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, written by Paul Veradittakit and compiled by DefiLlama 24, provides an overview of Omni Network’s key innovations.
Introduction
Rollups are the current and future scaling solution for Ethereum. From 2021 to 2023, the use of Rollups has gradually increased, resulting in nearly a 10x increase in transaction throughput for Ethereum L1.
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 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, Rollups introduce negative externalities due to their isolated off-chain environments, which fragment liquidity, users, and developers across different ecosystems. The increasing number and adoption of Rollup variants will exacerbate these problems. 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 among all Ethereum Rollups, enabling Ethereum to function as a cohesive system in the modular era. Built by a team with extensive industry experience, Omni aims to unify Ethereum’s decentralized Rollup ecosystem and has the following defining features:
Security
Interoperability protocols have historically struggled with security. First-generation protocols relied solely on a set of trusted participants to validate and relay messages between networks. Over the years, these protocols have been subject to numerous exploits, resulting in over $1 billion in losses for the industry.
Second-generation protocols improved this design by applying economic security to the network. Participants stake native assets to participate in the validation process. While this is a step in the right direction, relying on native assets introduces instability to the security guarantees of the protocol.
By leveraging EigenLayer, Omni introduces a fundamentally new security model for interoperability protocols. Omni uses re-staked ETH to secure its validator set, allowing the protocol’s security to align with Ethereum L1’s security budget. Ethereum’s current security budget exceeds $100 billion, an order of magnitude larger than any other PoS network.
By utilizing re-staked ETH (a highly liquid/low-volatility asset), Omni achieves greater stability in security compared to its predecessors. Furthermore, by deriving security from Ethereum, Omni aligns its security foundation with the connected Rollups, facilitating a secure 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 agreements with Liquid Re-staking (LRT) providers, leasing $600 million worth of re-staked ETH from EtherFi.
Omni’s team has reached agreements with multiple LRT providers, pushing its initial security budget to over $1 billion. This will allow Omni to provide industry-leading security without requiring the protocol to shoulder the high cost of bootstrapping the network. As the only AVS live on a testnet, apart from EigenDA, Omni positions itself as the most production-ready AVS in the market.
Sub-second Verification
One of the key advantages of integrated blockchains like Solana over modular systems is low-latency transactions. Users are accustomed to sub-second 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 on par with the transaction speed of integrated systems.
Omni brings this experience to Ethereum Rollups, achieving sub-second cross-Rollup message verification through a novel protocol architecture. Omni Labs completely overhauled the network’s architecture after processing 7.5 million transactions from 550,000 wallets on the previous testnet.
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 the execution and consensus environment of Omni nodes by utilizing Ethereum Engine API and ABCI++. This isolation removes the performance bottlenecks present in existing EVM < CometBFT frameworks.Native Global Applications (NGAs)In addition to providing cross-Rollup message verification, Omni offers a dedicated execution environment, Omni EVM, allowing 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 Rollups, enabling them to access Ethereum's liquidity and user base by default. With NGAs, developers can leverage the scalability of Ethereum Rollups without the burden of managing distributed state among multiple Rollup environments.As the Rollup ecosystem continues to expand, projects will develop more tailored Rollup solutions, each catering to specific functional and performance requirements and integrating unique virtual machines, programming languages, and data availability architectures. Omni is designed to support any Rollup architecture, achieving seamless application management through Omni EVM.Backward CompatibilityTo accommodate existing Rollup applications, Omni considers backward compatibility in its design. Applications can integrate with Omni without modifying their deployed contracts. Instead, applications use modified frontend instructions to assemble cross-Rollup messages, allowing Omni to act as a wrapper for existing application deployments. Omni also introduces a universal GAS market, passing Rollup layer messages to the target network, eliminating the need for users to manage different sets of Gas tokens.TeamOmni Labs is composed of a team with extensive 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 jointly developed Rift Finance, a DeFi protocol that accumulated $50 million TVL in just two days.Future OutlookOmni'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 Q2, Omni will become the first AVS to launch on the mainnet, bringing a secure and high-performance interoperability solution to the decentralized Rollup landscape of Ethereum. As Rollups have established themselves as the core infrastructure for transaction processing, Omni is poised to become the standard for interoperability within the Ethereum ecosystem.