Deploying Scalable Custom Rollups with a RaaS in 2025

Deploying a blockchain has never been easier. 

Rollups are a Layer 2 (L2) scaling solution that address Ethereum’s scaling challenges by enabling higher transaction speeds and lower costs without sacrificing security or decentralization. By creating an environment for transactions to execute offchain and some proof system for making that verifiable, rollups inherit Ethereum’s hardened security, credible decentralization, and robust ecosystem of avid users and developers. 

By building with the breakthroughs, insights, and research of fifteen years, new entrants have plenty of choices when it comes to designing their own blockchain and launching it within an interoperable ecosystem. The ease with which rollups in particular can be deployed—and the number of developers building within the Ethereum ecosystem—have yielded explosive growth, with new projects coming online everyday. 

Hundreds of rollups are securing more than $31B in total value locked across the Ethereum landscape, a steep increase year-over-year in quantity and TVL. 

In addition to the throughput and cost advantages, rollups can be custom-fit to meet any number of requirements. In creating this first rollups report, we came away with one impression: specialization is the future. 

Specialization means more than one thing in this context: a rollup’s purpose and its configuration. A rollup’s purpose is its use-case: payments, real world assets, DeFi, etc., along with the project’s particular goals, like time-to-market, investment horizon, and revenue targets. 

A rollup’s configuration is how the chain becomes optimized to fulfill its purpose.

This report provides you a surveyor’s view of the rollups landscape. We tackle how rollups work, adoption over the last year and what that adoption tells us, the differences among underlying rollup frameworks, operating costs, and the end-to-end services rollups can provide to your project. 

Want to talk to the Alchemy Rollups team? Get in touch here

What is a Rollup in 2025?

L2s scale blockchains by fundamentally transforming transaction processing capabilities without sacrificing the critical security foundation of the underlying Layer 1 (L1). 

In this case, the L1 is Ethereum. While the concept has been adopted by other L1 blockchains, the majority of rollup activity is happening on Ethereum, where the total value locked across L2s is $31B. There are over 100 Ethereum-deployed mainnets in 2025, according to L2Beat.

Each rollup functions as an independent blockchain built atop Ethereum. The reason this is important is horizontal scalability and chain composability. 

While Ethereum itself may be limited to throughput of ~14 transactions-per-second (TPS), the accumulative activity of L2s—and the ability to launch new L2s to quickly meet any increase in demand—greatly improve what the Ethereum network can bear, where high network load causes spikes in transaction fees that make mass adoption impractical. 

Rollups, on the other hand, are less sensitive to network congestion and can process transactions in batches, making them capital and resource efficient: they are orders of magnitude cheaper than Ethereum L1. Transaction batches are then posted to Ethereum for final verification. 

Teams are deploying their own rollups to create customized and cheaper, affordable blockspace for their projects. When performance or cost is affected by settling to Ethereum, the affordability of deploying and owning a rollup that is tailored to a team’s needs is strongly appealing. 

Security and adoption with Ethereum

The true power of rollups emerges from their seamless integration with Ethereum’s broader vision and ecosystem. Not only does Ethereum boast a battle-tested consensus mechanism with proven security, but it continues to have the most robust and active developer set—with nodes in nearly every country in the world. Other significant upsides for rollups include:

• EVM Compatibility: Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) compatibility enables rollups to support existing Ethereum developer tools, languages, and infrastructure without code changes. This allows integration with the Ethereum ecosystem while maintaining security and decentralization, giving developers familiar workflows on a scalable layer.

• Offchain execution with onchain verification: Transactions execute with high throughput outside the congested mainnet environment, but critical cryptographic proofs are anchored back to Ethereum—ensuring every transaction remains verifiable and immutable.

But more than anything else, the widespread embrace of L2s demonstrates a clear market fit.

Rollup Adoption: More Users are Using More Rollups 

At the end of 2024, there were more than a hundred Layer 2s (L2s) deployed on Ethereum mainnet and, in November, the cumulative total value locked (TVL)  across these rollups hit an all time high of $51.5B. This is a 205% increase from November 2023, when the cumulative TVL across rollups was $16.6B.

It’s clear that the trend of creating customized blockspace isn’t going anywhere, even as more economic activity than ever is happening onchain. Plus, recent upgrades to Ethereum have driven significantly cheaper transaction costs, starting with EIP 4844 in 2024 and scaling with the recent Pectra upgrade. 

In 2024, Ethereum’s Dencun Upgrade introduced a new, low-cost resource for L2s to post transaction data: blobs. Blobs reduced the cost of transaction fees exclusively on L2s by allowing them to post large amounts of calldata more cheaply and efficiently. Lower fees drove more users and more activity to rollups. 

