The mainnet is about to launch, Fuel is ready to take on the storm again!

L2 wars are heating up, and the future of Ethereum's scaling is expected to revolve around L3, SuperChain, and Hyperchain. How can we keep up with this wave of trends? Let's dive into the forefront of L2 development together.
Why has it evolved into such a pattern?
While Ethereum operates as L1, it must possess operational capabilities on par with the scale of the internet. However, currently, no single L2 has this capability.
From a higher-dimensional perspective, Web3 developers currently have three options:
• Deploy on Ethereum, but sacrifice scalability.
• Choose an L2 solution, but face the risk of dependency on a specific ecosystem.
• Deploy and maintain their own chain, but this may lead to liquidity fragmentation.
Moreover, achieving interoperability is also a significant challenge. It has proven that our efforts to tackle this challenge using cross-chain bridges are fragile and have been continuously attacked by malicious actors. New challenges require innovative solutions. New challenges require innovative solutions.
The next wave of Rollups, such as building a dedicated operating system for Ethereum to help developers scale decentralized economies, will empower various entities with different goals to create their own customized environments. You can think of it as deploying a new Rollup chain = creating a new webpage.
Let's take a closer look at the solutions offered by core scaling participants.

01 Initial Exploration and Innovation Starting Point

The Ethereum ecosystem is experiencing explosive growth in modular L2 chains, with traditional EVM-based Rollups and non-EVM-based Rollups developing separately. However, most of these architectures are designed for monolithic L1s and cannot meet the modular and Rollup-centric needs of the Ethereum ecosystem. Fuel has built a new architecture specifically designed to address the unique challenges of Ethereum aggregation by creating tools suitable for this work.
In December 2020, Fuel Labs launched Fuel V1, the first Optimistic Rollup on Ethereum, and became the first Rollup to reach Stage 2 security status.
Three years later, Fuel Labs announced that the Fuel mainnet would go live in Q3 2024, marking a new development phase for Fuel and demonstrating its commitment to continuously improving design and technology.

02 Breaking the Deadlock: Unique Architectural Design

Fuel combines Bitcoin's UTXO model, Solana's parallelization, Ethereum's security, Move's asset-oriented design, and Cosmos's interoperability and VM customization to create a software package specifically built for Ethereum aggregation. Its core components include FuelVM, Sway, and the Forc toolchain, providing powerful features such as parallelization, state minimization, and customizability.
Fuel allows blockchains to mutually verify each other, thereby collecting detailed information from each blockchain at the block level, enabling Fuel blockchains to operate securely and seamlessly with one another. Its high customizability allows chain builders to deploy highly scalable application chains to address various use cases, ensuring high performance and a user-friendly development experience.

03 Exploring New Token Models for Layer-2

Existing Layer-2 token models have many shortcomings, and Fuel Labs believes that new models need to be introduced to address these issues.
About a year ago, Fuel Labs launched the first Optimistic Rollup on the Ethereum mainnet—Fuel v1. This version supports cross-chain transactions, such as facilitating transactions between Ethereum and Bitcoin through HTLC, and operates without permission or admin keys, achieving the initial expectations for Optimistic Rollups.
As the number of scaling platforms on Ethereum increases, addressing the high miner fee issue becomes particularly important. Given the limited and scarce transaction capacity of Rollups, this scarcity can be tokenized without increasing costs for users. Fuel proposed an innovative token model where Rollups act as block builders and charge fees.
As demand for block space increases, Rollups can raise fees, allowing users to utilize the service without needing to pay with Rollup tokens.
This model addresses a major challenge in Rollup design: decentralized block building. While the mechanism is similar to PoS tokens of sidechains, Rollups have better anti-censorship capabilities. Tokens are used to select block builders without requiring a majority vote, thereby ensuring the security and fairness of the system.

04 The Largest Security Audit Competition in Web3 History

With the mainnet launch at the end of May, Fuel partnered with the Web3 crowdsourced security platform Immunefi to launch the Attackathon competition with a prize pool of up to $1.3 million. This collaboration is not only an important initiative for Fuel in the field of technical security but also marks the largest security audit competition in Web3 history.
The total prize pool for the Fuel Attackathon program is $1.3 million, with $1 million allocated for the public competition focused on auditing the Fuel codebase. Additionally, there will be a $300,000 invitation-only reward pool for four Fuel-based projects. Security researchers participating in the public competition must submit at least one valid medium or higher severity security vulnerability to qualify for the invitation-only program.
The competition plan includes several key milestones. The Fuel Education Academy launched on May 31, the education period began on June 3, and the Attackathon officially started on June 17. The specific dates for the invitation-only program will be announced separately. Fuel is committed to further strengthening the security infrastructure of the Web3 ecosystem through this $1.3 million reward program.
This educational program leverages the extensive expertise of 45,000 security researchers in the Immunefi community, over 1,000 of whom have successfully identified high-risk vulnerabilities, helping various projects avoid potential losses of up to $25 billion. Immunefi has earned a reputation as a security pioneer by protecting leading projects such as Chainlink, MakerDAO, Synthetix, and Polygon.

Conclusion

Since its launch, Ethereum's ecosystem has been growing increasingly robust. As more users adopt Ethereum, its performance issues have gradually come to light. When many people interact on Ethereum simultaneously, on-chain congestion occurs, driving up transaction costs. If Ethereum wants to become a true world computer, it must scale to increase the number of transactions it can process per second and the speed of processing each transaction.
Currently, Ethereum's scaling solutions are divided into on-chain scaling and off-chain scaling. On-chain scaling enhances the performance of the blockchain itself, modifying Ethereum for better scalability; off-chain scaling operates separately from the first-layer mainnet, achieving higher scalability without changing the existing Ethereum protocol. Currently, on-chain scaling has only sharding as a solution, while off-chain scaling has many options, but primarily adopts the Rollup solution. Given this trend, along with capital support, the application of new Layer-2 token models, and the favorable conditions of the mainnet launch, Fuel is worthy of continued attention from long-term investors.