Preconfs Evolution: From "Patch" to "Infrastructure", How Does UniFi AVS Change the Game for Based Rollup?

Written by: Web3 Farmer Frank

 

Why has Based Rollup, regarded as the “orthodox” scaling endgame for Ethereum, always received praise but failed to gain traction?

On one hand, it achieves the most thorough alignment with mainnet security and decentralization by returning sequencing rights to L1. On the other hand, it has to endure a confirmation delay of up to 12 seconds, which almost deters high-frequency trading and real-time financial scenarios.

This is why Preconfs were proposed as a necessary patch for Based Rollup, attempting to smooth out the delay with sub-second transaction commitments. However, for a long time, Preconfs have mostly remained in small-scale, non-standardized exploratory phases, lacking a unified mechanism and stable returns, and have never truly achieved scale.

Recently, Puffer Finance launched the Ethereum security infrastructure product “UniFi AVS,” finally attempting to upgrade Preconfs from a temporary performance patch to a reusable, standardized infrastructure, delivering sub-10ms confirmation speeds and introducing institutionalized design in terms of security and economic incentives.

This article, from the perspective of an industry observer, will break down the core capabilities, technical path, and ecosystem impact of UniFi AVS, and discuss whether it can truly become the key variable for Based Rollup—or even the broader Ethereum Rollup ecosystem.

I. UniFi AVS: Preconfs, No Longer Just a “Patch”

To understand the significance of this upgrade, we need to first review the core logic of Based Rollup.

In Ethereum’s scaling narrative, Based Rollup achieves full alignment with mainnet security and decentralization by returning sequencing rights to L1 validators. However, this inevitably comes with a trade-off—while inheriting mainnet security, it also brings about a roughly 12-second block confirmation delay.

For this reason, pre-confirmations (Preconfs) have become a necessary patch for Based Rollup, responsible for providing users with transaction execution commitments before transactions are actually submitted to L1 (for further reading, see “Understanding Puffer UniFi AVS: From Preconfs to Ethereum’s Next Decade?”). It can be said that to fully unleash the potential of Based Rollup, a permissionless, neutral, and flexible pre-confirmation service is essential.

However, for quite a long time, Preconfs have mostly remained in the “workshop” stage (non-standardized, peer-to-peer solutions), usually run by a few nodes or project teams themselves, lacking unified standards and stable revenue models. If the nodes responsible for pre-confirmation go offline or act maliciously, transactions may fail or even suffer MEV attacks, resulting in serious deficiencies in reliability and sustainability.

Puffer’s UniFi AVS is a systematic solution to this dilemma. It no longer treats Preconfs as a temporary patch, but upgrades it to a callable infrastructure layer, with the core idea of reconstructing Preconfs as an AWS-style standardized cloud service.

Specifically, UniFi AVS starts from three main lines, not only making Based Rollup faster, but also providing sustainable returns and institutionalized security guarantees:

• Performance: Compresses transaction confirmation to sub-10ms, delivering an instant user experience comparable to Solana or even centralized exchanges;
• Economics: Through protocol-level revenue sharing, Rollups are no longer just “working for L1,” but share profits with validators and gateways;
• Security: Backed by up to $13 billions in Restaked ETH and a slashing mechanism, turning “verbal promises” into “costly contracts” and forming institutional constraints;

For developers and Rollup projects, the advent of UniFi AVS means there is no longer a need to design and maintain complex sequencing and confirmation logic themselves. Instead, they can plug directly into a proven pre-confirmation infrastructure, just like calling AWS cloud services—plug-and-play, scalable on demand, allowing more focus on product and user layers.

This modular design also makes it possible for Preconfs to be further productized and generate spillover effects—not only can Rollup project teams avoid reinventing the wheel, but in the future, wallets, DApps, and upper-layer protocols can also access standardized APIs to uniformly enjoy the capabilities of “instant confirmation + economic alignment + security guarantees,” truly turning “speed and stability” into a public foundational service for the Ethereum ecosystem.

From this perspective, UniFi AVS enables Preconfs to transcend the role of a mere performance patch, standardizing performance, returns, and security all at once, pushing it from an add-on feature to a mid-layer infrastructure for Ethereum scaling, paving a more sustainable path for the large-scale adoption of Based Rollup.

It is worth noting that Puffer also emphasizes that the scope of UniFi AVS is not limited to Based Rollup. By design, its registry mechanism can also provide sub-10ms instant confirmation for any OP Stack Rollup, and plans to support more Rollup architectures in the future. In other words, it is positioned as a universal pre-confirmation infrastructure with cross-architecture potential.

