Why Gas Fees Are a Solvable Problem, Not a Dealbreaker

Every transaction competes for the same global compute. This creates a bidding war for block space, making simple swaps cost $50+ during peaks.\n- Single Resource Bottleneck: Computation, data, and consensus are bundled.\n- Inefficient Pricing: Users pay for security they don't need for simple logic.

Offload execution to specialized layers that batch proofs back to Ethereum. This decouples cost from mainnet congestion.\n- Batch Economics: ~100-1000x cheaper by amortizing L1 settlement cost.\n- Specialized VMs: Optimistic (Arbitrum) for compatibility, ZK (Starknet) for speed.\n- Sovereign Security: Inherits Ethereum's finality, not its gas market.

Storing all transaction data permanently on L1 is the primary cost driver for rollups. Data availability is the new scaling bottleneck.\n- Blob Overhead: ~90% of a rollup's cost is paying for L1 calldata.\n- State Bloat: Full nodes become prohibitively expensive to run.

Provide cheap, scalable data publishing with cryptographic guarantees, separate from execution.\n- Order-of-Magnitude Savings: ~100x cheaper data than Ethereum calldata.\n- Modular Security: Light clients can verify data availability with fraud or validity proofs.\n- Enables Volition: Apps choose between Ethereum for security or DA layers for cost.

Atomic cross-chain transactions require expensive bridging and introduce settlement latency, breaking DeFi's money legos.\n- Liquidity Fragmentation: TVL is siloed, increasing slippage.\n- Bridge Risk & Cost: $3B+ lost to bridge hacks; fees add 1-3% overhead.

Users specify what they want, not how to do it. Solvers compete to fulfill the intent off-chain, settling on-chain.\n- Gas Abstraction: User doesn't pay gas; solver bundles and optimizes.\n- Cross-Chain Native: Solvers source liquidity from any chain (Ethereum, Arbitrum, Base) atomically.\n- Better Pricing: Competition among solvers (like CowSwap) finds optimal routes.

Moves computation off-chain and compresses data on-chain, decoupling execution cost from L1 gas.\n- ~90% cheaper than Ethereum L1 for typical swaps.\n- Fraud proofs secured by a single, honest validator.\n- Stylus enables near-native performance for Rust/C++ apps.

Solves congestion by processing transactions in parallel, not sequentially.\n- Localized fee markets prevent one app's traffic from spiking costs for all.\n- ~$0.001 average fee for simple transfers.\n- Quic & Stake-weighted QoS prioritizes real users over bots.

Replaces gas-intensive computation with a cryptographic proof, paying L1 only to verify.\n- Cost amortized across thousands of bundled transactions.\n- Native account abstraction enables sponsored transactions.\n- Volition mode lets users choose data availability, trading cost for security.

Naive first-price auctions on monolithic chains let MEV bots spam the network, forcing users to overpay.\n- Base fee volatility makes cost prediction impossible.\n- Priority fee wars benefit extractors, not users.\n- Inefficient block space usage from non-urgent transactions.

Decouples transaction declaration from execution. Users specify a desired outcome, solvers compete to fulfill it optimally off-chain.\n- Gas costs absorbed by professional solvers with economies of scale.\n- MEV is captured and returned to the user as better prices.\n- Fail-safe: Falls back to on-chain execution if no solver succeeds.

The primary L1 gas cost for rollups is publishing data. Dedicated DA layers slash this by orders of magnitude.\n- ~$0.01 per MB vs. Ethereum's ~$100+ per MB.\n- Enables ultra-low-fee L2s and L3s.\n- Modular design separates execution, settlement, and DA, optimizing each.

Executing every opcode for every user on every node is the root inefficiency. This creates a zero-sum auction for block space, where demand directly translates to user-hostile fees.

• Cost Driver: Computation & storage on a global singleton.
• Result: $50+ simple swaps, $500+ for complex DeFi interactions at peak.

Decouple execution from consensus/data availability. Rollups (Arbitrum, Optimism, zkSync) batch thousands of transactions, prove them, and post a tiny proof to L1.

• Key Benefit: ~90% fee reduction vs. L1, inheriting L1 security.
• Key Benefit: Enables custom VMs (Starknet's Cairo, Fuel's UTXO) for optimized gas economics.

Move from transactional (user specifies how) to intentional (user specifies what) architectures. Protocols like UniswapX, CowSwap, and Across use off-chain solvers to find optimal routing, batching, and settlement, absorbing complexity and cost.

• Key Benefit: Gasless UX for end-users.
• Key Benefit: MEV protection and better price execution via competition.

Break the sequential processing bottleneck. Solana, Sui, Aptos, and Monad use parallel VMs to process non-conflicting transactions simultaneously, dramatically increasing throughput.

• Key Benefit: Linear scaling with cores, not Amdahl's Law.
• Key Benefit: Sub-cent fees at scale by maximizing hardware utilization.

A dedicated, cheap data channel for rollups. Replaces expensive calldata with ephemeral data blobs, slashing L1 data costs for rollups by ~100x.

• Key Benefit: Directly passes ~90% cost reduction to end-users.
• Key Benefit: Paves the way for full Danksharding, the scaling endgame.

The next bottleneck is fragmented liquidity and sequencing costs. Networks like Espresso, Astria, and LayerZero enable cross-rollup atomic composability and shared, decentralized sequencing.

• Key Benefit: Atomic cross-rollup DeFi without bridging delays.
• Key Benefit: Economies of scale in block building, further reducing fees.