Sovereign rollups vs Meta-protocols

Sovereign rollups vs Meta-protocols

by Bob Bodily

Sovereign Rollups vs Meta-Protocols

Sovereign rollups are strictly better than meta-protocols in almost every way, except they aren’t quite ready for prime time yet.

Compared to meta-protocols, sovereign rollups give you:
- 20x more throughput
- 20x reduction in cost
- 1000x easier to verify state

The key downside is you cannot trustlessly bridge Bitcoin to a sovereign rollup right now (it requires a new op_code) while meta-protocols can leverage PSBTs directly on L1 (but with centralized indexers).

Meta-protocols have:
- Less throughput (unless you batch transactions and use efficient encoding)
- Greater costs (unless you batch transactions and use efficient encoding)
- Much harder to verify state (unless you build state verification into the protocol)

These are the tradeoffs between meta-protocols and sovereign rollups right now.

And in the end, it’s all about trade-offs. I’m fascinated with the meta-protocol and sovereign rollup space on Bitcoin right now, and I’m excited about everyone building layers here to improve scale, throughput, costs, and programmability on Bitcoin.

For the future, we need to think about how to get a new op_code into Bitcoin to enable trustless bridging to and from sovereign rollups.

We also need to upgrade our current meta-protocols to have batched transactions and efficient encodings (much greater throughput and reduced costs) with state verification methods built-in (better trust assumptions).

Additional Resources:

1. My deep dive on X on how I got these numbers. When I say deep I mean DEEP. It took hours and hours to get these numbers. I’m very proud of this post: https://x.com/BobBodily/status/1722464210867900556?s=20

2. A list of everyone building sovereign rollups on Bitcoin right now: https://x.com/BobBodily/status/1701993646168695017?s=20