Sovereign Rollups vs. Enshrined Rollups: The Governance Split

Enshrined rollups, like Arbitrum and Optimism, are bound by the governance of their parent chain (e.g., Ethereum). This creates a political bottleneck for innovation, where even critical upgrades require L1 social consensus.\n- Risk of Stagnation: New VM support or precompiles move at L1 speed.\n- One-Size-Fits-All: Cannot fork the underlying chain to adopt novel features.

Sovereign rollups, like those built with Celestia or Polygon CDK, treat the data availability layer as a bulletin board. Their own validator set controls the execution and settlement rules, enabling unilateral forks.\n- Rapid Iteration: Deploy new VMs, fee markets, or privacy schemes without permission.\n- Niche Optimization: Tailor the chain for specific applications (DeFi, Gaming, Social).

Sovereignty sacrifices shared security for autonomy. The rollup's security is now a function of its own validator set's economic stake, not the parent chain's. This reintroduces sovereign security budgets and coordination complexity.\n- New Attack Vectors: Must bootstrap and maintain a robust validator ecosystem.\n- Fragmented Liquidity: Interoperability becomes a bridge security problem, not a native property.

Projects like EigenLayer and Babylon are creating markets for re-staked security, allowing sovereign chains to rent economic security from Ethereum. This creates a spectrum between pure enshrinement and pure sovereignty.\n- Security-as-a-Service: Pay for cryptoeconomic security without political control.\n- Best of Both: Retain upgrade autonomy while leveraging Ethereum's validator set.

Enshrined rollups like Arbitrum and Optimism inherit their security and upgrade keys from their parent L1. This creates vendor lock-in, where the rollup's roadmap is tied to the L1's governance and technical priorities, limiting innovation speed and sovereignty.

• Key Constraint: Upgrade paths require L1 governance approval or a multi-sig.
• Key Benefit: Stronger security guarantees from the canonical Ethereum bridge and validator set.

Sovereign rollups like those built with Celestia or EigenDA decouple execution from settlement. They post data to a data availability layer and handle their own consensus and fork choice rules. This enables full self-governance.

• Key Benefit: Unilateral upgradeability without L1 governance approval.
• Key Benefit: Ability to change the underlying VM or even the settlement layer entirely.

Enshrined rollups pay for maximal security with reduced autonomy. Sovereign rollups gain autonomy but must bootstrap their own validator set and social consensus for safety, introducing new coordination challenges. This is the fundamental modular blockchain trade-off.

• Enshrined Example: zkSync Era, Base - Security is a service from Ethereum.
• Sovereign Example: dYmension RollApps, Fuel - Security is a product of their own network.

Projects like StarkEx Validiums (e.g., Immutable X, Sorare) and Arbitrum AnyTrust blend models. They use off-chain data availability committees (DACs) for cost savings while optionally falling back to Ethereum. This creates a sliding scale of security guarantees.

• Key Benefit: ~100x lower fees than full L1 data posting.
• Key Constraint: Introduces trust assumptions in the DAC or a smaller validator set.

New layers like EigenLayer (restaking) and Celestia (sovereign rollups) are competing to become the security or settlement backbone. EigenLayer enables enshrined rollups to lease Ethereum's economic security, while Celestia provides a neutral DA layer for sovereign chains.

• EigenLayer: Turns staked ETH into a reusable security primitive.
• Celestia: Provides modular data availability as a commodity.

The sovereign model enables hyper-specialized app-chains. A gaming rollup can optimize for low-latency execution with a custom VM, while a DeFi rollup can enforce strict MEV policies. This fragments liquidity but maximizes performance per application.

• Key Driver: Customizability of fee markets, privacy, and execution environments.
• Key Challenge: Cross-chain liquidity fragmentation requiring robust bridges like LayerZero and Axelar.

Enshrined rollups (e.g., Arbitrum, Optimism) must pass all upgrades through the L1's governance, which is slow and politically charged. This creates a coordination tax and stifles rapid iteration.

• Key Benefit 1: Sovereign chains avoid L1 politics, enabling fork-first development like in Cosmos.
• Key Benefit 2: Teams can ship protocol changes in days, not months, crucial for DeFi primitives and novel VM support.

Sovereign rollups (e.g., Celestia, Eclipse) derive security from posting data to a cryptoeconomically secure DA layer, not from L1 execution. The L1 becomes a bulletin board, not a court.

• Key Benefit 1: Unbundles execution from settlement, allowing forking the state transition function without forking the L1.
• Key Benefit 2: Enables experimental VMs (Move, SVM) and fee markets independent of the host L1's constraints.

Enshrined rollups inherit the L1's validator set and social consensus from day one, providing instant finality and bridging security. Sovereign rollups must bootstrap their own ecosystem of provers and watchers.

• Key Benefit 1: Enshrined models offer stronger safety guarantees for high-value bridges and institutional DeFi (e.g., Aave, Uniswap).
• Key Benefit 2: Sovereign models force healthier security assumptions, avoiding the "too big to fail" political risk of a monolithic L1.

Choose enshrined for maximal security and composability within an existing L1 ecosystem (Ethereum's rollup-centric roadmap). Choose sovereign for maximal autonomy and innovation in application logic, especially for new gaming or social economies.

• Key Benefit 1: Enshrined is the safe bet for forking existing EVM dApps and leveraging established liquidity.
• Key Benefit 2: Sovereign is the frontier for niche app-chains that need custom fee tokens, privacy, or governance not possible on shared L2s.