, the Ethereum ecosystem needs breakthrough technological innovations. Based on the Based Rollup architecture, the Puffer team has launched the UniFi solution, opening up new possibilities for Ethereum's scalability journey.

As a revolutionary Ethereum Layer 2 solution, UniFi is committed to addressing the four core pain points that constrain the development of Ethereum: achieving atomic composability and immediate transactions between L1 and L2, solving the liquidity dispersion problem in the L2 ecosystem, and introducing a decentralized sorting mechanism to enhance the practical value of ETH tokens.

Puffer UniFi is based on the Based Rollup concept, which innovatively transfers transaction sorting responsibility to the Ethereum L1 validators, significantly enhancing security and neutrality, and providing a new approach for Ethereum to reshape its competitive advantages. This technological breakthrough may become a key turning point for the Ethereum ecosystem in the face of new market dynamics.

Puffer UniFi leverages the existing LRT service technology of Puffer, and organically integrates the innovative Based Sequencing, UniFi Preconf AVS, and TEE multi-prover, realizing the UniFi Based Rollup technology architecture.

Based Rollup: The new paradigm for Layer 2 scaling

After the Ethereum Cancun upgrade, Layer 2 scaling solutions have returned to the market's focus. The current mainstream scaling solutions, Optimistic Rollups and ZK Rollups, have both shown significant limitations in practical applications.

Although Optimistic Rollups dominate, their 7-day challenge window mechanism severely affects liquidity, and they face high fraud-proof costs during network congestion. ZK Rollup performs well in transaction confirmation speed and data storage efficiency, but suffers from higher operational costs due to the computationally intensive nature of zero-knowledge proofs, affecting overall processing performance. More critically, both solutions require maintaining independent centralized infrastructure, increasing system maintenance burden and deviating to some extent from the original decentralized design intent.

To overcome these technical bottlenecks, Ethereum Foundation researcher Justin Drake proposed the concept of Based Rollup in March 2023. This innovative solution achieves deep synergy between Layer 2 and Layer 1 by migrating transaction sequencing functionality 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 only on transaction execution and state updates. This design not only simplifies the technical architecture of Layer 2, but also achieves full inheritance of the liveness of the Ethereum mainnet, which is 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 the need for complex designs such as independent sequencer verification and escape hatch mechanisms, while significantly reducing the cost of system maintenance.

Here comes the question, why hasn't Based Rollup been widely adopted despite its excellence?

The answer is very obvious, Based Rollup still has some flaws, which require a lot of technical accumulation and innovative technology to solve.

While inheriting the security of the Ethereum mainnet, Based Rollup inevitably inherits the limitation of its transaction confirmation period. Due to the complete reliance on Layer 1 for transaction sequencing, the final confirmation time of Based Rollup is locked within the Ethereum block time of approximately 12 seconds. This timespan obviously proves too long for applications like DeFi that demand high timeliness, severely restricting the practical application prospects of Based Rollup.

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

( Pre-commitment mechanism: resolving the challenges of Based Rollups

In the development process of the Web3 ecosystem, high-performance public chains have always faced a deep contradiction between efficiency and decentralization. Although high-performance public chains represented by Solana and TON have strong processing capabilities, the direct interaction mode between users and chain nodes still faces congestion issues during network peak periods. To solve this dilemma, many off-chain preprocessing solutions have emerged in the market, which achieve millisecond-level transaction response through centralized order aggregation, while effectively avoiding MEV risks. However, this efficiency improvement method inevitably introduces centralized risks, as it relies on a single entity for transaction aggregation and asset custody.

Against this backdrop, the pre-confirmation) mechanism being explored by the Ethereum ecosystem offers a new perspective. By adding a preprocessing step before the transaction is chained, the mechanism attempts to maintain decentralization while maintaining high performance.

Based on this concept, Puffer has developed an innovative UniFi AVS pre-confirmation solution in conjunction with EigenLayer. In its architecture design, Layer 2 transactions first enter the validation node pool registered by Native ReStaking for processing. These validators, as native nodes of Ethereum, are able to complete transaction pre-confirmation within 100 milliseconds, allowing users to obtain reliable judgment of transaction status without waiting for the complete confirmation cycle, significantly improving user experience.

UniFi AVS implements a strict economic penalty mechanism through EigenLayer, which constrains validating nodes to fulfill pre-commitment commitments. This means that any node that violates the pre-commitment commitment will face a loss of pledged assets, thereby ensuring the credibility of pre-commitment at the system level. Through this dual-layer security mechanism, Puffer cleverly solves the efficiency bottleneck of Based Rollup, achieving millisecond-level transaction response while maintaining high security.

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

( TEE+Multiprover: Reconstructing Cross-Layer Atomic Interaction

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

The so-called atomic composability refers to the interaction between smart contracts that can 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 difficult problem in cross-layer scenarios. Traditional Layer 2 solutions often require long confirmation periods, severely restricting the development of cross-layer DeFi applications.

Puffer solves this problem cleverly through the TEE+Multiprover architecture. TEE provides an independent secure execution environment, which can isolate the verification process and ensure that the computation process is not affected by external interference. Based on this, 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 the final confirmation of Layer 1, keeping the consensus delay in milliseconds.

TEE+Multiprover not only improves the finality speed, but also brings atomic composability to UniFi rollup on Layer 1. This means that DApps deployed on rollup can directly access the liquidity pool 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 mechanism, Puffer ensures high performance while maintaining the decentralized nature of the system.

The significance of this innovative architecture far exceeds the technical level. It essentially redefines the boundaries of Layer 2, transforming rollup from a simple scaling tool to a bridge for inter-layer value transmission. With the deepening development of the Web3 ecosystem, it is believed that this infrastructure, which can achieve cross-layer atomic interaction, will play an increasingly important role.

Summary

Puffer's technical vision directly addresses the core pain points of the Ethereum ecosystem, including fragmented liquidity, fragmented user experience, and dispersed narratives.

At the technical implementation level, Puffer fully leverages its technical accumulation in the fields of re-stakable verifiable node network and trusted execution environment TEE domain, and has launched the most complete Based Rollup solution Puffer UniFi at present, which ensures decentralization while maintaining high performance. This innovative technical architecture not only provides a new technical solution for the existing scalability dilemma of Ethereum, but also opens up a new path for the healthy development of the Layer 2 ecosystem.

At the same time, with the gradual improvement of innovative technologies such as pre-commitment mechanism and TEE multi-prover, the benefited application scenarios are not limited to a single track of Rollup, but are spread across Web3, such as Trading Bot, DEX, which can be upgraded due to these technologies. And as a leader in multiple technological innovations, Puffer may also occupy an important position in these processes.