So your layer-2 is ‘secured by Ethereum’ — what does that mean?
The chief selling point of layer-2 blockchains built atop Ethereum — aside from increased throughput — is security. Ideally, it should be faster and cheaper to interact with L-2s, but also as safe to transact as using Ethereum. Unsurprisingly, in practice it’s complicated and not always black and white. “Security,” in this context, refers to the settlement guarantees on Ethereum mainnet. That translates to how certain a user can be that their L-2 transactions will be finalized correctly — without censorship — and whether assets remain safe from being stolen by the more performant layer-2 . We’re not talking security from smart contract bugs at the level of applications (it’s not about avoiding exploits or rugpulls), but whether the Ethereum Virtual Machine runs the code and reconciles its state per specifications. There’s not a universally accepted definition of what it means to be “secured by Ethereum.” According to Louis Guthmann, ecosystem lead at StarkWare, a key feature of a...