now: ecosystems @ /syndicate. then: started this thing called /fwb w/ my friends. also do a ton of music and media things. also mba from usc. constant.coffee

Rollups are only parasitic to ETH when they do the same thing as Ethereum Mainnet. As they become more customized and move away from “Ethereum but cheaper”, they’ll start to be additive.

h/t to @raihan for the great conversation today

Co-founder of @syndicate. Creator of $AGLD, Core Team at ConstitutionDAO. ETH since the 2014 presale

curious - what do you mean by parasitic? capturing execution that otherwise may have occurred on L1? if so, you are saying that RU specialization will lead to more L1 execution?

Makes sense. I agree that specialized L2's are less parasitic to L1 in that they're creating net new execution rather than cannibalizing.

General purpose execution L2's, on the other hand, can be more parasitic and don't show any signs of slowing down.

Great question! For parasitic, I’d say cases where they capture large amounts of execution that would otherwise occur on L1 while paying much less than that to the L1 for settlement and DA. Onchain social or games don’t fall under this in my view, but large DEX swaps, significant value transfers, etc likely do

As a result, for rollup specialization via customized appchains, they handle large amounts of execution that wouldn’t occur on L1 (gaming, social, at scale NFTs, high volume payments) while still contributing back to the L1 via settlement or DA. The execution wouldn’t have occurred on L1 because L1 doesn’t support the customizations these appchains need. As a result, it’s much clearer for them to be additive given that most of the value on the appchains is new value that wouldn’t have been captured by the L1