Immediately after the Dencun Upgrade, transaction fees on Optimism were one tenth of a cent—a 1000x improvement compared to fees on Optimism before the upgrade. This increased activity clustered around certain verticals, primarily DeFi, NFTs, and gaming. The DeFi and gaming verticals, in particular, are fee-sensitive, but for different reasons.

In May 2025, the Pectra upgrade scaled blob efficiency by doubling blob capacity-per-block. EIPs 7691, 7623, 7840 created better blob performance, de-incentivized costly calldata usage, and helped future-proof blob parameters for efficient updates. 

With L2s growing in popularity due to affordability and customization, the introduction of Dencun and Pectra has made data availability significantly more affordable, creating a flywheel for upcoming L2 growth. 

Dominant infrastructure

Optimistic rollup frameworks from Arbitrum and OP led in TVL growth, with Arbitrum One chains accounting for 32% of all TVL. Base, the L2 from Coinbase built with OP, surpassed 2M daily transactions. 

World Chain, a blockchain for real humans built and deployed on Alchemy-managed infrastructure, recently passed 25M users, with over 250M opens of mini apps built on the chain in 2025 and near-record daily transactions.

Customizing Rollups: An Overview 

Unlike deploying a decentralized application (dApp) on a shared L1 or L2 network, rollups empower projects to control the chain’s entire feature set, meet any number of regulatory considerations, and build more user-friendly platforms that can resemble the UX of using the internet.

To build a rollup, teams are increasingly leveraging Rollup-as-a-Service (RaaS) platforms to design, deploy, and manage rollups tailored to their specific needs. 

This approach enables developers to focus on innovation and user experience rather than the complexity of building, deploying, and maintaining the underlying infrastructure.

But a living blockchain doesn’t instantly translate to scale. Ambitious teams need to take into account all the additional infrastructure required to ensure a rollup’s success in market. 

When deploying with our rollups platform, developers have the added advantage of access to the entire suite of Alchemy’s solutions, which includes Supernode, Smart Wallets, and more. Alchemy Rollups offers 100+ APIs, out-of-the-box account abstraction (more on what this means below), and a path to scaling to millions of transactions and users. These tools allow Alchemy-deployed chains to be refined even further, with the safety guarantee of full-time customer support from real engineers.

Broadly, there are two types of L2s, defined by the underlying security assumptions of the network: optimistic and zero-knowledge (ZK). At a very high level, optimistic rollups have wider adoption and lower overhead costs, while ZK rollups offer greater security guarantees and are slightly pricier on a per-transaction basis. 

With Alchemy Rollups, projects have the option to choose the framework that best fits their goals, offering:

• Optimism’s OP Stack

• Arbitrum’s Orbit

• ZKsync’s ZK Stack 

These frameworks aren’t natively compatible with one another at the code level, preventing cross-chain interoperability between rollup clusters. So the framework a project chooses will, to some extent, tie them to that ecosystem.

With multiple rollup frameworks and many more options for building out a chain’s supporting infrastructure, one tradeoff emerges: specialization comes with increased complexity.

• Protocol complexity: Rollups involve intricate designs and architectural nuances, which define the underlying security framework and interoperability options. 

• Maintenance complexity: Maintaining a rollup requires ongoing management and expertise. This includes infrastructure maintenance, monitoring, and upgrades to ensure smooth and reliable operations.

• Partners: Providing end-users with a stable environment, especially during periods of high load, requires the integration of external services for data streaming, API management, and real-time monitoring.

What a rollup looks like now is radically different than even a couple years ago. Both generalization and use-case focused rollups are increasingly entering the market, with more customization that tweaks their performance to deliver an optimal user experience.

What's in a Rollup?

The components and considerations for deploying a rollup with the minimum set of features:

Types of Rollups 

The underlying proving system defines the method by which fraudulent or invalid transactions are identified before being committed to Ethereum. The two predominant proving systems for rollups are optimistic and ZK.

