We are currently in times of rapid development, so much has happened that it becomes increasingly difficult to keep track of what exactly is happening.
Layer 2 blockchains have simply become common since Polygon scaling technology for Ethereum blockchain hit the industry, and while we've all believed in all roads leading to "decentralization", it turns out; "all layer 2 blockchains are centralized", but how?
A glimpse of Optimism Blockchain
Optimism is a layer two network laced up as a scaling structure for the Ethereum blockchain, its outstanding feature is "Optimistic rollups" which is a sandboxing technology that leverages existing Ethereum technologies but with modifications.
This means that optimism is compatible with Ethereum's virtual machine and can pretty much execute all smart contracts on Ethereum but with the most efficiency.
Optimism scales Ethereum and attains higher throughput by grouping blocks of transactions into a single smart contract called the CanonicalTransactionChain. Note that blocks are being grouped, not single transactions, so that means significantly more transactions can be posted for validation on Ethereum at once, a similar transaction feature is seen in Vechain with its multipurpose transaction feature for enterprise businesses and individuals.
This enables the network to efficiently process transactions on L1, paying significantly lower gas on the mainnet, these grouped transactions are treated as one, thus, users do not have to post high gas prices to get their transactions processed even during network congestion.
What makes Optimism centralized?
Optimism is centralized because it runs just one validator node called the sequencer, transactions are posted to Ethereum through the sequencer for the sake of efficiency and these transactions are considered "authentic" until challenged. Although, users can directly post their transactions to Ethereum, only that they sacrifice the merits of using the sequencer which is the lowered gas fees in the process.
However, there are plans to make the transaction validation decentralized and even more, plans to eliminate the untold centralizating factor to all layer 2 blockchains.
Optimism outrightly pointed out that all layer 2 blockchains are centralized because a small party or single party can easily run a network upgrade, not needing any atom of consensus to do it.
This begs the question: how so?
Details are explained here with appropriate references to broaden your reading. Optimism so far has taken a bold step to not only promise a decentralized, scalable and fast layer two networks but has gone so far as to accept the current centralized nature of its blockchain which it plans to change through future developments.
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