[mattdesl]

Security of zk rollups may be sufficient for a lot of activity - trading, DeFi, games, art, DAO/access tokens, escrow, crowdfunds, all the web3 stuff.

The L1 may eventually be a primary settlement layer for protocols like zkSync and StarkNet (and any other protocols and rollups built on Ethereum L1). At some point it may not be common for users to interact with L1—ie. users of Argent and Sequence wallets may only be holding assets on L2.

zkSTARK/SNARKs has pretty dramatically changed the L2 landscape and new direction seems to be moving away from optimistic rollups like in the OP. This is just my understanding, somebody please correct me if I’m wrong.

[baby]

I just spent 20min to look for that debate between some of the big players:

* the optimistic side: https://medium.com/offchainlabs/optimistic-rollups-the-prese...

* the zk side: https://blog.polygon.technology/zk-and-the-future-of-ethereu...

On one hand you have a complicated protocol that doesn't really use cryptography and that has the user (you) monitor the blockchain for a week to make sure their transfer was processed correctly (otherwise my understanding is that you have to create a fraud proof, send it to the chain, otherwise you will lose your funds).

On the other hand you have a cryptographic proof of a few kilobyte that proves that some program correctly validated and applied the state transition of thousands of transactions.

[Ar-Curunir]

As a zkSNARK cryptographer, efficient cryptographic proofs are incredibly complex pieces of technology that still have a ways to go before they can match the speed of native execution. Both approaches have pros and cons.

[baby]

Good thing we’re not competing with native execution, and instead with the slow ethereum computer.

[Ar-Curunir]

Optimistic rollups are native execution

[baby]

that has 1 week of finality

[jrochkind1]

I gotta admit I don't know what 50% of the words there mean, but it surprises me to suggest that "absolute integrity" would not be required for trading, escrow, DeFi, DAO/access tokens.

Makes sense for games and art (but then I wonder what they are doing using a blockchain in the first place).

[mattdesl]

zk rollups tend to inherit most of the security features of L1[1] but with some trade-offs.

The trade-off is basically scalability (and thus fees). If the L1 network is so highly congested that each transaction costs $100 or more in the future, a scalable zk rollup that achieves about the same level of security at the cost of < $0.001 may be worth these tradeoffs.

[1] - https://zksync.io/userdocs/security.html#security-overview