Of course, whether all Rollups are willing to cede Sequencer revenue to AVS remains uncertain, and it can even be asserted that it will be difficult to achieve in the early stages—after all, sequencing has never been just a technical issue, but a deeply intertwined issue of interest distribution:

In the L2 economic system, who is responsible for dividing the pie, who is it planned for, and how should it be divided?

Therefore, whether Preconfs will eventually evolve into a public standard for the entire Rollup ecosystem or mainly serve the Based path is not only a matter of technical route choice, but also a game of business models and interest distribution, and is destined to be an issue that will require continuous observation in the coming years.

II. How Are Preconfs Reconstructed as Standardized Infrastructure?

Objectively speaking, since the Rollup concept was proposed, what Ethereum scaling has always lacked is not concepts, but the ability to engineer real-world solutions.

After all, for a technology to evolve from a clever “feature” to a robust “infrastructure,” it usually needs to meet three core conditions: clear service commitments, reliable security guarantees, and a sustainable economic model.

In other words, only by moving from a technical concept to “engineering” implementation can it truly have the conditions for large-scale operation. Puffer’s UniFi AVS approach is similar—reconstructing Preconfs from scattered, small-scale attempts into reusable, scalable infrastructure with economic incentives.

In other words, how can Preconfs cease to be “temporary promises” by certain nodes and instead be designed as a standardized network service? 

1. Execution Preconfs: From “Inclusion Guarantee” to “Execution Guarantee”

The first step is the upgrade from Inclusion Preconfs to Execution Preconfs.

In the traditional Inclusion Preconfs model, users are only promised that their transactions will be included in a block, but the state at the time of execution cannot be guaranteed. As a result, users may still experience price slippage or even MEV frontrunning.

Execution Preconfs, on the other hand, further upgrade to “execution guarantee,” ensuring that the transaction will be executed in the state when the user submitted it—once the user places an order, the state is locked, and the transaction will only execute under this state, otherwise it will not be executed at all.

For example, you place an order to buy ETH at a price of 4400 USDC:

• Under the Inclusion model, by the time the transaction is actually executed, the market price may have changed to 4410 USDC. The trade will still go through, but the execution price is not your expected 4400;
• Under the Execution model, no matter how the market fluctuates, the system will guarantee the execution price of 4400 USDC. The transaction will only execute if this condition is met;

This upgrades Preconfs from an “early admission ticket” to “deterministic settlement,” significantly improving user experience and providing stronger reliability for DeFi, derivatives, payments, and other financial applications sensitive to price.

2. Gateway Architecture and Frags Technology: Compressing Latency to Below 10ms

Puffer also introduces a Collateral-backed Gateway architecture (pioneered by the Gattaca team), allowing L1 proposers to delegate pre-confirmation execution rights to more specialized Gateways.

With frags (block fragments) technology and a lookahead mechanism, Gateways can process transactions ahead of actual block production, shortening the window of state transition. Theoretically, under optimal configuration, transaction latency can be reduced to below 10 milliseconds (sub-10ms).

This brings the user experience, in theory, to the level of high-performance public chains like Solana.

3. Restaked ETH Security Endorsement: Making Commitments “Costly”

In the past, Preconfs largely relied on node “goodwill.” If nodes went offline or acted maliciously, users had almost no compensation mechanism.

Puffer’s upgraded version, through EigenLayer’s restaking mechanism, ensures that every Gateway is backed by validator-staked ETH (implemented in phases)—if a node becomes inactive, it may be penalized by 1 ETH; if it maliciously extracts MEV or breaks its promise, it may trigger slashing at the 1000 ETH level.

Unlike PoS penalties, slashed ETH from Preconfs will compensate users of the Preconf service, directly enhancing economic alignment. This turns the previous soft promise based on node reputation into a hard promise constrained by a clear slashing mechanism, greatly increasing institutional constraint.

At the same time, Puffer has established the Canonical Preconf Gateway Registry to ensure that all Gateways enter an orderly, public, and verifiable registration system.

4. Programmable Revenue Sharing: Institutionalized Multi-Party Value Distribution

Speed and security alone are not enough; for Preconfs to become infrastructure, they must also be sustainably operated.

To this end, the upgraded UniFi AVS has a built-in Rewards Distributor, allowing flexible revenue distribution among Rollup teams, Ethereum proposers, and Gateway providers, achieving protocol-level programmable revenue sharing:

• Rollup teams: retain a portion of transaction fees, no longer just “working for L1”;
• Ethereum proposers (validators): earn additional income by providing Preconfs;
• Gateway providers: are incentivized for running the network, ensuring service stability; 

Revenue sharing is no longer a temporary agreement, but is written into the protocol and executed automatically, forming a long-term closed loop of economic alignment among Rollups, validators, and Gateways.

