Awesome post @JustinDrake! Really great summary of the pros and cons of based vs non-based sequencing for rollups. Also love the term “based”, I have just been calling this native vs non-native sequencing, and native is an overloaded term
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One question on the social consensus point quoted above – what precisely is the issue that you are referring to? For example, if a non-based sequencing solution is implemented with an external consensus protocol whose stake table (i.e., participation set) is managed in an L1 contract, why wouldn’t you say that social consensus among the L1 nodes could be used to recover from failures?
Or at least to the same extent that it can be used to recover from failures with based sequencing? (I am not sure to what extent we can rely on social consensus in the first place, as it is somewhat of a magic hammer to circumvent impossibilities in consensus, recovering liveness despite the conditions that made it impossible in the given model, whether due to the network or corruption thresholds exceeded).
Is the assumption that L1 validators do not have the incentive to do any form of social recovery for non-based sequencing because they aren’t running it and aren’t deriving sufficient benefit from it? Would you say this changes with re-staking that protocols like Eigenlayer are enabling? Because with re-staking the L1 validators do have the option to participate and get more exposure to the value generated by the rollup? If so, would you say this still remains true when some form of dual-staking is used, that allows both for participation of Ethereum nodes (L1 stakers) and other nodes that are directly staking (some other token) for the non-based sequencing protocol? If not, then where would you say the threshold is crossed, going from pure based sequencing, to sequencing exclusively run by L1 re-stakers, to some hybrid dual-staking, that makes social consensus no-longer viable?