The Ethereum ecosystem is facing a reshaping: Puffer UniFi creates a new paradigm for Layer 2

Introduction

Recently, a team of a well-known political figure launched a meme coin on Solana, causing a stir in the market. This move not only boosted the valuation of the Solana ecosystem but also led to a significant amount of institutional funds shifting from the Ethereum ecosystem, putting Ethereum under the most severe market test since its inception.

The dramatic changes in this market landscape have not only shaken the market confidence in Ethereum on the public chain track but also highlighted that the competition in the Layer 1 track is entering a critical turning point: in the face of dual challenges of scalability and user experience, the Ethereum ecosystem needs breakthrough technological innovation. Against this backdrop, the Puffer team has launched the UniFi solution based on the Based Rollup architecture, opening up new possibilities for Ethereum's expansion.

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

UniFi is based on the concept of Based Rollup, which innovatively shifts the responsibility of transaction ordering to Ethereum L1 validators. This not only significantly enhances security and neutrality but also provides a new perspective for reshaping Ethereum's competitive advantage. This technological breakthrough could become a key turning point for the Ethereum ecosystem in the face of a new market landscape.

UniFi leverages the existing LRT service technology accumulation of Puffer and achieves the UniFi Based Rollup technical architecture through the organic integration of three core components: Based Sequencing, UniFi Preconf AVS, and TEE multi-prover.

Based Rollup: A New Paradigm for Layer 2 Scalability

After the Ethereum Cancun upgrade, Layer 2 scaling solutions have returned to the market spotlight. The current mainstream scaling solutions, Optimistic Rollups and ZK Rollups, have both exposed significant limitations in real-world applications.

Optimistic Rollups dominate the market, but their 7-day challenge window mechanism severely affects liquidity, and they face high costs of fraud proof during network congestion. ZK Rollup excels in transaction confirmation speed and data storage efficiency, but bears high operational costs due to the computationally intensive nature of zero-knowledge proofs, impacting overall processing performance. More critically, both types of solutions require the maintenance of independent centralized infrastructure, which not only increases the burden of system maintenance but also diverges from the original design intent of decentralization to some extent.

To overcome these technical bottlenecks, a researcher from the Ethereum Foundation proposed the concept of Based Rollup in March 2023. This innovative solution achieves deep synergy between Layer 2 and Layer 1 by migrating the transaction sorting function to the Ethereum mainnet. 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 fully inherits the activity of the Ethereum mainnet, marking a significant breakthrough in existing scalability solutions.

The biggest advantage of Based Rollup is that it fully inherits the security of the Ethereum mainnet, eliminating complex designs such as independent sorter verification and escape pod mechanisms, while also significantly reducing system maintenance costs.

The question arises, since Based Rollup is so excellent, why hasn't it been widely adopted?

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

Based Rollup inherits the transaction confirmation cycle limitations of the Ethereum mainnet while also inheriting its security. Since transaction ordering relies entirely on Layer 1, the final confirmation time of Based Rollup is locked within the Ethereum block time (about 12 seconds). This time span is clearly too long for applications with high timeliness requirements such as DeFi, severely restricting the practical application prospects of Based Rollup.

To address this core pain point, Puffer has proposed a creative and comprehensive solution.

Pre-confirmation Mechanism: Resolving the Based Rollups Dilemma

In the development process of the Web3 ecosystem, high-performance public chains have always faced a deep-seated contradiction between efficiency and decentralization. Projects represented by certain high-performance public chains, while possessing strong processing capabilities, still struggle with congestion issues during network peak periods due to the direct interaction model between users and chain nodes. To solve this dilemma, many off-chain pre-processing solutions have emerged in the market, achieving millisecond-level transaction responses through centralized order aggregation, while effectively avoiding MEV risks. However, this method of improving efficiency inevitably introduces centralization risks, as it relies on a single entity for transaction aggregation and asset custody.

In this context, the pre-confirmation mechanism being explored by the Ethereum ecosystem provides a fresh perspective. This mechanism attempts to maintain decentralized characteristics while ensuring high performance by adding a preprocessing stage before transactions are recorded on the blockchain.

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

UniFi AVS implements a strict economic penalty mechanism through EigenLayer, constraining validator nodes to fulfill their pre-confirmation commitments. This means that any node that violates the pre-confirmation commitments will face losses of their staked assets, thereby ensuring the credibility of pre-confirmations at the system level. Through this dual-layer guarantee mechanism, Puffer cleverly addresses the efficiency bottleneck of Based Rollup, achieving millisecond-level transaction response while maintaining high security.

The pre-confirmation 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 creates 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 achieves 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.

The so-called atomic composability refers to the ability for interactions between smart contracts to 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 achieve in a single-chain environment but has always been a challenge in cross-layer scenarios. Traditional Layer 2 solutions often require a long confirmation period, which severely restricts 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, ensuring that the computing process is not affected by external interference. On this basis, the Multiprover mechanism introduces multiple verification nodes to jointly participate in transaction verification, forming a decentralized fast consensus network. This design allows cross-layer transactions to obtain trusted pre-confirmations from the TEE node cluster before waiting for Layer 1 final confirmation, controlling consensus delay to the millisecond level.

TEE+Multiprover not only enhances finality speed but also brings atomic composability with Layer 1 to the UniFi rollup. This means that DApps deployed on the rollup can directly access the liquidity pools of the Ethereum mainnet, enabling 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, Puffer maintains the decentralization 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, evolving rollups from mere scaling tools to bridges for inter-layer value transfer. With the deepening development of the Web3 ecosystem, it is believed that this infrastructure capable of achieving cross-layer atomic interactions will play an increasingly important role.

Summary

Puffer's technical vision directly addresses the core pain points of the Ethereum ecosystem, such as liquidity fragmentation, fragmented user experience, and dispersed narratives.

On the technical implementation level, Puffer fully leverages its technological accumulation in the fields of re-staked verifiable node networks and trusted execution environments (TEE) to launch the most complete Based Rollup solution UniFi, which maintains high performance while ensuring decentralization. This innovative technical architecture not only provides a new technical solution to the existing scalability dilemma of Ethereum but also opens up new paths for the healthy development of the Layer 2 ecosystem.

At the same time, with the gradual improvement of innovative technologies such as the pre-confirmation mechanism and TEE multi-prover, the beneficial application scenarios are not limited to a single track of Rollup, but are spread across various fields of Web3. For example, Trading Bot and DEX can also be upgraded due to these technological advancements. As a leader in multiple technological innovations, Puffer may also play an important role in these processes.