Explaining Puffer: Strategic Upgrade from LRT leading to Based Rollup Pioneer

The Puffer team has launched the UniFi solution based on the Based Rollup architecture, opening up new possibilities for the scalability of Ethereum.

Author: Biteye Core Contributor Mingyue

Editor: Biteye Core Contributor viee

Preface

The Trump team's issuance of meme coins on Solana has caused a market shock. The team's choice to issue meme coins on Solana has not only driven up the valuation of the Solana ecosystem, but also triggered a large amount of institutional funds to shift from the Ethereum ecosystem, putting Ethereum in the most severe market test since its inception.

This change in the market structure has not only reshaped the competitive situation of ETH in the public chain track, but also brought new thinking to Layer 1 ecology: in the competition of scalability and user experience, the ETH ecosystem urgently needs technological breakthroughs.

The dramatic change in the market structure not only shakes the market confidence of Ethereum in the public chain track, but also highlights that the competition in the Layer 1 track is entering a critical turning point: facing the dual challenges of scalability and user experience, the Ethereum ecosystem needs groundbreaking technological innovations. The Puffer team has launched the UniFi solution based on the Based Rollup architecture, opening up new possibilities for Ethereum's scalability.

Puffer UniFi, as a revolutionary Ethereum Layer 2 solution, is committed to addressing the four core pain points that hinder the development of Ethereum: achieving atomic composability and instant transactions between L1 and L2, solving the liquidity fragmentation problem in the L2 ecosystem, and introducing a decentralized sorting mechanism to enhance the utility value of ETH tokens.

Puffer UniFi is based on the concept of Rollup, which innovatively transfers the responsibility of transaction ordering to the ETH L1 validators. This not only greatly enhances security and neutrality, but also provides a new approach for Ethereum to reshape its competitive advantage. This technological breakthrough may become a key turning point for the Ethereum ecosystem in the face of a new market landscape.

Puffer UniFi utilizes the existing LRT service technology accumulated by Puffer, and integrates it organically with three core components: Based Sequencing, UniFi Preconf AVS, and TEE multi-prover, to achieve the UniFi Based Rollup technology architecture.

Based Rollup: The new paradigm of Layer 2 scaling

After the upgrade of ETH Kangkun, Layer 2 scalability solutions have regained market attention. The current mainstream scalability solutions, Optimistic Rollups and ZK Rollups, have both shown significant limitations in practical applications.

Although Optimistic Rollups dominate, their 7-day challenge window mechanism seriously affects liquidity and faces high fraud proof costs during network congestion. ZK Rollup performs well in transaction confirmation speed and data storage efficiency, but suffers from higher operational costs due to the computationally intensive nature of zero-knowledge proofs, which affects overall processing performance. More importantly, both solutions require maintaining independent centralized infrastructure, which not only increases the burden of system maintenance but also deviates from the original design intention of decentralization.

To overcome these technical bottlenecks, Ethereum Foundation researcher Justin Drake proposed the Based Rollup concept in March 2023. This innovative solution transfers transaction sorting functions to the Ethereum mainnet, achieving deep coordination between Layer 2 and Layer 1. In the Based Rollup architecture, the consensus layer, data availability layer, and settlement layer all rely on the Ethereum mainnet, while the Rollup network focuses solely on transaction execution and state updates. This design not only simplifies the technical architecture of Layer 2, but also achieves full inheritance of the Liveness of the Ethereum mainnet, marking an important breakthrough in existing scaling solutions.

The biggest advantage of Based Rollup is that it fully inherits the security of the Ethereum mainnet, eliminates complex designs such as independent sequencer verification and escape hatch mechanism, and significantly reduces system maintenance costs.

Here comes the question, why, since Based Rollup is so excellent, has it not been widely applied?

The answer is obvious, Based Rollup still has some flaws that require a lot of technical accumulation and innovative technology to solve.

While inheriting the security of the Ethereum mainnet, Based Rollup also inevitably inherits the limitations of its transaction confirmation period. Since transaction sequencing relies entirely on Layer 1, the final confirmation time of Based Rollup is locked within the Ethereum block time of approximately 12 seconds. This time span is obviously too long for applications with high requirements for timeliness, such as DeFi, severely restricting the practical application prospects of Based Rollup.

In response to this core pain point, Puffer has proposed a creative and comprehensive solution.

