Why Decentralized Sequencers?

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To deploy your own rollup on the Astria Devnet on your local machine, check out the instructions here!

To deploy your own rollup on the Astria Devnet using Digital Ocean, check out the instructions here!

Centralization is antithetical to crypto. And yet, today’s rollups almost universally depend on a single sequencer. Centralized sequencers provide fast transaction confirmations and reduce costs by batching and compressing transactions. However, these benefits come at the cost of relying on a single trusted actor for liveness and censorship resistance.

Sacrificing decentralization for an improved user experience is an unacceptable Faustian bargain.

Astria tackles centralization head-on, providing rollups with a decentralized sequencer and even better UX. Astria’s shared sequencer network is a middleware blockchain with its own decentralized sequencer set which accepts transactions from multiple rollups. These transactions are ordered into a single block and written to the base layer without executing them.