In our last essay, we outlined a new type of rollup that fulfills the promise of decentralization and community ownership while unlocking new models for economic sustainability: metabased rollups.

These rollups, which sequence their blocks via a smart contract on a layer above L1, offer unprecedented opportunities for creating diverse and community-aligned economic models. This is especially relevant for communities that would like to design permissioning systems and drive value to node operators.

This article explores economic mechanisms that might be implemented using metabased rollups, showcasing their potential to revolutionize how networks create, manage, and distribute value within communities.

Driving Value to Communities

Metabased rollups enable both new and existing economic mechanisms, with the added advantage of being fully onchain. This design makes the process of enabling these mechanisms far less technically complex, unlocking new opportunities for communities big and small.

For example, the community-centric nature of metabased rollups allows for the creation of innovative membership models, allowing communities to:

Implement tiered membership systems with different benefits and responsibilities based on stake or contribution.
Create token-gated access to certain network features or economic rewards.
Develop reputation-based membership levels that evolve based on user activity and contributions to the network.

These opportunities can generate value for communities and networks in permissioned yet customizable ways. The ability to flexibly determine who operates nodes and sequences blocks is a key feature of metabased rollups. This also opens up possibilities for various sequencer selection models, such as:

Stake-based selection, where sequencers are chosen based on the amount of network tokens they've staked.
Reputation-based systems that factor in past performance and reliability when selecting sequencers.
Hybrid models that combine multiple criteria to ensure a balance between security, efficiency, and decentralization.

Abundance of Economic Models

In addition to opening the door to community sequencing and making it possible to drive value to select node operators, metabased rollups also expand the ways that rollups can generate revenue.

For example:

Maximal Aligned Value (MAV). In this case, node operators can stake tokens promising that they will share a certain amount of value back with the community. Failure to do so will cause the operator to lose their stake. This creates an incentive for value to be shared with the community, leading to less extractive onchain markets.
Blockspace Auctions. Metabased rollups enable auction mechanisms that can optimize resource allocation and value capture within the network. These models can be designed to implement dynamic pricing for blockspace based on demand, ensuring efficient use of network resources. Additionally, they could allow users to bid for priority in block inclusion, creating a competitive market for transaction ordering (priority fees).

Metabased Economic Models

We are excited to build toward a future where economic opportunity and optionality is available to every community and network by default.

If you’re interested in exploring further economic mechanisms or have ideas of your own, please reach out to us or follow Metabased on X and Warpcast.

Metabased Economic Mechanisms