Ethereum Faces Major Challenges, Puffer UniFi May Become a Key Turning Point

Introduction

Recently, a political figure's team issued a meme coin on Solana, causing significant market fluctuations. The team chose Solana as the issuance platform, which not only accelerated the rapid increase in Solana's ecosystem valuation but also led to a large amount of institutional funds transferring from the Ethereum ecosystem, putting Ethereum through its most severe market test since its inception.

The shift in this market landscape has not only shaken Ethereum's position in the public chain arena but has also brought new considerations to the Layer 1 ecosystem: In the competition of scalability and user experience, the Ethereum ecosystem urgently needs technological breakthroughs. In the face of this challenge, an innovative solution based on the Based Rollup architecture, UniFi, has emerged, opening up new possibilities for Ethereum's scalability.

UniFi, as a revolutionary Ethereum Layer 2 solution, aims to address the four core pain points that hinder Ethereum's development: achieving atomic composability and instant transactions between L1 and L2, solving the liquidity fragmentation issue in the L2 ecosystem, and introducing a decentralized ordering mechanism to enhance the utility of ETH tokens.

Based on the concept of Based Rollup, UniFi innovatively shifts the responsibility of transaction ordering to Ether L1 validators, which not only significantly enhances security and neutrality but also provides a new approach for reshaping Ethereum's competitive advantage. This technological breakthrough may become a key turning point for the Ethereum ecosystem in the face of a new market landscape.

UniFi leverages the existing LRT service technology accumulation and organically integrates the three core components of Based Sequencing, UniFi Preconf AVS, and TEE multi-prover to achieve the UniFi Based Rollup technology architecture.

Based Rollup: A New Paradigm for Layer 2 Scaling

After the Ethereum Cancun upgrade, Layer 2 scaling solutions have returned to the market spotlight. Current mainstream scaling solutions Optimistic Rollups and ZK Rollups have both revealed significant limitations in practical applications.

While Optimistic Rollups dominate the market, their 7-day challenge window mechanism severely impacts liquidity, and they face high costs for fraud proofs during periods of network congestion. ZK Rollups excel in transaction confirmation speed and data storage efficiency, but bear higher operational costs due to the computationally intensive nature of zero-knowledge proofs, affecting overall processing performance. More critically, both types of solutions require the maintenance of independent centralized infrastructure, which not only increases the burden of system maintenance but also somewhat deviates from the original design intention of decentralization.

To break through these technical bottlenecks, a researcher from the Ethereum Foundation proposed the concept of Based Rollup in March 2023. This innovative solution achieves deep synergy between Layer 2 and Layer 1 by migrating the transaction ordering 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 focuses solely on transaction execution and state updates. This design not only simplifies the technical architecture of Layer 2 but also fully inherits the liveness of the Ethereum mainnet (Liveness), marking a significant breakthrough in existing scalability solutions.

The biggest advantage of Based Rollup is that it fully inherits the security of the Ethereum mainnet, eliminating complex designs such as independent sequencer validation and escape pod mechanisms, while also significantly reducing system maintenance costs.

However, Based Rollup also faces some challenges. While inheriting the security of the Ethereum mainnet, it inevitably inherits the limitations of its transaction confirmation cycle. Since the transaction ordering rights are entirely dependent on Layer 1, the final confirmation time of Based Rollup is locked within the Ethereum block cycle ( of about 12 seconds ). This time span is clearly too long for application scenarios that require high timeliness, such as DeFi, severely restricting the practical application prospects of Based Rollup.

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

Pre-confirmation Mechanism: Resolving the Challenges of Based Rollups

In the development process of the Web3 ecosystem, high-performance public chains have always faced a deep-rooted contradiction between efficiency and decentralization. Although platforms represented by certain high-performance public chains possess strong processing capabilities, their direct interaction model between users and chain nodes still struggles to avoid congestion issues during peak network times. To address this predicament, many off-chain preprocessing solutions have emerged in the market, achieving millisecond-level transaction responses through centralized order aggregation while effectively avoiding MEV risks. However, this method of improving efficiency inevitably introduces centralization risks, as 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 decentralization characteristics while ensuring high performance by adding a preprocessing step before transactions are recorded on the blockchain.

