Can you imagine processing a million transactions per second on blockchain? Yes. This is not a distant Utopia; teams working on Tezos have already achieved this massive throughput using the smart rollup technology. Let’s understand the tech behind this efficient and scalable blockchain solution called Tezos Smart Rollups and what makes it so special. 

What are Tezos Smart Rollups?

At the very core, Tezos smart rollups are layer 2 solutions on the Tezos L1 blockchain network. The basic function they achieve is to increase the number of transactions per second or the scalability of the blockchain. They do this using the Optimistic Rollups technology, in which transactions are processed off the main network, and only the state is uploaded to the network. Transactions in Optimistic rollups are considered valid by default and can be reverted in case someone refutes the validity within the set period. But Tezos is more than just another Optimistic Rollup.

Scalability, built into the system

Unlike many other blockchains, the rollup system is built into the Tezos protocol. This means that the validation logic is already present in the main blockchain. Making the main blockchain very friendly with rollups and providing a specialized infrastructure and guidelines for anyone to follow and make their own version of rollups. The process of building a rollup thus becomes much easier and more secure. 

The approach of supporting smart contracts out of the box helps developers as they can now deploy and run their programs directly without needing to go through the entire process of recreating the entire infrastructure every time they need to create a new contract. 

Governance and self-amendment

The Tezos protocol has robust guidelines for future upgrades and governance. Both of these play a pivotal role in scalability. Upgradability ensures that any new technology gets incorporated into the blockchain, making it future-proof. The upgrades on Tezos happen without needing to fork the blockchain. Again, this enables the community to stay united and avoid divisions with each new update. The upgrades also ensure that the blockchain can always be scaled vertically and horizontally, i.e., by adding new nodes to handle higher loads or upgrading the existing resources.

The on-chain governance adopted by Tezos ensures that all the decisions on public blockchains happen with a consensus from the community. I specified the word “public” here because Tezos allows the building of public as well as private blockchains. 

Privacy with Tezos Smart Rollups

Some applications need to keep crucial data private; in such cases, Tezos allows for the creation of permissioned or consortium blockchains. Some addresses can be whitelisted to give special privileges. Data availability committees can be used to keep the data secure and private. 

Developer friendly

Another important aspect of Tezos rollups is the support for Web Assembly or WASM compilation. This means developers can create smart contracts in any language of their choice; as long as it is compiled in WASM, the smart contract would work just fine. This choice further eases the development process as you don’t need to learn a new and project-specific language; you can even easily port other compatible contracts to Tezos.

Benefits of Tezos Rollups

By employing all the above aspects, Tezos provides a few key benefits to rollups. The permissionless fraud-proof mechanism neatly balances the incentives for anyone to point out fraudulent activity while penalizing the fraudster to keep the network healthy. The flexibility of using the language of choice reduces the initial burden and the barrier of entry, enabling diverse developers to join the community. Advanced technologies like proof-generating virtual machines, kernel, and native support for rollups scale the blockchain to enable a massive number of transactions per unit of time. The ability to create public or private blockchains ensures privacy and decentralization, depending on the project. 

Conclusion:

Considering all the features and benefits listed above, Tezos looks like one of the best-emerging blockchain scaling solutions that are developer-friendly, scalable, and efficient in operations. Enabling innovation to transcend the usual low scalability, Tezos provides many tools to serve more users by using as few resources as possible. All this is done while being future-proof of upgradability and on-chain governance.

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