Scaling Ethereum Rollups with Helios

It has become clear that light clients are more than tools to secure wallets and bridges: they are fundamental to Ethereum scaling. A future with thousands of rollups doesn’t feel far away, and the closer we get, the more critical rollup interoperability will become. 

Current proposals to make rollups interoperable — such as Optimism’s Superchain and zkSync’s Elastic Chain — will rely on the existence of secure light clients for rollup operators to validate incoming cross-rollup messages scalably. Right now, rollup operators need to run full nodes for every chain with which they interoperate. With Helios for L2s, they can run an efficient light client instead.

So what’s changing? We’ve revamped our light client’s internals to make it agnostic to how blocks are verified, and added support for modifying the underlying execution environment to suit differences between rollups.

Helios is becoming a multichain light client for Ethereum.

We’ve started by implementing a light client for the OP Stack based on signed sequencer preconfirmations, meaning Helios can now sync on Optimism, Base, Unichain, World Chain, and anything else within the Superchain ecosystem. If you want to see it in action, try our live demo of Helios syncing on Ethereum, Optimism, and Base — all from within your browser.

What’s next

The OP Stack is just the beginning. We’re going to be exploring more robust verification mechanisms, building better tooling for using Helios on the browser, mobile devices, or anywhere else we could imagine someone needing a light client. We’ve also audited Helios’s core L1 consensus verification (and plan to publish the report in the coming weeks), allowing bridges to use Helios for secure cross-chain message passing.

We can’t achieve the full scale of crypto’s potential – trustless interactions between billions of people around the world – unless every user and node is able to efficiently verify their data regardless of blockchain, hardware, or internet speed.

If any of this excites you, please reach out. Whether you’re building a wallet and want a light client to support your users, work on an L2 that’s in need of a light client, or are a talented engineer interested in contributing, we want to hear from you.

To learn more, or get involved, check out Helios’s website and GitHub repository — or message Noah Citron or Eddy Lazzarin.