Why Cero?

As blockspace on Ethereum and other blockchain network remains expensive and slow to aquire. App-chains & Rollups have become the promising way of how one can achieve promises of decentralization. Yet the problems that a chain, especially rollups face is still difficult enough to get the adoption going.

• Economic viability for underlying infrastructure(especially in case of ZK proof based systems), on-chain costs(in case of rollups or interop solutions).

• Censorship of transactions: A centralized sequencer or a small validator set can easily choose to censor some transactions by dropping them from their mempool or not adding them there in the first place.

• MEV exploitation: To maximize the extortion out of any specific application, a validator or centralized sequencer may choose to order the transactions in a manner that allows exploitations to take place with activities such as sandwich attack or frontrunning.

• Single-point failures: A simple failure in a centralized sequencer can lead to a complete halt in the entire blockchain, whether intentional or unintentional, leading to substantial loss of business and funds.

• Composability: The block production taking place independently across chains leads to leads to failure in composability within the ecosystem which is almost impossible to solve in fragmented chains.

Rollups working on centralized sequencers have high risk on above points, while validator based side chains struggle with the same as the consensus is yet not decentralized enough. While the solutions to work on above challenges exist, there are many constrainsts that have proven themselves as challenges. Evidence to this is that very few, even in top rollups running today are actually decentralized.

• Design drawbacks - Lack of decentralization in the architecture, unproven complex economic structures and tradeoffs in scalability.

• Configurability & modularity restrictions - The rollups of today are quite specific on their preferences in choice of their settlement layer, DA layer, interoperability interfaces, and also various configurations of batch sizes and timely finalization.

• Lack of support from Rollup stacks - Not being able to integrate directly into the stacks with a standard interface has made the world of modular blockchains very difficult to adopt.

• Lack of readiness - We have only a handful of networks using decentralized sequencing, due to the slow advancement in the technology.

• Targeted adoption - Much of the sequencing solutions are only targeted towards a specific audience of rollups looking to solve a very specific problem. Rollups in enterprise domain, privacy oriented rollups and L3s and many more implementations are left out.

• Performance bottlenecks - Decentralized attempts of sequencing networks have come at the big cost of performance.

Based on our experience as described above, we are deduce that a universal transaction ordering layer which is built in mutiple dimensions simutaneously with the backing of our amazing partners would lead us to build a strong solution to the problem that has existed for long.