POA transition to optimistic rollup VM

[adowson]

Hi Barry,

This is an extremely interesting proposal which I think is a fantastic short term plan.

@barryWhiteHat

Phase 1: Setup

First we set up a PoA chain with our high reputation projects. Each token that wants to use this chain deploys its own token bridge contract. This is registered on the PoA side who treat balance made here as PoA chain deposits.

It seems strange that we would not consider using the xDai rather than spinning up an entirely separate PoA chain, xDai has been in production for over 2 years now which has a tonne of tooling available (TheGraph, Nethermind, OpenEthereum…), wallet support, a solid developer following, well battle-tested, a great set of validators and many projects migrating over there frequently.

If we decided to set up a new PoA chain it would throw away a lot of the infrastructure and support which is already available with xDai, granted it’s is far from perfect however it fits perfectly with the proposal outlined here.

igorbarinov has already outlined a proposal for as an interim solution to increase the number of bridge validators from 5 to 9 (far from ideal) but the team has also proposed an optimistic bridge between mainnet and a POS chain which again, is harmonious with this proposal.

@vbuterin

my main concern is just that the actual optimistic rollup projects that are out there (Optimism, Fuel, Arbitrum…) are getting close to launch so not sure how much we benefit by trying to spin up yet another new system in the meantime.

I completely agree with what @vbuterin has said here, optimistic rollup projects are close to being done so deploying an entirely separate PoA chain instead of using xDai will just delay what we all are aiming to achieve which is the quickest / best solution to scale Ethereum. We have the PoA expertise of igorbarinov and the POA / xDai team and the wealth of knowledge from the EF to make this a reality, we have seen over the past few weeks we simply can’t afford to wait and we need a solution now.

I’m sure between igorbarinov and ourselves we can reach some sort of consensus on this, the xDai team have already publicly stated several times about being a staging network for ETH2 / rollups. If we can find some harmony here, it seems like a great fit.

I think the guys over at Gnosis (recently migrated to xDai) have summed this up nicely:

We’re looking forward to this collaboration [with xDai] bolstering the perfect staging environment for Ethereum, due to its migration capabilities, token economics, and low transaction costs. Because Gnosis is long on the Ethereum ecosystem, we believe it’s important to invest in infrastructure that will keep bringing users and developers to our ecosystem.

I would be interested to hear @barryWhiteHat, @vbuterin and igorbarinov’s thoughts to see how we could make this collaboration a reality.