Offloading transaction execution and state from a limited base layer to a higher-throughput computing environment while inheriting the security of the underlying blockchain can greatly increase the overall transaction throughput of the smart contract ecosystem. The consensus process, where the validity of transactions performed by the execution layer is verified, is still carried out by the base-layer blockchain. Notably, this means that the computational bandwidth of the layer-1 blockchain is used more efficiently because full nodes don’t need to execute every transaction, they just need to verify zero-knowledge proofs and store a smaller amount of transaction data.
Offloading transaction execution and state from a limited base layer to a higher-throughput computing environment while inheriting the security of the underlying blockchain can greatly increase the overall transaction throughput of the smart contract ecosystem. The consensus process, where the validity of transactions performed by the execution layer is verified, is still carried out by the base-layer blockchain. Notably, this means that the computational bandwidth of the layer-1 blockchain is used more efficiently because full nodes don’t need to execute every transaction, they just need to verify zero-knowledge proofs and store a smaller amount of transaction data.