Optimistic rollups assume transactions are valid by default and use fraud proofs to challenge any discrepancies. If fraud is detected, optimistic rollups use a dispute resolution game to revert the invalid transaction. Optimistic rollups post all transaction data to the L1. Because fraud proofs are only generated when a fraudulent transaction is identified, optimistic rollups require a waiting period between when a transaction is finalized on the rollup and when that transaction data is committed to Ethereum. This waiting period is typically ~7 days.  The two dominant optimistic frameworks are:

• OP Stack

• Arbitrum Orbit

ZK rollups use cryptography to prove the validity of rollup transactions. Each time a ZK rollup submits a batch of transaction data to the L1, it also submits a ZK proof, proving the validity of the transactions. Because ZK rollups don’t require a dispute resolution mechanism, there is no waiting period. Most ZK rollups can be settled on Ethereum in hours, not days. The dominant ZK rollup framework ZKsync’s ZK Stack

Rollup stack

The stack is the set of tools, protocols, and infrastructure designed to simplify the creation and deployment of rollups. It provides projects with the building blocks to construct a rollup, while still allowing for significant customization through modularity. Rollup frameworks enable smart contract and application developers to use familiar tooling.

Three of the most widely used rollup frameworks are OP Stack, Arbitrum Orbit, and ZK Stack. We’ll describe these in greater detail below. Broadly: 

Orbit chains are deployed using the rollup framework designed and maintained by Arbitrum. Arbitrum One leads all rollups in TVL with $13B in user deposits. 

OP Stack is the rollup framework designed and maintained by the Optimism Collective. The most widely used chain built with OP Stack is Base, with $15B in user deposit.

The ZK Stack is the ZK rollup framework designed by ZKsync. ZK Stack verifies transactions using a specialized virtual machine called a zkEVM (zero-knowledge Ethereum Virtual Machine). The most widely used ZK Stack chain is ZKsync Era, with $551M in TVL.

Partner highlight: Syndicate

Deploying an application-specific rollup? Talk to the Alchemy Rollups team and mention Syndicate.

Data Availability (DA)

Data availability refers to rollups’ need to ensure that the transaction data they process off of Ethereum, as well as the proofs of that data’s correctness, are available for any network participant to view. This is necessary to maintain trustlessness—if the data isn’t available, then the rollup can theoretically steal funds or publish false data. Under the optimistic rollup model, data availability is also key to ensuring participants can challenge invalid transactions. 

In addition to trustlessness, data availability also guarantees liveness—meaning, if a rollup network were to go down, the transaction data can be used to reconstruct the correct balances of every user’s wallet.  Picking a DA layer is one of the most important decisions projects make in building a rollup. Broadly, there are three categories of options:

• Third-party DA: Third-party DA solutions serve as intermediate networks that are decentralized and store data offchain for low-cost.

• L1: Rollups can post transaction data to Ethereum using the special resource created by EIP-4844 or as calldata.

• Offchain DACs: Rollups can also build their own DA solution via an offchain DA committees, an allowlisted set of participants who attest that transaction data is available and provide access to that data, when requested.

Gas token

Every transaction on a rollup incurs a fee relative to the computational resources required to execute that transaction, along with other inputs. This transaction fee is also called gas, and, on Ethereum, gas is always paid in ETH. But rollups can be configured to use any token, even their own, for paying transaction fees. These transaction fees accrue to the rollup’s sequencer and create buy-side demand from a rollup’s users. Using a custom gas token can enhance tokenomics, but with one caveat: price volatility can result in lost value, as the rollup will always have to swap the token into ETH to pay onchain costs. 

Bridge

Bridges allow users to move funds between blockchains. For rollups, bridges are crucial first and foremost to onboarding. OP Stack and Arbitrum Orbit come equipped with their own native bridges that connect the rollup to Ethereum. Third-party bridges, including Alchemy’s bridge solution, are a neutral and more flexible access point for connecting your rollup to other L2s and even blockchains outside of Ethereum. For optimistic rollups, third-party bridges provide the added benefit of offering a solution to the seven-day waiting period. 

RPC nodes

RPC (Remote Procedure Call) nodes are servers that enable intra-network communication via RPC calls. Nodes provide the core onchain operations for transactions, smart contract calls, and querying data like wallet balances. The most advanced RPC node providers, like Alchemy’s  Node API, use autoscaling frameworks to automatically scale available RPC nodes up and down depending on onchain traffic. 

Having a reliable RPC node that offers near-100% uptime and stays up-to-date is crucial for a rollup; if not, transactions on the network may fail or get stuck, resulting in a poor user experience and directly impacting user trust. 

Configuring Scalable Custom Rollups  

Customizability is one of the core advantages of launching a rollup. Here are some of the non-essential, but important-to-have features that can be integrated into a rollup, depending on its purpose. 

Account abstraction 

If you’re deploying a rollup to capture transaction revenue, enabling account abstraction features is a priority. Account abstraction makes it possible to build a seamless onchain experience by removing the most common points of friction for new users. 

What is account abstraction for a new rollup? Smart wallets are wallets powered by smart contracts, an implementation enabled through ERC-4337.

