Optimistic Rollup
Consensus is maintained with a based rollup design. All consensus related activity occurs on the base L1 chain. This includes managing an open auction for block space, a native bridge for assets and messages, and a fraud proving mechanism for blocks to reach finality.
🏗️ This section is in active development with more details coming soon. The following is only meant to serve as a rough outline and may be incomplete. These details may also contain multiple design paths if a direction has not yet been chosen.
Motivation
It is a complex problem to enshrine a competitive block building process into a protocol that doesn't devolve into builders simply choosing a block order that produces them the most MEV (Maximal Extractable Value). An existing and simple solution to this problem is to bid for inclusion of a solution in the block. This requires trusting that the builder will not steal solutions because doing so will hurt their reputation. This is not a perfect way to solve the problem but it is currently in production in a lot of ecosystems and is fairly simple to implement.
Fraud Proofs
Fraud proofs are critical to keep optimistic rollups trustworthy. The fraud proving mechanism is responsible for verifying submitted proofs that prove a failed constraint in a block. Fraud signals prevent a block from being finalized.
Fast Finality
The fast finality mechanism is designed to achieve finality faster than the typical 7 day delay for optimistic rollups. This is achieved through a set of validators who attest to the validity of a block.
Bridge
Bridging between the L1 chain and Essential is a bit different to traditional rollups as the bridging is happening between a world of imperative execution and declarative constraint validation.