Optimism price

Author: Ishita Compiled by: Deep Tide TechFlow Ethereum's evolution over the past decade revolves around a simple promise: to scale the network without sacrificing decentralization. And according to its roadmap, the answer is a future with rollups at its core. In this architecture, Layer 2 networks (L2s or "Rollups") execute transactions off-chain, achieving lower costs and higher throughput while still getting core security from Ethereum as the base layer (Layer 1). Almost all major rollup projects, including Arbitrum, Optimism, Base, zkSync, and Scroll, have "security guaranteed by Ethereum" as their core brand. This slogan is powerful and central to its marketing narrative, but is it really realistic? This claim becomes vague after delving into how these rollups actually operate and the movement of assets within them. This article will dissect the gap between slogans and reality, starting with bridging (where user funds reside), to sequencers (roles responsible for sequencing transactions), and then to governance (rule-makers). The reality of the Rollup Bridge Rollups claim to be "secured by Ethereum," but this claim obscures how users actually interact with these systems. To use a rollup, whether it's for DeFi, payments, or applications, you first need to transfer assets to a rollup. However, Ethereum doesn't have a built-in feature for direct transfers in or out – you can't simply "transfer" ETH to a rollup. This requires a bridge. Bridging is the on-ramp and off-ramp between Ethereum and Rollup, and it determines the security that users actually experience. How bridging works: deposit When you deposit ETH into a rollup, you are actually sending it to a bridge contract on Ethereum. The contract locks your ETH and instructs the rollup to create the same amount of ETH in your L2 wallet. For example, if you deposit 1 ETH, the bridge contract will keep that 1 ETH securely on Ethereum, and 1 ETH will also appear in your rollup account. Since ETH is locked on Ethereum, this deposit minimizes trust. Withdrawal Withdrawals are much more complicated. The process of withdrawing is the opposite of depositing: You burn (or lock) tokens on a rollup. You send a message to Ethereum's bridge contract: I burned tokens on L2, please release my locked ETH. The problem is: Ethereum can't see what's going on inside the rollup, it's blind to L2 calculations. Therefore, Ethereum will only release your funds if the bridge provides proof of withdrawal legally. This proof may include: Fraud Proofs (optimistic scenario): The default assumes that the transaction is legitimate unless it is challenged within the dispute window. Validity Proofs (zero-knowledge solutions): By demonstrating in advance that all transactions follow the rules, Ethereum can immediately trust the results. Multisigs or Committees: Relies on trusted parties for authentication. Bridging is key for users to access rollups. It can be compared to a window into the house. Even if the windows (Bridge) are broken, the house (Rollup) still stands. But if the window is broken, you can no longer get in and out safely. Similarly, a bridge failure cuts off user access even when the rollup's core mechanism is still running. Therefore, the bridge layer is the real perspective of rollup security. Whether an asset is truly "secured by Ethereum" depends on the bridge you use and its trust model, not the rollup itself. Bridging models and their assumptions Canonical Bridges Official bridges are "official bridges for each rollup" that are directly bound to Ethereum. When users lock their assets here, Ethereum validators guarantee that users will eventually withdraw back to Layer 1 even if L2 stops operating. This is the only bridge that directly inherits Ethereum's security attributes. External Bridges, such as Wormhole, LayerZero, and Axelar, optimize the user experience through fast chain-to-chain transfers but rely on their own validator councils or multisig mechanisms. These bridges are not enforced by the Ethereum consensus. If these off-chain operators are hacked or colluding to do evil, users can still lose their funds even if Ethereum itself is working well. Native issuance refers to tokens minted directly on rollups, such as USDC on Base or OP on Optimism. These assets have never been officially bridged and cannot be redeemed on Layer 1. Their security comes from the governance and infrastructure of rollups, not Ethereum. The actual distribution of rollup assets As of August 29, 2025, Ethereum Rollups have secured a total of approximately $43.96 billion in assets, distributed as follows: External bridging: $16.95 billion (39%) – the largest share Official Bridge: $14.81 billion (34%) – Ethereum-secured assets Native Issuance: $12.20 billion (27%) – Rollup native assets Historical trend analysis Looking back at 2019-2022, official