What is Etherlink?
- Decentralised sequencer 🌐: Using a state-of-the-art consensus mechanism, Etherlink's decentralised sequencer provides high availability and built-in censorship resistance.
- Very low fees 💰 : Etherlink has super low fees. How low? Think $0.01 per transaction, not $20.
- Fair ordering ⚖️ : Etherlink's distributed sequencer provides maximal extractable value (MEV, also known as "sandwich attack") protection by running transactions in a fair, first-come-first-serve order for all users.
Etherlink uses Smart Rollups on the decentralised Tezos protocol for data availability and will expand to use the Tezos Data Availability Layer.
What does that mean?
- EVM compatible: Etherlink runs all Solidity/Vyper smart contracts just like any other EVM chain. All your developer tooling (including Hardhat, Foundry, and Viem) should work out-of-the-box with Etherlink.
- Smart Rollup: Smart Rollups are Tezos's 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 by default. Other operators can easily verify and challenge the claim, and a single honest operator is enough to ensure that the rollup is running honestly.
- Enshrined means that they are implemented as a first-class operation 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 on Tezos layer 1, making it available to everyone.
Why use Etherlink?
It's fast
Tezos's 2-block finality guarantee and the speed of its Smart Rollups ensure that transactions are finalized quickly. Leveraging the latest research with a modified implementation of Bullshark with Shoal, Etherlink is low latency, with sub-second confirmation times:
It's decentralized
Etherlink's decentralized sequencer has no single point of failure, providing high availability, resistance to attacks, and fair transaction ordering. If the sequencing fails, users have an option to submit to the L1 directly after a delay.
It's cheap
Etherlink is built on Tezos Smart Rollups, which are enshrined on the platform, meaning that they are implemented directly on layer 1 of the protocol. However, because Smart Rollups run in their own separate environments, they are not subject to the per-transaction gas fees of layer 1, only small fees when they publish their state to layer 1. At a load of 200TPS, you can expect an ERC-20 transaction to cost $0.001 on Etherlink.
Smart Rollups also provide standardized communication between layer 1 and other rollups, even those with different execution environments, such as EVM, Michelson, and SVM. They can retrieve data from outside the Tezos blockchain via the reveal data channel.
For more information about Smart Rollups, see Scaling on Tezos.
