Vision

The challenges stemming from rollup fragmentation underscore the need for robust interoperability solutions to facilitate connections between rollup networks.

Past interop networks have been significantly constrained by their dependence on a singular native asset for ensuring security limiting economic scalability of the network to the value of a novel asset and pose significant challenges, particularly in the protocol's early stages of development. Early verifiers, crucial for the protocol's bootstrapping phase, often face substantial inventory risk due to the asset's inherent volatility and limited liquidity. Incentivizing participation becomes increasingly difficult, as the potential rewards must offset the heightened risk associated with the asset's novelty and price fluctuations. Moreover, the instability stemming from highly volatile assets undermines the network's overall security model and deters potential users and developers from engaging with the protocol.

Externally verified interoperability protocols provide a scalable framework for arbitrary message passing between a wide range of networks. However, outsourcing the responsibilities of verification creates additional trust assumptions for the system. To mitigate these new trust assumptions, protocols can introduce cryptoeconomic security measures that require the verification set to commit capital that is at risk of being slashed in the event of misconduct. Interoperability protocols that choose to implement this model can be considered game-theoretically secure so long as the staked value of their verifier set is greater than the value that the verifier set can transfer in a single state transition period.

These drawbacks underscore the need for a new approach that is capable of achieving secure interoperability at scale, effectively addressing the foundational gaps in existing solutions.