bridging was the main driver of Rollup adoption. Almost all early growth was achieved through official bridges, keeping Ethereum at its core. However, from the end of 2023, the situation began to change: Official bridges continue to grow, but market share begins to decrease, peaking in 2024. Native distribution is gradually expanding, especially between 2024–2025. External bridges have grown dramatically since late 2023 and surpassed official bridges by early 2025, marking Ethereum's loss of majority share of rollup assets. Today, two-thirds of Rollup's assets (external + native) are free from Ethereum's direct security guarantees. Breakdown of the Rollup ecosystem The market concentration is extremely high: the top six rollups account for 93.3% of the total locked volume (TVL). The distribution of assets across ecosystems is as follows: Official Bridge: 32.0% Native Issuance: 28.8% External bridging: 39.2% Pie chart overall pattern analysis External bridging dominates: For example, Arbitrum and Unichain allow users to pursue quick withdrawals and liquidity, preferring third-party bridging. Official bridging dominates: like Linea (and the suboptimal OP Mainnet), more L1-sourced collateral is bridged through official bridging. Native issuance dominates: such as zkSync Era and Base, where assets are minted directly on L2 (such as native USDC on Base) and flowed in through direct on-ramps. Key Point: Most of the assets of large rollups are beyond Ethereum's immediate security guarantees. The actual security that users get depends on the trust mechanism behind each bridge model, not the rollup itself. Beyond bridging: what are the risks? The bridging model determines the ownership of assets, but even if all assets are officially bridged, users still face other trust and security vulnerabilities. Three areas are particularly important: transaction ordering mechanisms, governance structures, and the impact of composability on user experience. 1. Sequencer: A centralized control point The sequencer is responsible for determining how transactions are ordered and packaged. Currently, the vast majority of rollups use centralized sequencers, a design that is both efficient and profitable, but also poses the following risks: Transaction Review: The sequencer can reject the inclusion of certain transactions, enabling censorship. Block withdrawals: The sequencer decides when to send exit transactions to Ethereum in bulk, so withdrawals can be blocked indefinitely. Completely offline: A sequencer downtime causes the rollup activity to pause until it comes back online. (For example, Arbitrum had a 78-minute downtime) Ethereum offers a "Force Inclusion" mechanism that allows users to submit transactions directly to Layer 1s to bypass sequencers. However, this mechanism does not guarantee fairness, as the sequencer still controls the order of blocks, which is enough to break the user experience. For example: Let's say you try to withdraw funds from Aave on L2. and submit a mandatory included withdrawal request through Ethereum, which means that the sequencer cannot ignore your transaction. However, sequencers can insert their own trades before yours – for example, lending more funds from the same pool. By the time your withdrawal transaction is executed, the pool is no longer liquid, resulting in withdrawal failure. While your trade is "included," the result is ruined. In addition, there are practical problems with forced inclusion: wait times can be hours (sometimes more than 12 hours), throughput is limited, and can be reordered even after commit. Therefore, this mechanism is more of a slow safety valve than a guarantee of fair enforcement. Decentralized sequencers are gradually gaining traction. For example, projects like Espresso and Astria are building shared sequencer networks to improve resilience and interoperability. One of the core concepts is "pre-confirmations": sequencers or shared networks can promise in advance that transactions will be included, even if they have not yet been finalized on Ethereum. This reduces latency issues associated with decentralization, providing users with faster security while maintaining neutrality. Still, centralized sequencers dominate because they are simple, profitable, and more attractive to institutions — at least until competition or user demand forces them to change. 