Mantle's "Escape": Switching from the OP Rollup camp to the ZK camp

Author: Haotian; Source: X, @tmel0211

A few months ago, @0xMantleCN completed a technical upgrade from OP Rollup to ZK Validium + EigenDA, which not only brought costs close to those during the OP phase, but crucially reduced the finality from 7 days to within 1 hour. Sounds like nothing much, right? But if we say this is Mantle's “escape” from the OP Rollup camp? Would that pique your interest?

Why do you say that?

1. Mantle has transformed from a chain that previously provided liquidity economic incentives for Multi-layer2 into an institutional-grade RWA financial infrastructure service based on off-chain yields from Bybit.

Previously, Mantle provided a liquidity transit station for L2, attracting multi-chain liquidity with mETH staking rewards. Now, the brand new institutional-level services include tokenization services for US stocks such as xStocks.

In simple terms, everyone needs to rely on capital circulation efficiency and the participation of institutional funds, but if it is the technical security guarantee of the 7-day optimistic verification and Fraud Proof of the past OP Rollup, there will obviously be significant issues;

After all, the “security” of fraud proof is based on the optimistic assumption of not doing evil and post-game punishment, promoting a logic of “get on the bus first, and we'll talk about problems later”. This could barely hold up in the past with layer 2 having tens of millions in TVL and several hundred million in small ecosystems, but in today’s context where institutional funds are flooding in with compliance requirements, this logic clearly no longer holds. How do you convince institutions like BlackRock and Fidelity to endure a security assumption for 7 days? What a joke!

2. If the reason for sacrificing capital flow efficiency with OP Rollup in the past was to save costs, then with the reduction in the cost of ZK Proof and the maturity of combination economic verification models like EigenDA, this reason of “cheapness” no longer holds.

At that time, choosing OP and skipping ZK proofs was simply because ZK technology was not mature and too expensive. However, with services like RISC Zero and Succinct reducing proof costs to below $0.002, even lower than the overall cost of OP Rollup, the OP Rollup table was overturned by ZK Rollup.

Moreover, EigenDA has compressed the DA cost to 1/10 of the normal Blob on Ethereum L1 through off-chain data availability + AVS re-staking economic security model.

In this way, the combination of ZK Validium and EigenDA in Mantle results in lower gas costs, faster transaction speeds, and the security finality has been reduced from 7 days to within 1 hour.

This is not the case; it has achieved a comprehensive surpassing of the original OP era?

Above.

Although the statement that ZK Rollup is the ultimate layer 2 solution was initially clear to everyone, with the maturity of ZK proof technology and various DA economic validation models, the technical advantages of OP lineage chains have been challenged. For those still adhering to the layer 2 ecosystem, relying on application proliferation for Mass Adoption, the impact of OP layer 2 chains such as Arbitrum and Base is still not significant.

However, for financial-oriented chains like Mantle that embrace institutions, transformation is imminent.