Author: Biteye core contributor Mingyue
Preface
Trump's team's issuance of meme coins on Solana has caused a huge shock in the market. The team's choice to issue meme coins on Solana has not only led to a surge in Solana's ecosystem valuation, but also triggered a large amount of institutional funds to transfer from the Ethereum ecosystem, making Ethereum face the most severe market test since its inception.
This shift in the market landscape not only reshaped Ethereum’s competitive landscape in the public chain arena, but also brought new thinking to the Layer 1 ecosystem: in the competition for scalability and user experience, the Ethereum ecosystem urgently needs technological breakthroughs.
This dramatic change in the market landscape has not only shaken Ethereum's market confidence in the public chain track, but also highlighted 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 innovation. The Puffer team launched the UniFi solution based on the Based Rollup architecture, opening up new possibilities for Ethereum's expansion.
As a revolutionary Ethereum Layer 2 solution, Puffer UniFi is committed to solving the four core pain points that restrict the development of Ethereum: achieving atomic composability and instant transactions between L1 and L2, solving the problem of liquidity dispersion in the L2 ecosystem, and introducing a decentralized sorting mechanism to enhance the practical value of ETH tokens.
Puffer UniFi is based on the concept of Based Rollup. By innovatively transferring the transaction sorting responsibility to Ethereum L1 validators, it not only greatly improves security and neutrality, but also provides a new idea for Ethereum to reshape its competitive advantage. This technological breakthrough may become a key turning point for the Ethereum ecosystem in the face of the new market landscape.
Puffer UniFi leverages Puffer's existing LRT service technology and organically integrates it with the three innovative core components of Based Sequencing, UniFi Preconf AVS, and TEE multi-prover to realize the UniFi Based Rollup technology architecture.
Based Rollup: A new paradigm for Layer 2 expansion
After the Ethereum Cancun upgrade, Layer 2 scaling solutions have returned to the market spotlight. The current mainstream scaling solutions, Optimistic Rollups and ZK Rollups, have both shown significant limitations in practical applications.
Although Optimistic Rollups is dominant, its 7-day challenge window mechanism seriously affects the liquidity of funds and faces high fraud proof costs during periods of network congestion. ZK Rollup performs well in terms of transaction confirmation speed and data storage efficiency, but it suffers from high operating costs due to the computationally intensive nature of zero-knowledge proofs, affecting overall processing performance. More importantly, both types of solutions require the maintenance of independent centralized infrastructure, which not only increases the burden of system maintenance, but also deviates from the original design intention of decentralization to some extent.
In order to break through these technical bottlenecks, Justin Drake, a researcher at the Ethereum Foundation, proposed the concept of Based Rollup in March 2023. This innovative solution achieves deep collaboration between Layer 2 and Layer 1 by migrating the transaction sorting 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 only focuses on transaction execution and status 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 an important breakthrough in existing expansion solutions.
The biggest advantage of Based Rollup is that it fully inherits the security of the Ethereum mainnet, eliminates complex designs such as independent sorter verification and escape hatch mechanisms, and significantly reduces system maintenance costs.
The question is, if Based Rollup is so good, why is it not widely used?
The answer is obvious. Based Rollup still has some defects, which require a lot of technical accumulation and innovative technologies to solve.
While Based Rollup inherits the security of the Ethereum mainnet, it also inevitably inherits the limitations of its transaction confirmation cycle. Since the transaction sorting right relies entirely on Layer 1, the final confirmation time of Based Rollup is locked within the Ethereum block cycle (about 12 seconds). This time span is obviously too long for application scenarios such as DeFi that have extremely high timeliness requirements, which seriously restricts the actual application prospects of Based Rollup.
In response to this core pain point, Puffer proposed a creative and complete solution.
Pre-confirmation mechanism: Solving the problem of Based Rollups
In the process of Web3 ecological development, high-performance public chains have always faced a deep-seated contradiction between efficiency and decentralization. Although high-performance public chains represented by Solana and TON have strong processing capabilities, their direct interaction mode between users and chain nodes still cannot avoid congestion during network peak hours. To solve this dilemma, many off-chain pre-processing solutions have emerged in the market, which achieve millisecond-level transaction response through centralized order aggregation, while effectively avoiding MEV risks. However, this way of improving efficiency inevitably introduces centralization risks because it relies on a single entity for transaction 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 high performance while maintaining decentralization by adding a pre-processing step before the transaction is uploaded to the chain.
Based on this concept, Puffer developed an innovative UniFi AVS pre-confirmation solution in combination with EigenLayer. In its architectural design, Layer 2 transactions are first processed by the verification node pool registered by Native ReStaking. These verifiers, which are native Ethereum nodes, can complete transaction pre-confirmation within 100 milliseconds, allowing users to obtain reliable predictions of transaction status without waiting for a full confirmation cycle, significantly improving the user experience.
UniFi AVS implements a strict economic penalty mechanism through EigenLayer, which constrains the verification nodes to fulfill the pre-confirmation commitment. This means that any node that violates the pre-confirmation commitment will face the loss of pledged assets, thereby ensuring the credibility of pre-confirmation at the system level. Through this two-layer protection mechanism, Puffer cleverly solves the efficiency bottleneck of Based Rollup and achieves millisecond-level transaction response while maintaining high security.
The pre-confirmation mechanism is expected to become a key technology to promote the evolution of the Web3 ecosystem. It not only provides the necessary performance support for Based Rollup, but more importantly, it 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 connection between Layer 1 and Layer 2 through the TEE (Trusted Execution Environment) + Multiprover dual verification architecture. The core value of this architectural design lies in the realization of cross-layer atomic composability.
Atomic composability means that the interaction between smart contracts can be completed in a single transaction, ensuring that either all operations are successfully executed or all fail and roll back. This feature is easier to implement in a single-chain environment, but it has always been a difficult problem in the industry in cross-layer scenarios. Traditional Layer 2 solutions often require a long confirmation period, which seriously 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 and ensure that the calculation process is not interfered with by external factors. On this basis, the Multiprover mechanism introduces multiple verification nodes to jointly participate in transaction verification, forming a decentralized fast consensus network. This design enables cross-layer transactions to obtain trusted pre-confirmation from the TEE node cluster before waiting for the final confirmation of Layer 1, controlling the consensus delay to the millisecond level.
TEE+Multiprover not only improves the speed of finality, but also brings atomic composability with Layer 1 to UniFi rollup. This means that DApps deployed on rollup can directly access the liquidity pool of the Ethereum mainnet and realize 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, Puffer maintains the decentralized nature 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, allowing rollup to evolve from a simple expansion tool to a bridge for value transfer between layers. As the Web3 ecosystem develops, it is believed that this infrastructure that can achieve cross-layer atomic interactions will play an increasingly important role.
Summarize
Puffer’s technological vision directly addresses the core pain points of the Ethereum ecosystem, including liquidity fragmentation, fragmented user experience, and decentralized narrative.
In terms of technical implementation, Puffer has made full use of its technical accumulation in the field of re-staking verifiable node network and trusted execution environment (TEE) to launch the most complete Based Rollup solution, Puffer UniFi, which maintains high performance while also ensuring decentralization. This innovative technical architecture not only provides a new technical solution to Ethereum's existing expansion difficulties, 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-confirmation mechanism and TEE multi-prover, the application scenarios that benefit are not limited to the single track of Rollup, but all over Web3, such as Trading Bot and DEX can be upgraded due to these technologies. As a leader in multiple technological innovations, Puffer may also occupy an important position in these processes.
