Layer 2 Blockchains Simplified: A Survey of Vector Commitment Schemes, ZKP Frameworks, Layer-2 Data Structures and Verkle Trees
It provides an accessible yet rigorous reference for researchers and developers to reason about L2 security from a cryptographic perspective, addressing fragmented prior literature.
This paper presents the first unified, security-focused survey of Layer-2 blockchains, mapping L2 architecture to underlying cryptographic security and formalizing a comprehensive threat model covering sequencer liveness, bridge exploits, and data-availability failures.
Layer-2 (L2) protocols address the fundamental limitations of Layer-1 (L1) blockchains by offloading computation while anchoring trust to the parent chain. This architectural shift, while boosting throughput, introduces a new, complex security surface defined by off-chain components like sequencers, bridges, and data availability mechanisms. Prior literature[31][33] offers fragmented views of this risk. This paper presents the first unified, security-focused survey that rigorously maps L2 architecture to its underlying cryptographic security. We dissect the technical progression from L1 primitives to the core of modern L2s, analyzing the security assumptions(Discrete Logarithm, Computational Diffie-Hellman, Bilinear Diffie-Hellman) of ZK frameworks (Groth16, Plonk) and their corresponding commitment schemes (KZG, IPA). We formalize a comprehensive L2 threat model encompassing sequencer liveness, bridge exploits, and data-availability failures. This work serves as an accessible yet rigorous reference for researchers and developers to reason about L2 security from a deep crypto-mathematical perspective.