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What is Etherlink?

Etherlink is an EVM-compatible rollup which has a decentralised sequencer, low gas fees, and fair ordering.
  • Decentralised Sequencer 🌐: using a state-of-the-art consensus mechanism, Etherlink's decentralised sequencer provides censorship resistance and MEV protection out-of-the-box.
  • Very Low Fees 💰 : at a load of 200TPS, expect an ERC-20 transaction to cost $0.001 on Etherlink.
  • Fair Ordering ⚖️ : with a distributed sequencer from day 1, MEV protection is built-in with fair transaction ordering for all users.
Etherlink uses the decentralised Tezos protocol for data availability (prior to an implementation of the Data Availability Layer).

What does that mean?

  • EVM compatible: all Solidity/Vyper smart contracts can be deployed to Etherlink just like any other EVM chain. All your developer tooling (Hardhat, Foundry, Viem) should work out-of-the-box.
  • Smart Rollup: smart rollups are Tezos’ permissionless L2 scaling solution. They are WASM applications, providing versatility in what language you write them in. They are optimistic and enshrined:
    • Optimistic means that when rollup operators publish a claim about the state of the rollup, the claim is trusted automatically. Innocent until proven guilty.
    • Enshrined means they are implemented directly at the protocol level within L1 Tezos, as opposed to using a smart contract on L1 like current Ethereum solutions.
  • Data Availability on Tezos: smart rollups store data they want available on the Tezos layer 1.

Why is it better?

Etherlink is an enshrined smart rollup which rolls up on the decentralised Tezos protocol. Therefore, Tezos validators are the only point of failure, not the sequencer.
Furthermore, being a smart rollup on Tezos gives Etherlink some unique advantages, for example quick time-to-L1 finality thanks to Tezos’ 2 block finality guarantee.
Chain
Sequencer
L2 finality time
Data Posted on L1
Etherlink
Decentralized
~ 750ms
~ 15 seconds
Optimism Bedrock
Centralized
Arbitrum One
Centralized
~ 300ms

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Last modified 6d ago
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