UniFi is based on this concept and has developed an innovative UniFi AVS pre-confirmation solution in collaboration with EigenLayer. In its architectural design, Layer 2 transactions first enter a pool of validating nodes registered with Native ReStaking for processing. These validators, as native nodes of Ethereum, can complete transaction pre-confirmations within 100 milliseconds, allowing users to obtain a reliable prediction of transaction status without waiting for the full confirmation cycle, significantly enhancing the user experience.

UniFi AVS implements a strict economic penalty mechanism through EigenLayer, constraining validator nodes to fulfill their pre-confirmation commitments. This means that any node that violates the pre-confirmation commitment will face the loss of staked assets, thereby ensuring the credibility of pre-confirmations at the system level. Through this dual-layer guarantee mechanism, UniFi cleverly addresses the efficiency bottleneck of Based Rollup, achieving millisecond-level transaction response while maintaining high security.

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

TEE+Multiprover: Reconstructing Cross-layer Atomic Interactions

The technological innovation of UniFi is not only reflected in the pre-confirmation mechanism but also achieved 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 achieving cross-layer atomic composability(Atomic Composability).

The so-called atomic composability refers to the ability for interactions between smart contracts to be completed in a single transaction, ensuring that either all operations succeed or all fail and roll back. This feature is relatively easy to achieve in a single-chain environment, but has been a challenge in cross-layer scenarios. Traditional Layer 2 solutions often require a long confirmation period, which severely limits the development of cross-layer DeFi applications.

UniFi cleverly solves this problem through the TEE+Multiprover architecture. TEE provides an independent secure execution environment that isolates the verification process, ensuring that the computation is not disrupted by external factors. Based on this, the Multiprover mechanism introduces multiple verification nodes to participate in transaction verification collectively, forming a decentralized fast consensus network. This design allows cross-layer transactions to obtain trustworthy pre-confirmation from the TEE node cluster before waiting for the final confirmation from Layer 1, keeping the consensus delay at the millisecond level.

TEE+Multiprover not only enhances finality speed but also provides UniFi rollup with atomic composability with Layer 1. This means that DApps deployed on the rollup can directly access the liquidity pools of the Ethereum mainnet, enabling cross-layer atomic transactions. This seamless cross-layer interaction capability offers unprecedented possibilities for DeFi innovation. At the same time, by introducing a permissionless validator participation mechanism and an anti-slashing system (anti-slashing), UniFi maintains high performance while preserving the decentralized nature of the system.

The significance of this innovative architecture goes far beyond the technical level. It essentially redefines the boundaries of Layer 2, evolving rollups from merely scaling tools into bridges for inter-layer value transfer. As the Web3 ecosystem continues to deepen and develop, I believe that this infrastructure capable of achieving cross-layer atomic interactions will play an increasingly important role.

Summary

UniFi's technological vision directly addresses the core pain points of the Ethereum ecosystem, such as liquidity fragmentation, disjointed user experience, and scattered narratives.

On the technical implementation level, UniFi fully leverages its technological accumulation in the areas of re-staking verifiable node networks and trusted execution environments ( TEE ) to launch the currently most complete Based Rollup solution, which ensures decentralization while maintaining high performance. This innovative technical architecture not only provides a new technical solution to the existing scalability dilemma of Ethereum but also opens up new paths for the healthy development of the Layer 2 ecosystem.

At the same time, with the gradual improvement of innovative technologies such as the pre-confirmation mechanism and TEE multi-prover, the benefiting application scenarios are not limited to a single track of Rollup, but are spread across various fields of Web3, such as Trading Bots and DEXs that can be upgraded due to these technological advancements. As a leader in multiple technological innovations, UniFi may also play an important role in these processes.