In 2020’s, when Ethereum was at its prime, protocol upgrades in the form of the Merge, followed by Shapella focussed exclusively towards improving the base Ethereum layer to make it performant from the standpoint of scalability, security and decentralization. However, over the period, it became increasingly clear that managing all operations on a single execution environment could dilute the ethos of blockchains and even make development extremely cost-intensive. Vitalik Buterin, the founder of Ethereum, through one of its tweets said that scalability should be as important as simplicity in development. Hence, he acknowledged the importance of rollups since they abstract every segment: (i) Execution (ii) Settlement (iii) Consensus
But even if you want to enjoy maximum modularity on your chain, if it comes at a very high cost, it would make the reach possible to a handful of businesses. Thereby making blockchain available to a select few for development and deployment. That’s where Rollups-as-a-Service comes for the rescue of Ethereum’s rollup centric roadmap eliminating cost intensive deployment challenges.
What is RaaS?
RaaS or Rollups-as-a-Service is a new trend in Web3 that not only expedites the development but even allows Web3 enterprises and different projects to build their own rollups, without having to extravagantly spend on the infrastructure and other resources to launch their own rollups chain.
How RaaS Helps Ethereum Pursue a Rollup Centric Future?
Imagine, if you are a business, for example, an exchange. Now, you have to cater to say thousands of transactions per second to accommodate the use-cases that you have planned for your application. In this pursuit, you cannot look forward to the main l1 chain. Why? It has a fixed block space and noisy neighbors to share the same with. Ideally, you find building your own rollups chain fascinating. But, the problem here is requirements might change. On top of this, there might be a lot of management at the backend. So, if you want to build on top of blockchains, either you have to earmark a team to manage everything, which ideally would deviate you from your own project vision or you need an alternate solution that relieves your load. R-a-a-S perfectly fits here to control this crisis by allowing project owners/developers to;
Go for Off-The Shelf Solution
In the off-the shelf solution, as a project owner or developer, you can quickly deploy a rollup solution in your own application without facing any technical complexities. Due to the off-the shelf service feature that R-a-a-S providers< deliver, the project owners/developers can focus on creating their own use-cases specific application, apply their own business logic, integrate the user experience that they wish and customize everything from the scratch without having to build their own rollup from the scratch. So, it not only improves the development process; rather, it also significantly impacts the time to market, allowing you to release your product at the right time when you want to, despite launching on top of a rollup/blockchain.
Absolute Customization
RaaS for Ethereum rollups allow projects to enjoy absolute customization where they can choose their own decentralized sequencing, data availability options, execution frameworks, and native gas tokens. It is completely on the developers to decide which stack would perfectly fit into their application’s narrative and they can integrate the same into their application. This allows them to refine their application to the core so that they can absolutely uplift the user-experience.
Suites of Integrations
When you are developing and deploying your own application, the development environment should be such that you can look forward to deep integration like deploying your own custom block explorers, fully operational KYC-identifier layer to Data Availability and preferred sequencers. Since R-a-a-S providers have network partnerships with other key players in the space, they help bring everything under one roof with on-demand integration. Hence, it opens new doors of possibilities.
What Does RaaS Provide For Quicker Rollup Integration?
Multichain Support
When you are building on top of a blockchain, it shouldn’t be walled gardens around. If you are building your own rollups, you have to ideally build bridges or messaging protocols to suit different chain specific integrations for interaction. RaaS abstracts all of that and provides a ready to deploy solution.
Major RaaS service providers like Zeeve ensure quick support for rollup stacks like Polygon CDK, Arbitrum Orbits, OP Stack, and zkSync ZK Stack. So, you can get the pleasure of building on top of all of these when you are planning to roll out your own rollup chain.
If you’re not sure which one is perfect for your application, you have the choice to go for a test drive on all stacks with a shared devnet / custom sandbox, and finalize where you want to launch the testnet/mainnet. Everything at one place.
Robust RPC & Non-RPC Node Infrastructure
You get access to a robust RPC interface that allows you to connect with different blockchains with just a click of a button. WIth this trade off, the developers are well placed to build a very high performant rollup chain as per their application specific need.
You might also need non-RPC nodes like, dedicated indexer nodes, DA Nodes, Sentinel Nodes for your Optimistic rollup chain monitoring, etc - you get everything at one place.
Greater Development Flexibility
Any application will likely prefer to develop on top of a blockchain only when their developers get to define the chain parameters as per their own standards. For example, the DyDx exchange wanted limitless scalability on their chain without exorbitantly increasing the gas fees. Hence they wanted to launch their own appchain for that matter. As an application launching on top of a rollup chain, you would like to have that same degree of flexibility to launch your application. The SDKs provide you everything for sure, but doing things from scratch has its own learning curve. RaaS gives you a standardized dashboard where developers can point and click. You get pre-defined configurations + room for experimentation.
Service integration
As a developer deploying your own rollup chain, the flexibility to deploy with decentralized storage, MPC wallets or maybe on/off ramping solutions can be a big advantage for you. Not only this can save your time but also aids in cutting down the resource spendings. R-a-a-S providers have everything intact in their service package to ensure that firsthand.
Zeeve As a RaaS Service Provider
Zeeve as a RaaS solution providers abstracts all the hassles and provide the best way forward to launch your own rollup chain using a low code deployment sandbox tool for all the leading rollup stacks like Polygon CDK, Zk Sync, Arbitrum Orbit and Op Stack. Furthermore, Zeeve brings more than 30+ integration partners to make your rollup chain comprehensive, performant and battle-tested. You can get access to all the components that you need to launch your own rollup like scalable nodes, RPCs, data Indexers, block explorers, testnet faucets, cross-chain bridges, and faucets
Along with this, you also get a dashboard integrated with Zeeve’s R-a-a-S that will display all the latest insights like uptime, disk usage, storage running out, current block height. Since Zeeve is ISO 27001 and SOC 2 Type 2 compliance and enterprise-level SLA, developers/projects get comprehensive service and support.
If you are planning to launch your own rollup/L2 to planning upon migrating from L1 to L2, we are there to help you. Send us an email or schedule a call for detailed discussion.