Caldera: a powerful tool for deploying Rollups

Caldera is a tool that allows you to deploy Rollups with a single click. With it, you can launch rollups based on: OP Stack, Arbitrum Orbit, and Polygon CDK.

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ℹ️ Information : Rollups are a Layer 2 scaling solution designed to enhance the scalability and efficiency of blockchain networks. In short: rollups are blockchains that rely on another layer-one blockchain (especially Ethereum) for settlement, while providing better scalability and performance guarantees compared to the underlying blockchain.

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Actually, what’s amazing about Caldera is that anyone can deploy a rollup in seconds without any computer skills. You can deploy a rollup, your friend can deploy theirs, even your neighbor who knows nothing about crypto can deploy theirs, all like a developer, yet no technical/programming skills are required. See for yourself right here: https://dashboard.caldera.xyz

Build your Rollup with Caldera

By visiting the website above, you will begin building your Rollup with the ability to:

• Choose to build with Arbitrum Orbit, OP Stack, or Polygon CDK.
• You can also choose to opt for shared and decentralized sequencing from the start.
• You can reduce fees by 10 to 100 times by using Celestia, Eigen, or NEAR for Data Availability (the choice is yours).
• Finally, you have the option to choose any token as the native token and pay the fees of your chain with it. In the examples provided, you can use: $ETH, $USDC, $DAI, $wWBTC, and $SHIB. You can use almost any ERC-20 token as the native token of your rollup. The only tokens that cannot be used as native rollup tokens are elastic tokens due to their volatile supply. Fortunately, very few tokens use this type of design.

Then you will be able to:

• Connect your chain via Caldera’s RPCs. They will host the infrastructure for your Rollup. • Deploy smart contracts in Solidity. Caldera’s rollups are fully compatible with the EVM.
• A native bridge interface from Caldera will be provided for depositing and withdrawing funds, or use one of Caldera’s third-party partners for bridging.
• Offer developers a familiar development experience, with a block explorer, transaction data API, indexer, and more…

🔹 Advantages

• Never encounter performance issues. Caldera nodes adapt as usage increases.
• Caldera chains offer 99.99% uptime SLAs.
• Leverage Caldera’s audience to kickstart user adoption.

🔹 Caldera’s major downside

All of Caldera’s infrastructure is hosted on Amazon Web Services and distributed across multiple regions. This leads to the conclusion that AWS has a “life or death” control over Caldera.

Data Availability Alternatives

🔹 Issue with Ethereum’s Data Availability

To ensure that processed invalid transactions can be detected and rolled back on a rollup, users need a way to ensure that the rollup block data is effectively published. Currently, the vast majority of Ethereum rollups solve this by simply publishing all rollup blocks on Ethereum and relying on it for data availability. However, traditional Ethereum Data Availability (DA) can result in extremely high and volatile costs, as rollups are constrained to compete for limited block space with all other dApps and users transacting on Ethereum. As a result, over 95% of the cost of a rollup transaction today comes from data publishing on Ethereum, and this is a problem—Ethereum is too expensive for DA!

🔹 Alternative DA Systems, a Solution?

Alternative DA systems employ innovative approaches to separate data availability from chain settlement, thereby significantly reducing associated costs and increasing throughput to significantly improve the long-term scalability of rollups. So alternative solutions like Celestia or NEAR DA are super useful because they are much cheaper and more scalable.

Currently, Caldera offers Celestia, Near, and Eigen DA as alternative DA solutions for all Caldera chains, leveraging their innovative technologies to save significant costs for chains in the Caldera ecosystem.

Decentralized Sequencing

Caldera supports decentralized sequencing through an integration with Espresso, a leading decentralized sequencing network.

🔹 Why Decentralized Sequencing?

Every rollup relies on a sequencer to order and verify transactions on the chain (for more information, see the mentioned thread above). Traditionally, these sequencers have been centralized entities, controlled by a single party or a group of parties. The vast majority of current rollups (including Arbitrum, Base, zkSync, etc.) currently use a centralized sequencer.

These rollups inherit security properties from their underlying chain through rollup proof systems, but their centralized sequencers still pose several problems:

• Centralized sequencers create a single point of failure in the system. If the sequencer fails, it may become impossible or very costly to submit transactions for inclusion.

• The centralized sequencer can arbitrarily censor or delay transactions, or reorder transactions to extract value from front-running transactions.

• Users have no visibility into how transactions are sequenced.

• Users must trust rollup operators to maintain the sequencer, order transactions according to specifications, and avoid any arbitrary value extraction or censorship.

🔹 How it Works

Essentially, the Espresso sequencer network replaces the rollup’s mempool implementation. User transactions are sent to the Espresso sequencer instead of the rollup node itself. Then, rollup nodes query sequenced transactions from the Espresso sequencer node. This eliminates the reliance on a centralized sequencer to act fairly.

Useful Links

• Official Site: https://caldera.xyz
• Documentation
• Discord: https://discord.gg/caldera

Caldera is an excellent project that enables the deployment of rollups very rapidly. It aligns with the “rollup as a service” trend and is worth keeping an eye on!