• Provide secure onboarding with email, social login, or any web3 wallet

• Enable account recovery and secure authentication through MFA

• Sponsored gas lets users transact without signing transactions or paying for gas fees

• Enable policies on accounts for multi-sig, permissions, automations or more.

With the right account abstraction features, a rollup can provide its users with an Internet-like UX to optimize for easy onboarding and to reduce the number of clicks required for the most common interactions. 

• Conditional transaction execution. Account abstraction allows users to program their wallets to automatically carry out transactions under specific circumstances

• Gas sponsorship. Your rollup can pay for gas on users’ behalf or support gas payment in tokens other than ETH 

• Session keys. Users may continuously transact on your rollup for a given period of time without needing to sign each transaction

Features like sponsored gas, for example, enable a chain operator to pay users’ transaction fees. Using Alchemy Smart Wallets’s Account Abstraction, the project onboarded 3.3M fans. Gas sponsored transactions for these users resulted in 4X growth of total transaction volume. 

Read more about how Alchemy supports easy account abstraction features, here.

Services for third-party dApp developers

More specialized services like oracles, subgraphs, indexers, and block explorers services are available à la carte, and are must-have configurations for any rollup that wants smart contract developers to deploy on their chain:

• Oracles provide accurate data sharing between your rollup and anything you target offchain. For Decentralized Exchanges (DEXs), oracles provide the latest pricing to ensure all assets are priced accurately at all times

• Subgraphs allow developers to access onchain data related to their rollup. Subgraphs provide APIs for onchain apps to query a rollup’s data without needing to run a node on the network, making them important for third-party developers rollups want to attract

• Indexers extract data from the chain, put it into a readable or query-able format, and surface it in a more convenient UI

• Block explorers, such as Etherscan, allow users to browse information about blocks, transactions, and addresses on your rollup

The Bull and Bear Case for Rollups

Bull case

In one word: specialization. 

Ethereum’s approach to scaling, leaning hard on L2s, has led to a modular blockchain revolution. This is the industry’s recognition that no single blockchain can be all things to all people. Much better is to custom-spec chains that serve unique, pre-determined purposes. 

Developers can tailor execution environments to specific application requirements—whether optimizing for capital efficiency in a DeFi application, latency for gaming responsiveness, or enterprise compliance needs. This flexibility enables user experiences that feel more like familiar internet applications than traditional blockchain interactions.

Economically, rollups allow builders to capture value directly rather than seeing a base layer extract the value from their project. This creates sustainable incentive alignment between development teams and protocols.

Finally, there are shared interests between rollups and Ethereum. Rather than competing with it, rollups drive demand for Ethereum block space, handling computational complexity elsewhere. It’s a relationship designed to enhance rollup efficiency even while creating the conditions for security at the L2 level—with a number of emerging interop solutions being worked on that will likely ease the pain of walled L2 gardens in the coming years, even as Ethereum aims for 100k TPS.

Bear case

Despite our bullishness, developers thinking about launching a rollup should understand some of the significant challenges they face. 

Without a RaaS, the technical complexity required to successfully build, launch, and maintain a rollup that can truly scale to millions of transactions means the barrier to entry is extremely high. And even with third-party help, many developers find they have deployed chains that can’t handle true scale. 

On the other end of the spectrum is the cold start problem, where it’s not scale that plagues a rollup so much as getting started with liquidity, infra, developer tooling, and users. Building out a compelling case to attract users and liquidity to a custom chain is not a simple task—which makes the notion of launching on an existing L1 appealing to many projects. 

Existing L1s also don’t suffer from a massive problem in the rollup world: liquidity and user fragmentation. The network effects that make Ethereum powerful are also extremely fragmented. 

Infrastructure costs and sequencer centralization present additional concerns, as operational expenses are frequently underestimated and many implementations rely on centralized components that compromise blockchain's core value proposition of trustlessness.

The future of scaling likely involves navigating these competing realities rather than a simple victory of one approach over others. Understanding and controlling for these tradeoffs before launching a rollup is critical.

Deciding on a Stack

How might you go about deciding on which stack to use? Based on our years of experience, here are some things to consider:

Optimistic vs. ZK

The underlying proving system defines how fraudulent or invalid transactions are identified and resolved.

Optimistic rollups operate on the assumption that all transactions are innocent until proven guilty. They post transaction data to Ethereum and employ fraud proofs to challenge any discrepancies. If a transaction is flagged as fraudulent, the rollup can rewind the chain, removing the invalid data. 

