DYdX Founder Antonio Juliano in Exclusive Interview Discusses Blockchain’s Migration to Cosmos

Juliano: I do strongly believe that layer 2s will get to a point where the sequencer is a network, rather than just a single operator. And that will make the sequencers much more decentralized, censorship-resistant. But the problem with having a single sequencer on layer 2’s right now is, the single sequencers are not censorship-resistant, right? It’s just like, literally a server, and the server can refuse to process your transactions if it wants to. Like, I’m not trying to pick on anyone, like literally all of them are like this, but let’s just take like Coinbase or Base as an example. Coinbase is literally running a server that is the sequencer for the Base chain. And if they want to reject your transaction, for whatever reason, they can do that. And, you know, I think they’re trying to be as impartial as possible. And that’s awesome. But that is not totally decentralized, I may say. And just to prove the point that I kind of understand most of the arguments at least, OK, there’s a way to get around the censorship-resistance switches. Effectively, you can go back to layer 1, and send a transaction to layer 1 and be like, Oh, Coinbase, you have to include my transaction now because I went to the layer 1. But that’s a terrible product experience, right? Like maybe that works for some edge cases, or if like the less than 1% of the time when, for some random reason somebody’s being centralized by a sequencer. But if there’s a good amount of opportunity for a sizable amount of the transactions to be censored on a given sequencer, for whatever reason, then this may not be something that you want for your network as much.