A Technical Exploration of Optimistic Rollups in the context of Collaboration

Optimistic Rollups (ORU) is a type of layer two construct that aims to provide low gas and high TPS simultaneously. Readers can read more about the details of ORU here. Earlier, Optimism has already released an alpha version of the OVM and a gamified demo partnering with Uniswap. Things look very promising.

However, when people look at ORU, most of the use cases focus on payments. An article from Kevin briefly studied how ORU can be used to improve collaborations on Ethereum. This article aims to explore technically about the feasibility, discuss the limitations and outline improvements we proposed to a specialized ORU construct for collaboration.

A Walkthrough of the Simplest Collaboration

Compared to payment scenarios, a collaboration is quite different because collaboration is never a single transaction. At the minimum, a collaboration involves two parties. The simplest collaboration consists of the following steps:

1. Initiate
2. Acknowledge
3. Pay

Let’s expand it one step at a time in the context of ORU.

Initiate