Omni Network brings native interoperability to the Ethereum Rollup ecosystem, enabling Ethereum to once again function as a unified decentralized application operating system. This article is sourced from the author PAUL VERADITTAKIT, compiled by DefiLlama 24, and organized and written by Foresight News.
Table of Contents
Introduction
Key Innovations of Omni
Security
Subsecond Verification
Native Global Applications (NGAs)
Backward Compatibility
Team
Future Outlook
Recently, it has become popular among developers to build infrastructure projects using EigenLayer. These projects, known as Active Verification Services (AVS), refer to systems that require their own decentralized verification semantics for validation.
These systems may include DA layers, new virtual machines, oracles, and bridges, among others. This article aims to elaborate on the upcoming AVS system Omni Network, which, upon the successful launch of its dissected underlying mechanism, can be considered a dual upgrade in terms of security and user experience compared to LayerZero.
Introduction
Rollups are the current and future scaling solution for Ethereum. From 2021 to 2023, the usage of Rollups has steadily increased, as shown in the chart below, resulting in nearly a tenfold increase in transaction throughput for Ethereum L1.
[Image]
Source: https://l2beat.com/scaling/activity
Rollups process transactions off-chain and only store data or proofs on Ethereum L1, allowing Ethereum to handle more transactions more efficiently. This approach allows Rollups to inherit the security of Ethereum L1 while maintaining compatibility with Ethereum’s extensive developer tools and application ecosystem.
However, due to the isolated off-chain environment used by Rollups to scale Ethereum, they introduce negative externalities that reduce the network effect of Ethereum. Specifically, liquidity, users, and developers are fragmented across different ecosystems. The increasing variety of Rollup types and their widespread adoption will only exacerbate these issues. Therefore, Ethereum needs a native interoperability protocol to realign with its original vision as a unified decentralized application operating system.
Key Innovations of Omni
Omni is an Ethereum-native interoperability protocol that establishes low-latency communication between all Ethereum Rollups, allowing Ethereum to function as a cohesive system in the modular era. Built by a team with deep industry experience, Omni aims to unify Ethereum’s fragmented Rollup ecosystem and features the following defining characteristics:
Security
Interoperability protocols have historically struggled with security. First-generation protocols relied solely on a set of trusted participants to verify and relay messages between networks. Over the years, these protocols have been the target of numerous exploits, resulting in losses exceeding $1 billion for the industry.
Second-generation protocols improved this design by applying cryptoeconomic security to the network. In this approach, participants stake their native assets to participate in the verification process. While this is a step in the right direction, relying on native assets introduces instability to the security guarantee of the protocol.
Using EigenLayer, Omni introduces a fundamentally new security model for interoperability protocols. Omni leverages re-staked ETH to secure its validator set, aligning the security of the protocol with the security budget of Ethereum L1. Ethereum’s current security budget exceeds $100 billion, an order of magnitude larger than any other PoS network.
By utilizing re-staked ETH (high liquidity/low volatility assets), Omni achieves higher stability in security compared to its predecessors. Furthermore, by deriving security from Ethereum, Omni maintains security consistency with the Rollups it connects to, fostering a security model that grows in sync with Ethereum’s modular ecosystem.
Omni is setting the standard for Active Verification Services (AVS) with EigenLayer. Omni became the first protocol to reach an agreement with a Liquid Rewrapper Token (LRT) provider when it agreed to lease $600 million worth of re-staked ETH from EtherFi.
Omni’s team has agreements with multiple LRT providers, pushing its first-day security budget to over $1 billion. This will allow Omni to provide industry-leading security without requiring the protocol to bear the high cost of bootstrapping the network. As the only production-ready AVS running on a testnet, in addition to EigenDA, Omni positions itself as the most ready AVS in the market.
Subsecond Verification
One key advantage of integrated blockchains like Solana over modular systems is low-latency transactions. Users are already accustomed to subsecond transaction times, aligning with the user experience of modern cloud-based web applications. To compete with these alternative platforms, the latency of cross-Rollup messaging must be comparable to the transaction speed of integrated systems.
Omni brings this experience to Ethereum Rollups by achieving subsecond verification of cross-Rollup messages through a novel protocol architecture. After processing 7.5 million transactions from 550,000 wallets on its previous testnet, Omni Labs completely overhauled the network’s architecture.
At the core of this design is Octane, a new open-source framework that combines the EVM with CometBFT consensus. Octane establishes a clear separation between EVM execution and consensus environment in Omni nodes, using Ethereum engine APIs and ABCI++ to isolate components that hinder performance in the existing EVM < CometBFT framework. Native Global Applications (NGAs) In addition to providing cross-Rollup message verification, Omni also offers a dedicated execution environment, Omni EVM, which allows developers to manage all their Rollup application deployments from a single location. By using Omni EVM as an orchestration layer, developers can deploy Native Global Applications (NGAs). NGAs are a new category of applications that dynamically propagate contracts and interfaces across any Rollup, enabling them to have default access to Ethereum's entire liquidity and user base. With NGAs, developers can leverage the scalability of Ethereum Rollups without the burden of managing decentralized state across multiple Rollup environments. [Image] As the Rollup ecosystem continues to evolve, projects will develop more customized Rollup solutions, each tailored to specific functionality and performance requirements, integrating unique virtual machines, programming languages, and data availability frameworks. Omni is designed to support any Rollup architecture and achieve seamless application management through Omni EVM. Backward Compatibility To accommodate existing Rollup applications, Omni has considered backward compatibility in its design. Applications can integrate Omni without modifying their deployed contracts. Instead, applications use modified front-end instructions to assemble cross-Rollup messages, allowing Omni to act as a wrapper for existing application deployments. Omni also introduces a universal GAS market that delivers Rollup layer messages to target networks, eliminating the need for users to maintain different sets of Gas tokens. Team Omni Labs is comprised of a team with rich industry experience. The team is led by CEO Austin King, a Harvard graduate who previously built the Interledger network, which processed over 10 billion payments and was eventually sold to Ripple. CTO Tyler Tarsi, also a Harvard graduate, leads the development work of the team and brings experience in building machine learning infrastructure for quantitative trading systems. Prior to building Omni, these two collaborators co-developed Rift Finance, a DeFi protocol that accumulated $50 million TVL within two days. Future Outlook Omni's unique approach to Ethereum Rollup interoperability will soon be open to all users and developers. The Omni Labs team recently deployed its final testnet, Omni Omega. In the second quarter, Omni will become the first AVS to launch on the mainnet, providing a secure and high-performance interoperability solution for Ethereum's decentralized Rollup landscape. Just as Rollups have established themselves as the core infrastructure for transaction processing, Omni aims to become the standard for interoperability within the Ethereum ecosystem. Related Reports: What new narrative opportunities are there for Rollup Summer? The era of blockchain Rollups has arrived, and the demand for shared ordering is about to explode! OP Rollup Challenge has never appeared: Is Optimism's verification too "optimistic"?