Unrolling the Performance of ZK-Rollups through Stochastic Modeling

Abstract

Sidechains offer partial solutions to Ethereum’s scalability challenges; however, they introduce trade-offs related to security and implementation complexity. These limitations have been further addressed by Layer-2 solutions known as rollups, which combine off-chain computation with on-chain verification, preserving both security and decentralization on the Ethereum platform. This paper proposes a Stochastic Petri Net model to evaluate the feasibility of ZK-Rollups by analyzing their impact on throughput and latency. The results indicate that increased adoption of Layer-2 transactions can enhance system throughput by up to 20%. Conversely, latency may rise by more than 100% when larger batches are used, revealing a fundamental performance trade-off.