This is a call to action, if you find the following arguments compelling, then please get involved in governance (and Intersect) and advocate for Midgard, or rollups in general, to be included as part of the core Cardano roadmap.
We have Hydra as our native state of the art state channel solution, we have partnerchains our native evolution of sidechains, we need Midgard as our native evolution of rollups.
Midgard is a layer 2 optimistic rollup for Cardano. It has a tokenless design. All transaction fees on Midgard are paid in Ada, and every Midgard block is published to the Cardano L1. Where Hydra moves transactions offchain (and thus does not contribute consistently in fee revenue to the Cardano L1) Midgard keeps transactions onchain but in a more compact form (ie. rolls up transactions offchain into a compact representation that is published onchain, thus the name rollups). This represents a significant source of fee revenue for the Cardano L1. Midgard does not have independent economic security. Instead it maximally inherits the security of Cardano.
I want to advocate that Midgard (or rollups in general) be included as part of the core roadmap for Cardano.
For reference rollups are a huge part of the core Ethereum roadmap and are responsible for the vast majority of economic activity on Ethereum over the past few years.
The UTxO system is a match made in heaven for rollups. It allows us to build true L2 rollups that inherit maximal security from Cardano. This cannot be replicated in account based global state systems.
It’s not a coincidence that Fuel, the only L2 in Ethereum to receive a decentralization level of 2 (highest ever recorded) is UTxO based.
Fraud proofs for global state systems like Arbitrum and Optimism are extremely difficult to implement and very expensive and complicated to conduct onchain (and require multiple parties); this is why to this date despite spending millions in R&D neither of those protocols has working fraud proofs, and they all rely on centralized sequencers who can frontrun and extract MEV.
On the other-hand, Fraud proofs on UTxO based systems (Cardano) are extremely straightforward and require only a single party (no challenge-response proofs).
Likewise, it is extremely difficult to deal with sequencers in global state rollups (ie Optimism and Arbitrum), because in such systems the order in which transactions are processed affects their outcome; this means malicious sequencers can reorder transactions in their favor to conduct sandwich attacks and extract MEV. In UTxO rollups we don’t have this problem, either your transaction does exactly what you expect it to do or it does nothing, the only impact that ordering has on transaction processing is who wins a UTxO contention battle which is zero risk in comparison to front-running or MEV.