Why Shared Security Models Fail for Sovereign Rollups

Projects like Astria and Espresso promise cheaper blockspace but create a new centralization vector. Sovereignty means controlling your own transaction ordering and censorship resistance.

• MEV Capture: Your rollup's value is extracted by a third-party sequencer set.
• Liveness Risk: Your chain halts if the shared sequencer fails or is attacked.
• Weak Sovereignty: You delegate the most critical l1 function—consensus.

Relying on a smart contract rollup (e.g., Arbitrum, Optimism) for settlement surrenders ultimate authority. The L1 can freeze or upgrade your chain without your consent.

• Forced Upgrades: You must adopt the L2's protocol changes, breaking custom logic.
• Censorship Finality: The settlement layer can reject your state roots.
• Vendor Lock-in: You're tied to one VM (EVM, SVM) and its economic policy.

Celestia and Avail provide only data availability and consensus—the minimal shared base layer. This enables true sovereignty: you settle your own proofs and define your own fork-choice rule.

• Unopinionated Execution: Use any VM (EVM, SVM, Move, CosmWasm).
• Fork-Your-Chain: Disagree with governance? Fork the state and continue.
• Security Specialization: DA security scales independently from execution, enabling ~$0.001 per transaction data cost.

Re-staking ETH to secure sovereign chains like Dymension or Saga seems elegant but re-introduces shared risk. A catastrophic bug in one rollup can lead to slashings across the ecosystem, creating systemic contagion.

• Correlated Failure: Security isn't isolated; it's pooled and interdependent.
• Economic Abstraction: Validators secure for yield, not chain ideology.
• Complexity Risk: Adds multiple layers of trust (AVS, operator, L1).

Shared security hubs promise seamless composability (e.g., IBC, Polygon AggLayer). But sovereign chains need bridges, which become the new security bottleneck. You trade L1 risk for bridge risk—a historically worse attack vector with >$2B in losses.

• Bridge Dependence: Your chain's liquidity is secured by a multisig or light client.
• Composability Latency: Cross-chain messages have ~10min finality vs. instant L1 sharing.
• Fragmented Liquidity: Each sovereign chain becomes its own isolated island.

The future is thousands of purpose-built chains, not a few general-purpose L2s. Sovereignty allows optimal design for specific use cases: a high-frequency DEX chain with custom mempools, or a privacy chain with encrypted state.

• Fee Market Control: No competing with NFTs for block space.
• Custom Infrastructure: Tailored sequencers, provers, and data compressions.
• Sustainable Economics: Fees accrue to your chain's validators, not a parent chain.

Sovereign rollups demand final say over their state and upgrades, a right that shared security actively revokes. You're paying for a validator set you cannot govern.

• Governance Lock-In: A rollup on a shared sequencer like Espresso or a DA layer like Celestia cedes its upgrade path to an external, potentially adversarial, governance body.
• Economic Misalignment: The security provider's incentive is to maximize fees across all clients, not optimize for your chain's specific performance or user experience.

Centralizing transaction ordering into a single service like Astria or Espresso creates a bottleneck and a single point of failure for dozens of chains.

• Cross-Chain Contagion: A surge on one rollup can congest the shared sequencer, causing unpredictable latency spikes and failed transactions for all connected chains.
• Censorship Vulnerability: A malicious or compliant sequencer can selectively delay or exclude transactions, violating a sovereign chain's core credo of permissionlessness.

Using a shared DA layer like Celestia or EigenDA for data availability does not secure execution. It's a data rental agreement, not a security settlement.

• Execution is Sovereign: If the DA layer is available but your rollup's prover is malicious or fails, the shared security model offers zero recourse. The fault proof is your problem.
• Bridging Complexity: Moving assets between a sovereign rollup and a shared-security ecosystem like Cosmos IBC or Polygon CDK requires custom, high-trust bridges, negating the 'security' benefit.

EigenLayer restaking ETH to secure Actively Validated Services (AVS) conflates economic stake with technical security. Staked value does not automatically translate to correct execution.

• Slashing is Subjective: Penalizing operators for a sovereign rollup's complex, application-specific faults is politically fraught and often unimplementable.
• Yield Extraction: The model primarily serves to recycle L1 staking yield, creating a $15B+ TVL market driven by leverage, not by a proven need for its security abstraction.

Sovereignty means full control over your state transition function and fork choice. Shared security providers like Celestia (DA) or EigenLayer (AVS) only provide data availability or validation services, not finality. This creates a critical gap:

• No Enforcement: A malicious sequencer can post valid data but execute invalid state transitions.
• Fork Choice Risk: Users must actively monitor and coordinate forks, a UX nightmare.
• Not a Settlement Layer: You still need a separate layer (e.g., Bitcoin, Ethereum) for asset bridging and dispute resolution.

Shared security does not equal shared liquidity or composability. Sovereign rollups using different DA layers or settlement chains become isolated islands.

• Fragmented Liquidity: Assets bridged via LayerZero or Axelar rely on external, often centralized, attestation committees.
• No Atomic Composability: Cross-rollup transactions (e.g., between a Celestia-fueled rollup and an Ethereum L2) require complex, trust-minimized bridges like Across or intent-based systems like UniswapX, adding latency and cost.
• Settlement Dependence: You're only as secure as your weakest bridge, creating a $2B+ attack surface across major bridges.

The solution is a purpose-built security model that complements sovereignty. This isn't about outsourcing; it's about integrating.

• Hybrid DA: Use Celestia for cheap blob storage, but anchor checkpoints to Bitcoin or Ethereum for censorship-resistant finality.
• Light Client Bridges: Implement fraud or validity proofs that settle on a robust L1, enabling trust-minimized asset inflows without sacrificing fork choice.
• Sequencer Decentralization: Use a PoS-based sequencer set with slashing, or a shared sequencer network like Astria, but retain the sovereign ability to replace it.

True security for a sovereign chain isn't cheap or easy. Shared security models market low cost but offload critical risks.

• Hidden Costs: You pay for EigenLayer restaking yields and Celestia blob fees, but still need to bootstrap your own validator set for consensus.
• Capital Inefficiency: $15B+ is locked in restaking protocols, but that capital isn't directly securing your chain's execution.
• Time-to-Security: Bootstrapping a credible validator set with meaningful stake takes years and >$100M in token incentives, as seen with Cosmos chains.