Decentralizing Ethereum layer-two options has been an ongoing challenge for ecosystem participants, but Figment Capital thinks that distributed sequencer technologies (DST) could place an finish to this headache.
Sequencers are blockchain nodes run by layer-two options to attain consensus. They are a important tool to assistance create and propose blocks, and considerably minimize the expense to transact on Ethereum.
In today’s ecosystem, layer-two options largely sustain only a single sequencer — which means that it is topic to centralization dangers.
If rollups finish up becoming centralized systems constructed on leading of a decentralized network, then it defeats the objective of obtaining a decentralized technique in the 1st spot, Dougie DeLuca, an investor at Figment Capital, told Blockworks.
“We came up with a new notion for a possible sequencer design and style,” DeLuca explained. “What we’ve been ideating is a new resolution that can basically serve as a cease gap resolution till a much more complicated and maximally decentralized design and style is obtainable to be applied.”
This design and style is largely related to distributed validator technologies (DVT), exactly where the responsibilities of a validator are distributed across various operators or machines.
“Right now with validators you have a single operator, a single machine, and if a validator becomes compromised or goes offline, they would be topic to slashing situations — which generally indicates they will get penalized for not undertaking the operate that they’re supposed to do,” DeLuca stated.
With DVT, you can have a single validator becoming serviced by six various machines, DeLuca noted.
“What that accomplishes is fault tolerance, which indicates if a single sub-validator cluster goes offline, the other 5 are nevertheless operating as intended, so as a outcome we get a much more resilient network,” he stated.
DVT also enables capabilities such as network geographic distribution — generating networks much less prone to regulatory dangers and network outage (such as the most current Etheruem outage).
Employing DVT as a framework, DeLuca noted that he and other Figment group members had an notion of repurposing it for sequencers.
“There are persons making use of it right now who can testify that it performs, so rather of pondering of a brand new design and style that would take forever to implement, let’s consider of anything that can be applied in the mid-term…so just like DVT, DST can be applied to a single sequencer and it can distribute responsibilities of operating the sequencer across a cluster of machines and operators,” he stated.
Despite the fact that Figment Capital will not be developing out the technologies themselves, DeLuca shared that Obol Network is at present obtaining conversations with various rollup teams to discover the possibilities of this technologies.
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