Get Started with Fuel Network — Blockchain Roadmap
John Adler is the founder of Celestia and Fuel Network. Celestia is a blockchain under development, Fuel Network is the first Optimistic Rollup running on Ethereum Mainnet, so only simple payment tokens can be transferred, no smart contracts. These two projects will work together in the near future.
One of the most discussed topics in the blockchain ecosystem recently is modular architecture. This actually means that the monolithic architecture blockchains currently used are fragmented but still interoperable.
Blockchains such as Bitcoin and Ethereum, which have been used for years, have a monolithic architecture. Blockchains with monolithic architecture realize three basic elements together;
Operations are performed in the system with the task of execution, computation.
With the Consensus task, the processes performed in the system are listed.
With the Data Availability task, the data of the transactions made in the system are stored in an accessible way.
The fact that these three basic elements occur in the same system limits the potential of that system. The structures that make up the system can actually get into a bottleneck when nodes try to do many things at the same time.
Blockchains that will work with modular architecture, on the other hand, separate these elements from each other;
In the Execution layer, off-chain computation and calculations are made and transactions are carried out. Rollups are used for this task.
The Settlement layer includes the rollups, the Execution layer.
In the consensus layer, the transactions are listed and the data of the transactions are stored in an accessible way.
Contrary to the monolithic architecture, the same nodes do not perform many different tasks in the modular architecture, so the load of the system is reduced.
Modular blockchains like Celestia are designed to act only as the Consensus layer. Rollups (Execution) can send their data to Celestia (Data Availability) while deploying (Settlement) on Ethereum Mainnet.
Rollups run on the Ethereum Mainnet, deposits and withdrawals are made on Ethereum, not missing out on Ethereum’s massive network effect. It also saves the cost of sending data to Ethereum by sending its data to Celestia, not Ethereum. It only sends Fraud Proof or Validity (Zero Knowledge) Proof to Ethereum.
Transaction data sent to Celestia can be easily audited thanks to the Data Availability Sampling technique. Checking for the existence of data is important because, for the simplest example, Optimistic Rollup validators need to examine the data to detect invalid transactions with Fraud Proof. Similarly, if the data of zk-Rollup transactions are not accessible, it cannot be known who owns what in that rollup.
The Data Availability Sampling technique allows nodes to verify that the content of that block has been published without downloading the entire block’s data. In order to verify that the data of other blockchains is published in the monolithic blockchain, the nodes must download all the data and be full nodes.
L2 Operator Rollup validators send the data of the transactions made in the rollup to Celestia and the proofs to Ethereum.
Celestia validators send proof of accessibility of the data sent to them to Ethereum.
The rollup contract makes sure that the data in Celestia is available.
Relying on Celestia over Ethereum for data storage is an important choice. Problems that will occur in Celestia may affect this role on Ethereum, but Celestia has security measures in itself to deter malicious actors such as slashing.
Fuel Network is defined as an Execution layer. In other words, it is the first and only Optimistic Rollup that works on Ethereum Mainnet as trustless and permissionless. The vision of the Fuel team is different, they know that scaling should be in a system that can run smart contracts.
FuelVM is virtual machine in a similar way to EVM. The feature that distinguishes it from EVM is that it can run smart contracts with UTXO, and in this way, the system approves transactions in parallel.
Due to the architecture of Ethereum, in Ethereum, nodes approve transactions sequentially, whereas in Fuel, nodes can approve transactions in parallel. Since the state transition of operations with UTXO is obvious, operations A and B that do not operate on the same state can be confirmed in parallel.
Parallel operations ensure full efficiency from the CPU. The overall efficiency of the system increases as more than one CPU core can be used to validate processes. The use of more than one core of the CPU is important because while the number of cores increases in CPUs developed today, the quality of the performance provided by a single core is not increased. Since it is very difficult for EVM and Ethereum to allow parallel transactions due to their own architecture, they preferred to use a non-EVM-compatible architecture.
The UTXO model was also tested on smart contract platforms such as Cardano, but this limited the user experience quite a bit.
Modular building layers are being developed rapidly and it is seen that these developed projects complement each other. Fuel developers state that the necessary optimization and scaling should focus on the execution part because the problems in the Data Availability part will already be solved with techniques such as Data Availability Sampling used by Celestia.
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