Accountable Safety for Rollups

Abstract

Accountability, the ability to provably identify protocol violators, gained prominence as the main economic argument for the security of proof-of-stake (PoS) protocols. Rollups, the most popular scaling solution for blockchains, typically use PoS protocols as their parent chain. We define accountability for rollups, and present an attack that shows the absence of accountability on existing designs. We provide an accountable rollup design and prove its security, both for the traditional `enshrined' rollups and for sovereign rollups, an emergent alternative built on lazy blockchains, tasked only with ordering and availability of the rollup data.