Introducing Kailua by RISC Zero: A Hybrid Architecture for OP Rollups
TLDR: Kailua enables new and existing rollup stacks to achieve blazing fast finality without the higher costs of constant zk proving. Contact us today to get started.
A Primer on Hybrid Rollups: Fast finality at optimistic costs
Optimistic roll ups are an excellent scaling solution for many teams building in and on Ethereum. With low costs and high throughput, optimistic chains have come to dominate adoption but require a 7 day challenge window which delays finality and constrains interoperability. Meanwhile, ZK rollups are a good answer to other teams, providing fast finality, but with additional costs for generating ZK proofs for every block, costing millions of dollars or more for high throughput rollups. Optimistic ZK, or "hybrid" rollups enable a compelling third option offering the best of both worlds: optimistic operating costs with fast finality.
Introducing Kailua by RISC Zero
As an extension of our work on OP's 2023 ZK RFP, we're proud to announce Kailua. Kailua leverages OP's upcoming Kona suite, to implement the world's first hybrid, dispute game for the OP stack. Kailua is:
FAST - configurable finality capable of achieving settlement times of less than 1 hour
CHEAP - avoids the cost of constant proving
UPGRADABLE - includes a utility to easily upgrade OP stack version 1.4 chains or later
FULL VALIDITY COMPATIBLE - can be configured to require intermittent, or "heart beat" validity proofs, the frequency of which can be increased until the proof is required every block providing a gradual path to full validity rollup when teams are ready.
OPEN SOURCE - Kailua will be fully open-source and published under RISC Zero’s github.
Kailua achieves this via two innovations:
- A new proposer / challenger approach, built using Kona’s innovation module, which avoids the need to perform an on-chain bisection game.
- A new dispute game which utilizes a RISC Zero proofs to resolve disputes in a single cost-efficient transaction.
