Author: Abi, Swell CSO; Translation: 0xjs@Golden Finance
Swell L2 currently has over 1.2 billion in pre-deposits. What exactly is Swell building?
Eigenlayer is a security market. LRT is a secure liquidity re-collateralization token. When we built LRT, we wanted to be more than just a supplier.
Swell L2 is the L2 used for re-mortgage, and is the flywheel for unlocking demand for security with rswETH.
Swell L2 is a ZK-Validium built on Polygon CDK. It uses the technologies created by three industry leaders, Polygon, Altlayer, and Eigen DA, to create the next generation of DeFi center.
Why choose Polygon CDK? Polygon CDK is used by OKX, Immutable, and Gnosis Pay. The reasons why it is chosen by many projects are:
1. No fees. Optimism Superchain charges 15% for sorting fees. Polygon charges for Chain0 built on Polygon CDK. What is Polygon’s motivation?
2. Polygon’s biggest bet right now is the network effect of the aggregation layer. Connecting all chains through unified proof aggregation enables fast and secure native bridging. This creates unified liquidity, and for Swell, this means that we will become the center of re-staking for the entire aggregation layer ecosystem.
3. Swell makes a bigger directional bet on the future direction of ZK. ZK Rollups provide faster finality than the Optimistic chain, whose fraud proofs take 7 days to reach finality but are often criticized for higher TX fees due to the cost of submitting proofs. This is where Eigen DA is needed.
By building Swell L2 as a ZK-Validium, we are able to significantly reduce the fee difference between ZK and Optimistic Rollups (especially post blob). ZK-Validiums significantly reduce gas fees by using something that is not a DA mainnet. Before DA solutions like Celestia and Eigen DA appeared, you needed to start your own decentralized data availability committee.
But by combining rswETH and Eigen DA, Swell L2 is able to derive DA security from its own gas token. We incorporate DA security into the chain's "ETH", eliminating the need to launch a completely independent DAC or pay rent to external DA solutions such as Celestia.
We achieve fast finalization, decentralized verification, and decentralized ordering by using Altlayer’s AVS stack. rswETH is now directly tied to Swell L2, where the decentralized chain infrastructure built by Altlayer feeds back into rswETH.
Chain activity pushes fees to the chain infrastructure AVS, which in turn pushes fees to $rswETH, which provides higher yields to users, ultimately bringing more users to the chain. Welcome to re(3,3), the re-staking flywheel.