Instead of assuming innocence, ZK rollups provide a mathematical guarantee of correctness. This eliminates the need for a dispute resolution period, allowing ZK rollups to finalize transactions in hours rather than days. 

Choosing from the different stack frameworks is a multi-dimensional question beyond the scope of this report. But each has certain unique properties that can help determine which framework is the best fit.  

• Rollups built with OP Stack have the option to join the Superchain, a network of OP Stack chains with shared native interoperability. Chains that are part of the Superchain contribute a share of revenue to the Optimism Collective and are subject to a community governance mechanism called the Law of Chains.

• Orbit Chains have the fastest block times, which can make it better for use cases like onchain gaming that demand real-time transaction finality. Orbit Chains also have exclusive access to AnyTrust, a Data Availability (DA) layer built by Arbitrum. 

• ZK Stack: Chains built with ZK Stack feature guaranteed security (through ZK proofs), capability for privacy, and built-in permissioning.  

Other considerations

Interoperability: Consider how your rollup will connect and interact with other chains and applications. Right now, interoperability isn't seamless, as liquidity is fragmented across various rollups. Users often need to bridge funds between chains, which can be time-consuming and expensive. While Alchemy Rollups can implement various bridging options to connect your chain based on user needs, native interoperability likely drives greater network effects.

Governance or progressive decentralization: As your rollup evolves, how will decisions be made? What role will the community play? Governance tooling allows token holders to vote on key parameters, upgrades, and initiatives.

Appchain vs. ecosystem: Are you building a specialized appchain tailored to a specific use case, or a general-purpose ecosystem designed to be a launchpad for a variety of applications?

Appchains are like anything handmade: optimized for a specific effect. By tailoring the blockspace to a particular use case, appchains can achieve greater efficiency, making it easier to drive adoption by a segment of users. The tradeoff here is that an appchain’s total addressable market will always be defined by the total addressable market of its particular vertical. 

​Appchains are tailored to the needs of specific ecosystems, and designed for deep alignment over broad generality. By moving sequencing and economic logic onchain, they give communities full control over execution, fees, and governance—enabling custom gas tokens, stake-based inclusion, and sustainable value capture. They offer lower costs, higher performance, and greater resilience than general-purpose rollups. But they’re not one-size-fits-all. Appchains start without shared network effects, and require thoughtful governance to avoid early concentration of power. Still, their strength lies in focus—scaling ecosystems through depth, not breadth.

Ecosystem chains are designed to be bustling metropolises, attracting a diverse range of developers and applications. These rollups prioritize developer experience, offering a rich set of tools and infrastructure to support a thriving ecosystem. Rollups designed as ecosystems have greater absolute potential for revenue from applications deployed on the rollup. 

Here the tradeoff is total absolute potential for performance. Generalizability makes it harder for ecosystem chains to stand out in performance, while tools like Stylus, for example, greatly expand the potential pool of developers by providing support for more widely known programming languages. 

This is the very top of the decision tree for any project interested in launching a rollup. For the full end-to-end, reach out to the Alchemy Rollups team.

What Does It Cost to Run a Rollup?

Operational costs for running a rollup can vary drastically depending on the scale of the chain. While some RaaS providers charge a monthly or flat fee to deploy a testnet, testnets are included for free for all Alchemy Rollups customers.

Why Alchemy Rollups? 

When building in an evolving rollup ecosystem, the choice of infrastructure partner becomes increasingly critical. Alchemy Rollups enables enterprises and projects to deploy specialized, scalable rollups while abstracting away the technical and operational overhead.

Teams are looking for more than just infrastructure when selecting a RaaS provider. In most cases, they need a white-glove partner to help them figure out how to use their rollup infrastructure best to solve their specific problems. Alchemy works with some of the most ambitious companies in web3, fintech and beyond who need white-glove design, engineering and support for their chains. 

Customers who deploy a rollup with Alchemy get:

Enterprise-grade infrastructure: Alchemy Rollups are powered by the same battle-tested, high-performance infrastructure used across web3 and on many of the largest L2s, including Base, Monad, Unichain, World Chain and more. 

Comprehensive developer experience: Every developer tool—including 100+ APIs, AA, smart wallets, and more—are instantly available on an Alchemy-powered mainnet. 

Post-launch vision: While many RaaS providers emphasize initial deployment, Alchemy Rollups knows that scaling starts after launch, providing access to millions of developers and the hands-on support needed to grow, optimize, and scale your ecosystem. 

More control without more complexity: By managing the complexity of running rollup infrastructure at scale, teams can focus on refining and optimizing their core app, community and roadmap.  

For more on how Alchemy Rollups can support the chain you’re building, reach out to the team here.