This multi-dimensional mechanism design is precisely the key for Preconfs to move from a point solution to scalable, reliable public infrastructure.

III. The Beneficiary Landscape Amid Multi-Party Games

Any infrastructure upgrade is not just a technical evolution, but also a redistribution of interests.

The special feature of UniFi AVS is that it binds performance, security, and economic incentives together, allowing multiple ecosystem roles to find value within the same mechanism—from Rollup project teams, to Ethereum validators, developers, and end users. It turns Preconf from a patch into a sustainable modular service, allowing all participants to benefit on a stronger ship.

First and foremost are the Rollup project teams, who gain both performance and revenue unlocks.

In the past, Based Rollup was criticized by the market for being “slow and unprofitable,” especially as its economic model almost entirely ceded profits to L1 validators. With UniFi AVS’s Execution Preconfs, Rollups can plug-and-play to achieve sub-10ms confirmation speeds, greatly improving user experience.

At the same time, the protocol-level revenue sharing mechanism allows Rollup teams to retain part of the economic returns, rather than relying entirely on external subsidies. For project teams, this is a dual benefit of speed improvement and revenue sharing.

Next are Ethereum validators / Restakers, who gain a new source of income.

Because L1 validators are the direct executors of Preconfs, by participating in UniFi AVS, validators can earn new Preconf service revenue in addition to traditional block rewards.

At the same time, Restaked ETH not only provides security endorsement but also increases validator profitability, which in turn enhances the attractiveness of staking ETH and strengthens Ethereum’s overall economic security, transforming validators from simply running nodes to “providing value-added services and earning extra income.”

In addition, Gateway providers have their roles formally institutionalized in this upgrade.

Puffer has established the Canonical Gateway Registry, making Gateways standardized nodes in the network rather than temporary roles. After obtaining delegation rights, Gateways can use frags technology and lookahead mechanisms to achieve pre-confirmation at sub-10ms levels;

Their services are directly tied to economic incentives and constrained by the slashing mechanism, so Gateways have both revenue and costs, transforming them from “volunteers” into true infrastructure service providers.

At the same time, developers benefit from lower barriers and greater composability.

In the past, developers who wanted to achieve instant confirmation on Rollups often had to build complex mechanisms themselves, which was time-consuming and difficult to standardize. The upgraded UniFi AVS, through modular APIs, allows developers to access instant confirmation capabilities just like calling cloud services.

Whether it’s DEXs, derivatives protocols, or high-frequency GameFi applications, all can quickly enjoy the experience improvement brought by sub-10ms confirmation. This not only reduces infrastructure building costs but also decreases the risk of MEV theft, allowing developers to focus more on application-layer innovation.

Finally, ordinary users are the most direct beneficiaries, experiencing for the first time Solana-level or even near-CEX smoothness on Ethereum Rollups:

• In terms of speed, transaction confirmation time is reduced from 12 seconds to 10 milliseconds, rivaling centralized exchanges;
• In terms of determinism, Execution Preconfs guarantee price locking at the protocol commitment level, avoiding slippage and frontrunning;
• In terms of security, Restaked ETH endorsement and the slashing mechanism make commitments “costly,” and users can be compensated in case of default; 

From a higher perspective, the upgrade of Puffer UniFi AVS is not just a product evolution, but also establishes an industry standard for Preconfs, upgrading them from a patch to infrastructure, and even turning them into a standardized mid-layer service for Ethereum.

This not only makes it truly possible for Based Rollup to be fast, profitable, and secure, but also reinforces Ethereum’s long-term narrative as a Security Settlement Layer.

Final Thoughts

Looking back at Ethereum’s scaling process over the past five years, Rollups have undoubtedly been the main thread, but how to find a truly feasible balance between performance, economics, and security—the “impossible triangle”—has always been unresolved.

Especially for Based Rollup, the “orthodox scaling path” for Ethereum, the last piece of the puzzle for large-scale, commercial operation has always been missing. Objectively speaking, the launch of UniFi AVS in this Puffer upgrade is an attempt to fill this gap and is one of the most feasible explorations.

More profoundly, it sketches a clear “endgame” possibility for the future of modular blockchains: any emerging Rollup can be built directly on UniFi AVS, quickly gaining Solana-level performance, Ethereum mainnet-level security, and a self-consistent economic model without reinventing the wheel.

However, whether it can ultimately become industry consensus depends not only on the robustness and openness of its own design, but also on whether it can find the optimal balance in the complex Rollup ecosystem and multi-party interest game.

Therefore, for the industry, it is a key observation window in the next one to two years to measure whether the Based Rollup narrative can truly mature.