Puffer: Strategic upgrade from LRT leading to Based Rollup pioneer

Preface

The Trump team’s issuance of meme coins on Solana has caused a market shock. The team’s decision 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 change in this market pattern 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.

The dramatic change in the market pattern has not only shaken the market confidence of Ethereum in the public chain track, but also highlighted the competition in the Layer 1 track entering a critical turning point: facing the dual challenges of scalability and user experience, the Ethereum ecosystem needs groundbreaking technological innovations. Puffer team has launched the UniFi solution based on the Based Rollup architecture, opening up new possibilities for Ethereum’s scalability journey.

As a revolutionary Ethereum Layer 2 solution, Puffer UniFi is committed to addressing 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 fragmentation in the L2 ecosystem, and introducing a decentralized sorting mechanism to enhance the utility value of ETH tokens.

Puffer UniFi is based on the Based Rollup concept, which innovatively transfers the responsibility of transaction ordering to Ethereum L1 validators, greatly improving security and neutrality, and providing a new way for Ethereum to reshape its competitive advantage. 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 integrates it organically with the three core components of Based Sequencing, UniFi Preconf AVS, and TEE multi-prover, achieving the UniFi Based Rollup technology architecture.

Based Rollup: The new paradigm of Layer 2 scaling

After the Ethereum Cancun upgrade, Layer 2 scalability solutions have once again become the focus of the market. The mainstream scalability solutions currently, Optimistic Rollups and ZK Rollups, have both shown significant limitations in practical applications.

Although Optimistic Rollups occupy a dominant position, its 7-day challenge window mechanism seriously affects fund liquidity and faces high fraud proof costs during network congestion periods. ZK Rollup performs well in transaction confirmation speed and data storage efficiency, but it bears higher operating costs due to the computationally intensive nature of zero-knowledge proofs, affecting overall processing performance. What is more critical is that both types of solutions require maintaining independent centralized infrastructures, which not only increases the system maintenance burden but also deviates from the original design intention of decentralization.

To break through these technical bottlenecks, Ethereum Foundation researcher Justin Drake proposed the Based Rollup concept in March 2023. This innovative solution migrates the function of transaction sequencing to the Ethereum mainnet, achieving deep coordination between Layer 2 and Layer 1. 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 achieves full inheritance of the Liveness of the Ethereum mainnet, marking an important 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 system maintenance costs.

Here comes the question, since Based Rollup is so excellent, why hasn’t it been widely used?

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

While inheriting the security of the Ethereum mainnet, Based Rollup also inevitably inherits the limitations 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 approximately 12-second Ethereum block time span, which is evidently too long for applications such as DeFi that demand high timeliness, severely constraining the actual application prospects of Based Rollup.

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

( Pre-confirmation Mechanism: Solving the Challenges of Based Rollups

In the development of the Web3 ecosystem, high-performance public chains have always faced the deep-seated contradiction between efficiency and decentralization. Represented by Solana and TON, high-performance public chains have strong processing capabilities, but the direct interaction mode between users and chain nodes still faces congestion issues during network peak periods. To address this dilemma, many off-chain processing solutions have emerged in the market, achieving millisecond-level transaction response through centralized order aggregation, while effectively avoiding MEV risks. However, this efficiency improvement inevitably introduces centralization 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 provides a fresh perspective. By adding a pre-processing step before transactions are recorded on the blockchain, this mechanism aims to maintain decentralization while ensuring high performance.

Puffer, based on this concept, 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 Ethereum native nodes, are able to complete transaction pre-confirmation within 100 milliseconds, allowing users to obtain a reliable judgment of transaction status without waiting for the complete confirmation cycle, significantly improving the user experience.

UniFi AVS implements a strict economic penalty mechanism through EigenLayer, which constrains the validation nodes to fulfill pre-commitment commitments. This means that any node that violates the pre-commitment commitment will face the loss of pledged assets, thus ensuring the credibility of pre-commitment at the system level. With 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 creates a new paradigm that balances efficiency and decentralization.

) TEE+Multiprover: Refactoring Cross-Layer Atomic Interaction

Puffer’s technological innovation is not only reflected in the pre-confirmation mechanism, but also achieves seamless integration between Layer 1 and Layer 2 through TEE( Trusted Execution Environment)+ Multiprover double verification architecture. The core value of this architectural design lies in achieving cross-layer atomic composability###Atomic Composability(.

The so-called atomic composability refers to the ability of interaction 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 implement in a single-chain environment, but it has always been a challenge 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 isolates the verification process and ensures that the computation process is not interfered with externally. Based on this, the Multiprover mechanism introduces multiple verification nodes to 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 the final confirmation of Layer 1, keeping the consensus delay in the millisecond level.

TEE+Multiprover not only improves the finality speed but also brings atomic composability to UniFi rollup with Layer 1. This means that DApps deployed on rollup can directly access the liquidity pools on 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 system’s decentralization.

The significance of this innovative architecture goes far beyond the technical level. It essentially redefines the boundaries of Layer 2, transforming rollup from a simple scaling tool into a bridge for inter-layer value transfer. 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, such as fragmented liquidity, fractured user experience, and scattered narratives.

At the technical implementation level, Puffer makes full use of its technical accumulation in the field of re-staking verifiable node networks and trusted execution environments ###TEE(, and has launched the most complete Based Rollup solution Puffer UniFi, which not only maintains high performance but also ensures decentralization. This innovative technical architecture provides a new technical solution for the existing scalability dilemma of Ethereum, and opens up a new path for the healthy development of 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 extend to Web3, such as Trading Bot, DEX can be upgraded due to these technologies. As a leader in multiple technological innovations, Puffer may also play an important role in these processes.