Pre-confirmation mechanism: resolving the challenges of Based Rollups

In the development of the Web3 ecosystem, high-performance public chains have always faced the deep-seated contradiction between efficiency and decentralization. High-performance public chains represented by Solana and TON have strong processing capabilities, but the direct interaction mode between users and chain nodes still encounters congestion issues during network peak periods. To address this dilemma, many off-chain processing solutions have emerged in the market, realizing millisecond-level transaction response through centralized order aggregation, while effectively avoiding MEV risks. However, this efficiency improvement inevitably introduces centralization risks, as it relies on a single entity for transaction aggregation and asset custody.

In this context, the Ethereum ecosystem is exploring a new perspective provided by the pre-confirmation mechanism (Pre-Confirmation). This mechanism attempts to maintain decentralization while ensuring high performance by adding a preprocessing step before the transaction is recorded on the chain.

Puffer based on this concept, combined with EigenLayer, has developed an innovative UniFi AVS pre-confirmation solution. In its architecture design, Layer 2 transactions first enter the validation node pool registered by Native ReStaking for processing. These validators as native nodes of Ethereum are able to complete transaction pre-confirmation within 100 milliseconds, allowing users to obtain a reliable pre-judgment of the transaction status without waiting for the complete confirmation cycle, significantly improving user experience.

UniFi AVS implements a strict economic penalty mechanism through EigenLayer, constraining the validating nodes to fulfill pre-commitment promises. This means that any node that violates the pre-commitment promise will face the loss of pledged assets, thus ensuring the credibility of pre-commitment at the system level. Through this dual-layer security mechanism, Puffer ingeniously resolves the efficiency bottleneck of Based Rollup, achieving millisecond-level transaction response while maintaining high security.

The pre-commitment mechanism is expected to become a key technology driving the evolution of the Web3 ecosystem. It not only provides necessary performance support for Based Rollup but more importantly, it has created a new paradigm that balances efficiency and decentralization.

TEE+Multiprover: Reconstructing Cross-Layer Atomic Interactions

Puffer's technological innovation is not only reflected in the pre-confirmation mechanism, but also in the seamless connection between Layer 1 and Layer 2 through the TEE( Trusted Execution Environment )+Multiprover dual verification architecture. The core value of this architectural design lies in achieving cross-layer atomic composability (Atomic Composability).

The so-called atomic composability refers to the interaction between smart contracts that can be completed in a single transaction, ensuring that either all operations are successfully executed or all fail and roll back. This feature is relatively easy to implement in a single-chain environment, but has always been a challenge in cross-layer scenarios. Traditional Layer 2 solutions often require long confirmation periods, severely restricting the development of cross-layer DeFi applications.

Puffer cleverly solves this problem through the TEE+Multiprover architecture. TEE provides an independent secure execution environment that can isolate the verification process and ensure that the computation is not affected by external interference. Based on this, the Multiprover mechanism introduces multiple verification nodes to participate in transaction verification, forming a decentralized fast consensus network. This design allows cross-layer transactions to obtain trusted pre-confirmation from the TEE node cluster before the final confirmation of Layer 1, thereby controlling the consensus delay in milliseconds.

TEE+Multiprover not only improves the finality speed, but also brings atomic composability with Layer 1 to UniFi rollup. This means that DApps deployed on rollups can directly access liquidity pools on the ETH mainnet for cross-layer atomic transactions. This seamless cross-layer interaction capability provides unprecedented possibilities for DeFi innovation. At the same time, by introducing a permissionless validator participation mechanism and an anti-slashing system (anti-slashing), Puffer maintains the decentralized nature of the system while ensuring high performance.

The significance of this innovative architecture goes far beyond the technical level. It essentially redefines the boundaries of Layer 2 and enables rollups to evolve from a simple scaling tool to a bridge for value transfer between layers. With the deepening and development of the Web3 ecosystem, it is believed that this kind of infrastructure that can realize cross-layer atomic interaction will play an increasingly important role.

Summary

Puffer's technical vision directly addresses the core pain points of the Ethereum ecosystem, including fragmented liquidity, fragmented user experience, and decentralized narratives.

At the technical implementation level, Puffer fully utilizes its technical accumulation in the fields of re-staking verifiable node network and trusted execution environment (TEE), and launches the most complete Based Rollup solution Puffer UniFi at present, which ensures decentralization while maintaining high performance. This innovative technical architecture not only provides a new technical solution for the existing scalability dilemma of ETH, but also opens up a new path for the healthy development of Layer 2 ecosystem.

Meanwhile, with the gradual improvement of innovative technologies such as pre-confirmation mechanism and TEE multi-prover, the benefited application scenarios are not limited to a single track of Rollup, but extend to Web3, such as Trading Bot and DEX, which can be upgraded due to these technologies. As a leader in multiple technological innovations, Puffer may also play an important role in these processes.