A simple explanation about Ethereum Rollups

Photo by Shubham Dhage on Unsplash

In the last months, you probably saw something about rollups in Ethereum and how it can help the scalabilty of the network. But, most of the explanations are too technical or not practical and can be confusing for the majority, so here I will give some real-world analogies to demonstrate how it can be helpful for Ethereum.

To have an idea let's imagine that Ethereum is a city and can have just 100 houses (analogy for blocks), and the citizens are transactions. When we reach our limit of 100 houses, the price to rent or buy a house goes up, right? Same for gas fees :/

So, how we can optimize this space, to comport more people and make things more affordable to live? Yes, buildings. Now, we have the same space but we can comport hundreds of apartments and even more people.

And how this works in Ethereum? Layer 2 still executes the transactions, but instead of sending every transaction to Ethereum, the rollup compresses a bunch of transactions into a “proof” containing all of them, making all transactions being “rolled up” to Ethereum as just ONE TRANSACTION.

Let’s make another analogy, imagine that each proof can contain 100 transactions and the gas fee for a transaction now is 1$, instead of every person paying 1$, the rollup allows us to “divide” this 1$ for that 100 transactions since it will occupy the same space of just 1 transaction. And the best is, we are still registering the transactions at Ethereum, enjoying all the security.

Awesome, right? This can create reinvent how we interact and use blockchain, attracting more and more people and reducing entry barriers.