Rollup Teams Maintain More Infrastructure Than Expected

Running your own sequencer is a single point of failure and a massive operational liability. Outsourcing to a shared sequencer like Astria or Espresso trades control for resilience, but you still manage the proving and data availability stack.

• Guaranteed liveness vs. self-hosted risk
• MEV capture becomes a protocol design problem
• ~$50k/month baseline infra cost for a reliable, self-hosted setup

ZK-rollups must secure reliable, cost-effective proving. This means either building a prover network (a new startup) or becoming a major client for RiscZero, Succinct, or Ingonyama. The proving market is immature and expensive.

• Prover decentralization is a separate R&D challenge
• Proof costs scale with compute, not transactions
• ~$0.01-$0.10 per proof cost at moderate scale

Users won't bridge to your barren chain. You must integrate native USDC, wrap major assets, and deploy Canonical Bridges—each a security surface. Solutions like LayerZero and Axelar abstract the bridge but introduce new trust assumptions and fees.

• Bridge security is now your security problem
• Liquidity bootstrapping requires direct incentives
• $10M+ TVL minimum for a functional DeFi ecosystem

The sequencer is a centralized profit center and a critical liveness dependency. Most rollups run a single, permissioned sequencer operated by the core team, creating a single point of censorship and failure.\n- Liveness Risk: If the sequencer goes down, the chain halts for all users.\n- MEV Capture: Teams control the ordering of all transactions, creating a massive, opaque revenue stream.

Zero-knowledge rollups like zkSync Era and Starknet outsource proving to centralized, team-operated provers. This creates a verification bottleneck and reintroduces trust.\n- Trust Assumption: Users must trust the team's prover is honest.\n- Cost & Speed: Proving is computationally intensive, creating high barriers to permissionless participation and limiting decentralization roadmaps.

Rollups use proxy upgrade patterns for their core contracts (e.g., L1 Bridge, Verifier). A multi-sig controlled by the team holds the power to arbitrarily change contract logic, freeze funds, or mint tokens. This is a systemic risk for $10B+ in bridged assets.\n- Time-Lock Theater: Many implement timelocks, but governance is still centralized.\n- Bridge Risk: The canonical bridge is the ultimate custodian, not a trustless protocol.

Optimistic and Validium rollups are completely dependent on their chosen Data Availability (DA) layer. Using a centralized DA solution like a DAC (Data Availability Committee) or a single Celestia sequencer reintroduces a liveness assumption. If DA fails, the chain cannot reconstruct its state and funds are frozen.\n- Validium Trap: Security downgraded to committee honesty.\n- Systemic Coupling: Failure of a major DA layer could cascade across multiple rollup ecosystems.

End-user access is gated by centralized RPC endpoints and indexers, often operated by the rollup team or a single provider like Alchemy or Infura. This creates metadata surveillance risks and liveness dependencies distinct from the chain itself.\n- Censorship Vector: RPC providers can filter or block transactions.\n- Performance Single Point: Downtime for the primary RPC cripples dApp UX across the ecosystem.

Proposed solutions like Espresso, Astria, or Radius aim to decentralize sequencing. However, they risk creating a new centralized layer that multiple rollups depend on, transforming chain-level risk into ecosystem-wide risk. Atomic cross-rollup composability depends entirely on this new sequencer's liveness and honesty.\n- Meta-Game Theory: Incentives may lead to re-centralization.\n- Cascading Failure: A bug or attack on the shared sequencer halts all connected rollups.

Running your own sequencer means managing real-time consensus, transaction ordering, and MEV capture. The operational overhead is immense and centralizes risk.\n- ~$500k+ annual cost for a high-availability, geo-distributed setup\n- Single point of failure for your chain's liveness and censorship resistance\n- Lost revenue from inefficient MEV extraction vs. specialized networks like Espresso or Astria

Integrating and maintaining a Data Availability (DA) layer like Celestia, EigenDA, or Avail is not plug-and-play. It requires deep protocol-specific engineering for fraud proofs, data sampling, and long-term archival.\n- Weeks of integration work per DA provider, locking you into their roadmap\n- Ongoing cost optimization battle between blob space, call data, and security budgets\n- Complex trust assumptions shift from Ethereum to a newer, less battle-tested system

Every rollup must build and secure its own canonical bridge, a high-value attack vector historically responsible for $2B+ in exploits. Managing upgradeable contracts, multi-sigs, and fraud/zk proof verification is a constant security crisis.\n- Dedicated security team required to monitor and respond to bridge threats\n- Liquidity fragmentation as users get trapped by poorly designed bridge UX\n- Prover dependency on teams like RiscZero or Succinct adds another critical external failure point

Shared sequencer networks like Espresso, Astria, and Radius are the logical endpoint. They turn a capital-intensive liability into a utility, offering decentralized sequencing, cross-rollup atomic composability, and optimized MEV revenue.\n- Instant liveness and censorship resistance from a distributed validator set\n- Atomic cross-rollup arbitrage unlocks new DeFi primitives\n- Revenue share model turns sequencing cost into a potential income stream

Platforms like Conduit, Caldera, and Gelato RaaS abstract the entire stack. They provide a managed service for the rollup client, prover network, bridge, and explorer, letting teams focus on application logic.\n- Go-to-market in days, not months, with a production-ready chain\n- Automatic upgrades for core stack (OP Stack, Arbitrum Orbit, Polygon CDK)\n- Unified dashboard for monitoring, analytics, and managing key infra providers

Investors are now discounting rollups that own their entire stack. The market rewards capital efficiency and developer focus. The winning teams will be those that outsource non-core infra to best-in-class specialists.\n- Due diligence must audit the infra roadmap and dependency risks\n- Valuation premium for teams using RaaS + Shared Sequencer + Ethereum for settlement\n- Long-term liability of a custom stack outweighs short-term control benefits