Busting Myths: Aggregation Increases latency

In the next episode of MythBusters

It is often incorrectly assumed by builders that aggregation layers are a trade-off between reducing your gas cost in return for increasing your latency. That’s not true.

In fact, aggregation layers decrease both your latency and your gas cost. How? This is because the cost of verifying a proof is so high right now that projects can afford to send their proofs only after very long intervals ~ once every 3–4 hours. Using aggregation, we will reduce the cost of verifying proofs by so much, that you will be able to send your proofs to Ethereum in quick intervals.

Over time, as the cost per proof keeps getting lower, the projects will send proofs with higher and higher frequency.

So in the long term, what is the lower limit of proof submission interval that customers can demand?

Ans → 15s i.e. the Ethereum Blocktime. This is because you can add your proofs on Ethereum only as quickly as blocks are added to the chain.

This means that aggregation layers must generate their proofs in ~1s so that the projects’ proofs get added in the same block they would have been added in w/o aggregation latency. Note that projects must generate their own proofs as well within this 15s window, which means there would not be much time left for aggregation latency. This scenario will obviously play out over a long period of time.