The explosive growth of crypto assets has brought along a series of challenges—network congestion and soaring Gas fees. Many blockchains are currently experiencing this "growing pain."

The industry’s solutions generally fall into two main categories. One is directly modifying the main chain itself, such as through sharding to increase capacity, known as Layer 1 scaling; the other is building second-layer networks on top of the main chain to offload transactions, which is the Layer 2 solution. The latter includes state channels, sidechains, and rollups.

Among these, blockchain rollups are particularly interesting. Their core idea is not complicated: bundle a large number of transactions together, compress the data size, and record the transaction data on the main chain, while processing the transactions on a secondary chain. This approach ensures security (data on the main chain) while significantly improving efficiency (processing on the secondary chain).

In terms of operational mechanisms, rollups are divided into two camps—Optimistic Rollups and Zero-Knowledge Rollups. Each has its own logic, advantages, and disadvantages. But their common goal is the same: to solve the longstanding issues of high transaction costs and slow speeds. Many emerging applications are experimenting along this path.