2. Governance and incentive risk: Corporate L2 It matters who is operating the rollup. Many leading rollups are run by companies or VC-backed teams, such as Coinbase's Base, Offchain Labs' Arbitrum, OP Labs' Optimism. The primary obligation of these teams is to be accountable to shareholders and investors, not Ethereum's social contract. Shareholder Responsibility → Profitability Pressure: Initial fees are low to attract users, and then fees start to rise as liquidity and applications are locked in (typical "platform tax" model). Higher sequencer fees, priority integrations, or rules that benefit the operator's overall business may arise in the future. Lock-in Effect → Leverage: As billions of dollars are locked up and users accumulate, exit costs become higher, allowing operators to change the economy or policy with limited migration risk. Cultural misalignment: Ethereum relies on open development meetings, multi-client diversity, and open governance (like EIPs). Enterprise rollups, on the other hand, tend to be top-down management, often with admin keys or multi-signature permissions, and can pause, upgrade, or freeze the system – prioritizing compliance or profitability over neutrality. Over time, these rollups may be more like a "walled garden" than an open ecosystem of Ethereum. As a result, there is a growing gap between Ethereum's open spirit and the incentives that shape enterprise rollups. This gap not only affects governance but also spills over to how applications interact and the user's experience with the system. 3. Composability and user experience Ethereum's "magic" lies in atomic composability: smart contracts can read and write synchronously in a single transaction (e.g., swapping assets via Uniswap while repaying Aave debts and triggering Maker's actions). However, L2 breaks this composability: Asynchronous: There are delays in cross-rollup messages, official withdrawals can take days, and third-party bridging adds trust assumptions. Siloed: Liquidity and state are fragmented across different L2s, undermining Ethereum's seamless DeFi user experience. What is the solution? Ethereum's native rollups (designed and governed according to Layer-1 standards) enable simultaneous reads of L2→L1, simultaneous writes of L1→L2, and atomic cross-rollup writes, thereby expanding block space while restoring most of Layer-1's composability. Without these features, the user experience (UX) will continue to move closer to the convenience layer that is not Ethereum-secure. The future of rollups If "Ethereum security" is to go beyond a slogan, its core security must rely on Layer 1, rather than relying on off-chain committees or a single company's sequencer. Here are three design ideas that demonstrate the possibilities of this trend: Native Rollup: Move validation entirely to Ethereum Unlike requiring users to trust independent fraud proof systems, non-auditable zero-knowledge proofs (zk proofs), or security committees, rollups provide a transaction trace that Ethereum can re-execute on its own. In effect, this makes withdrawals and state correctness a Layer 1 right rather than a promise: if the rollup claims that your balance is X, Ethereum can directly verify this claim. This design narrows the bridge's attack surface, reduces the need for pause keys, and aligns rollups with future upgrades for Ethereum. The trade-off of this design is higher costs on Layer 1, but the reward is simple: when a dispute arises, it is up to Layer 1 to decide. There are no native rollups live yet. Sorting rollups based on Ethereum validators Today, a single sequencer can reorder or delay transactions, which is enough to break the "force inclusion" mechanism in practice. With an order-based design, the canonical order of transactions is determined by Layer 1 consensus, making it more difficult to review and reorder at the last minute. Enforce inclusion to be a normal path, not a slow safety valve. Projects can add "pre-confirmations" to keep the user experience smooth while allowing Layer 1 to be the ultimate ordering arbiter. This design requires sacrificing some of the Layer 2's revenue and flexibility, but eliminates the biggest single point of control problem in the current architecture. The core teams currently working on sorting-based rollup designs include Taiko, Spire, and Puffer. Key Store Rollup: Addressing key and upgrade risks Unlike each rollup and app that handles account recovery, session keys, and key rotation independently, a minimized "key store" rollup normalizes this logic and synchronizes it everywhere. Users can rotate or recover keys in one place, and changes propagate to all Layer 2s. Operators need fewer emergency keys, and administrators need fewer "god-mode" switches. The end result is fewer breached wallets, fewer emergency upgrades after incidents, and a clearer separation between account security and application logic. The design of key storage rollups is currently only in the theoretical stage and has not yet been launched. Together, these design concepts solve the problems that users actually face: trust-based withdrawal mechanisms, transaction ordering controlled by a single company, and fragile keys and escalation paths. Incorporating verification, ordering, and account security into Ethereum's system is how rollups achieve "security by Ethereum", not just a slogan.