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It all starts with Ethereum. The L1 is too slow. Every node needs to redundantly re-execute transactions in a block to ensure validity, which limits scalability.

By 2020, the Ethereum community coalesced around rollups as the scaling solution. Vitalik’s 2021 landmark blog post on rollups explains how optimistic and zk rollups can scale Ethereum.

Zk rollups are technologically superior for scaling but the tech was still too expensive to use and far behind (more later). 

So optimistic rollups broke into the market first. Optimistic rollups assume all transactions are valid until someone…

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