Ethereum

Helios is becoming a multichain light client for Ethereum.

Light clients are fundamental to Ethereum scaling. A future with thousands of rollups doesn’t feel far away, and the closer we get, the more critical rollup interoperability will become.

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building open source public goods @a16zcrypto

Current proposals to make rollups interoperable — such as Optimism’s Superchain and zkSync’s Elastic Chain — will rely on the existence of secure light clients for rollup operators to validate incoming cross-rollup messages scalably.

Right now, rollup operators need to run full nodes for every chain with which they interoperate. With Helios for L2s, they can run an efficient light client instead.

We’ve started by implementing a light client for the OP Stack based on signed sequencer preconfirmations, meaning Helios can now sync on Optimism, Base, Unichain, World Chain, and anything else within the Superchain ecosystem.

We can’t achieve the full scale of crypto’s potential – trustless interactions between billions of people around the world – unless every user and node is able to efficiently verify their data regardless of blockchain, hardware, or internet speed.

If any of this excites you, please reach out. Whether you’re building a wallet and want a light client to support your users, work on an L2 that's in need of a light client, or are a talented engineer interested in contributing, we want to hear from you.

Check out our demo, which shows Helios syncing on Ethereum, Optimism, and Base, all from within the browser:
helios.a16zcrypto.com/demo

For the full blog post, head to:

Check out our demo, which shows Helios syncing on Ethereum, Optimism, and Base, all from within the browser:
helios.a16zcrypto.com/demo

For the full blog post, head to:
https://a16zcrypto.com/posts/article/scaling-ethereum-rollups-with-helios/

The OP Stack is just the beginning. We’re going to be exploring more robust verification mechanisms, building better tooling for using Helios on the browser, mobile devices, or anywhere else we could imagine someone needing a light client.