Too Long; Didn't Read
Rollups are all the rage in the Ethereum community, and are poised to be the key scalability solution for Ethereum for the foreseeable future.
But what exactly is this technology, what can you expect from it and how will you be able to use it? This post will attempt to answer some of those key questions.
Background: What is Layer-1 and Layer-2 Scaling?
There are two ways to scale a blockchain ecosystem. First, you can make the blockchain itself have a higher transaction capacity.
The main challenge with this technique is that blockchains with "bigger blocks" are inherently more difficult to verify and likely to become more centralized.
To avoid such risks, developers can either increase the efficiency of client software or, more sustainably, use techniques such as sharding to allow the work of building and verifying the chain to be split up across many nodes; the effort known as "eth2" is currently building this upgrade to Ethereum.