Why build a new chain from scratch?

Building a new L1 is like opening a mall in the desert: no roads, no shops, no people. You spend months pouring building materials before a single customer walks through the door. Rollups skip that. When you launch on Ethereum, where the underground infrastructure (validators, smart contracts, standards), the roads (wallets, explorers, indexers), the shops (DeFi, NFTs, infra), and the people (users, liquidity) already exist. Your product opens from day one in the busiest city in the blockchain space.

That’s why the next frontier isn’t “another L1.” It’s synchronous, composable rollups—L2s that can work in sync. Think of an orchestra with multiple instruments playing in unison. 

Ethereum’s validator moat: decentralization you can’t fake

Truly decentralized proof-of-stake security isn’t an on/off switch; it’s a moat you dig over years. Ethereum’s validator set sits in the seven figures, representing billions in economic security. That’s not just a big number—it's a signal that the network can resist capture, survive shocks, and keep uptime through upgrades.

For a business, that means you don’t have to gamble your project on a young or centralized validator set. Rollups inherit Ethereum’s security from day one, anchoring finality to the same settlement layer that secures the largest on-chain economies. You get decentralization without having to bootstrap it.

Running your own validator set sounds empowering until you do it. You need to incentivize, standardize, and grow a diverse set of operators (unless your Solana); you need client diversity; you need monitoring and procedures like slashing. Miss any piece and you drift toward centralization or continued downtime.

Ethereum rollups avoid that overhead. By posting data to Ethereum and inheriting its security guarantees, they let teams focus on the thing customers actually use: dApps or even your own rollup - *think Robinhood building on Arbitrum. 

Rollups = Ethereum’s business model

Scaling on Ethereum means execution on L2, settlement on L1. That’s why we have Arbitrum, Optimism, Base, Taiko, zkSync, and others—each with different flavors, all following the same pattern: cut costs, raise throughput.

If you’re a builder, the question isn’t “Why rollups?” It’s “Which rollup, and how fast can I ship?”

Businesses have a clear on-ramp: RaaS & L2 ecosystems

Rollup-as-a-Service (Caldera, AltLayer, Gelato ) and Rollup ecosystems (Base, Taiko, OP) make go-to-market simple:

• Tooling. Wallets, RPCs, indexers, explorers—ready.

• Liquidity. You’re launching in a district with existing foot traffic.

• Ops are standardized. Providers have playbooks; you don’t invent everything

This lowers time-to-market. Less plumbing, more product.

The new problem: from walled gardens to walled forests

Here’s the twist: each rollup ecosystem operates well inside its own boundaries, but when it comes to other rollups, they don’t play well. Most cross-rollup actions today are asynchronous. You push a transaction via a bridge, wait, and hope everything lines up. If a leg fails or is disputed, you’re stuck with wait times and bridge risks. 

For users, that feels like shipping a parcel across borders. For devs, it’s duplicated deployments, split liquidity, and brittle strategies. We need a return to the L1 magic: atomic, synchronous composition—just at L2 speed and scale.

Enter shared sequencers—decentralized networks that coordinate ordering across many rollups. Projects like Espresso aim to provide credible neutrality, fast confirmations, and, crucially, atomic cross-rollup execution.

How synchronous composability protects Ethereum’s network effect

Call it defense against “rollup ejection.” L2s and the businesses building on them want independence. Without a way to act in sync, the ecosystem risks fragmenting into isolated stacks - which it currently is. Synchronous composability pulls in the other direction. It keeps value flows economically intertwined with ETH: cross-rollup actions still settle back to L1, so network effects compound rather than scatter.

The more cross-rollup flows settle to Ethereum, the more fee revenue and security alignment accrue to the L1. That’s a flywheel—good for ETH, good for L2s, good for builders.

Being the landlord, not the tenant: sovereignty is non-negotiable

Big brand L2s have made it clear: they want to be the landlord, not the tenant. In practice, that means keeping control over sequencing, fees, and upgrades—the core economics of a chain. Any interop solution that demands giving up your sequencer will get a polite “no.” most likely.

So the constraint is set: enable cross-rollup atomicity without forcing rollups to surrender control.

So how are we getting there? The ecosystem is exploring multiple roads to the same outcome:

• Protocol-native sync calls between L1 and L2. (SCOPE)

• Shared sequencing layers that remain decentralized and neutral. (Espresso)

• Based / validator-aligned approaches that bring Ethereum’s validator set closer to L2 confirmations. (Going based)

• Appchain rails (e.g., for Starkware L3s) are designed to compose cleanly into L2s.

The implementations differ, but the golden thread is the same: synchronous composability that feels like L1 and allows rollups to stay sovereign.

Deploy once, Compose everywhere

Compose is a new approach to synchronous composability designed for any rollup. 

Principles:

1. Sovereignty first. Rollups keep their sequencers, fee markets, and governance. No forced migration to a single operator.

2. Atomic L2↔L2 and L2↔L1. Cross-rollup bundles either settle together or not at all.

3. Based. Publishing and settlement are rooted in Ethereum, reinforcing ETH’s network effects rather than siphoning them away.

4. Synchronously composable. No need to deploy your dApp in many rollups. Compose enables any user to reach your dApp from everywhere.
   
   
   

Why launch a new L1? Eth has already won.

Zoom out:

• Security moat: a million-plus validators with 10 years of no downtime.

• Cheaper data availability: post-4844 economics make L2s increasingly cost-effective.

• ZK acceleration: proofs are getting faster and cheaper.

• Shared liquidity and better UX: Users get UX unlike any other blockchain.

Synchronous composability turns many sovereign rollups into one seamless network experience—atomic when it matters, sovereign where it counts—and Compose is how to make it real.