Many people, when they first hear about Espresso Systems, will think that it is a project for public chains or payments.

In fact, its positioning is more foundational: it is a modular infrastructure that serves multiple Rollups.

Its counterparts are Celestia and EigenDA, addressing one of the most pressing issues in the current Ethereum ecosystem: the centralization of orderers and the fragmentation of cross-chain liquidity.

But what @EspressoSys wants to solve is actually deeper than it appears.

Everyone knows that the Ethereum Rollup ecosystem is becoming increasingly "fragmented". Arbitrum, Base, Scroll, ZKSync... dozens of chains operate independently, settle separately, and sort their own.

The result is:
Cross-chain operations have become slow and expensive—such as buying on Arbitrum and selling on Base, not only is the process complicated, but it is also prone to errors.

The goal of Espresso is to build a unified layer for second-level settlements for these independent Rollups. All transactions are first ordered on Espresso and then submitted to the Ethereum mainnet together, allowing each chain to operate collaboratively as a whole.

In contrast, Celestia only manages the "ledger", EigenDA focuses on "data security", while Espresso encompasses all three aspects of "ordering + settlement + data."
This ensures not only data availability but also allows transactions to be executed simultaneously and confirmed instantly, making the cross-chain experience almost as fast as Web2 applications.

More cleverly, the Espresso project plans to enhance economic security through Restaking of EigenLayer: it can inherit Ethereum's security while being dozens of times faster than Ethereum.

Espresso has secured $64 million in financing, backed by top VCs such as a16z, Polychain, and Electric Capital. Its ecosystem is rapidly expanding, having connected with over 20 chains including Arbitrum Orbit, OP Stack, and Polygon CDK.

I think Espresso's positioning is a step higher than DA: it is the "coordinating center" of the entire Rollup world. If it can successfully complete PoS decentralization in 2025 and expand to over 100 Rollup integrations, it has the potential to become one of the most imaginative projects in the modular track after Celestia.