[General] Resource Usage Tracker for OP Stack rollups: seeking community insights

[mazurroman]

Discussion Topic

Considering this request to build an OP Resource Usage Tracker, we see a significant opportunity to develop a tool that provides insights for rollup and dApp developers helping them to optimize their applications and rollups built for the OP Stack.

Our team at Walnut, experienced in building dev tools on Starknet and Optimism, is interested in leading this project.

Below, we share our preliminary project specifications and ideas. We invite the community to provide feedback, particularly seeking insights on the added value to rollup builders and dApp developers.

Our Take

We identify two potential personas who would be interested in an L2 Resource Usage Tracking tool:

1. The rollup maintainer, responsible for running the chain, collecting gas from users, submitting transaction batches to L1, and paying gas on L1.
2. The smart contract developer who has their contracts deployed on one of the OP Stack chains.

We believe that each of these users has slightly different needs that could lead to two distinct products. Let’s consider both separately:

The Rollup Chain Maintainer

Below we list areas of concern for the rollup chain maintainer, along with corresponding metrics that would be valuable on the L2 Resource Usage Tracking tool:

Costs: How much does it cost to run the rollup??

• Rent paid to L1 - gas, calldata, blob storage
  • Ability to filter over time / blocks
• Who is the largest gas consumer on the rollup?
  • Ability to filter by user, smart contract, transaction type.
  • Ability to filter over time.
• Who is the largest consumer of storage and calldata in the rollup?
  • Ability to filter by contract.

Revenue: How much does the rollup earn from transaction fees??

• Who pays the most in transaction gas fees?
  • Ability to filter by dApp, contract, transaction type, users.
  • Ability to filter over time.
• The difference between the total rollup gas costs and revenue generated
  • Is the rollup generating any surplus? Does it change with time? What are the exact numbers?

Note: the rollup maintainer is also interested in metrics around the resiliency / uptime of their rollup. There is a separate discussion on that here and it's out of scope of this question.

The Smart Contract Developer

The smart contract developer needs to understand how many resources their dApp (smart contracts) is consuming. Is there a way to make it more efficient?

We think the smart contract developer will mainly be interested in costs and finding ways to optimize their contracts to make them cheaper for their users.

They might be interested in these metrics:

• Storage occupied by each contract, and the variables inside, to analyze if there is room for optimization.
• Storage updates (state diffs) caused by transactions or smart contracts over time.
• Gas usage by transactions or contracts over time.
• Calldata usage by transactions or contracts over time.

Summary

We have outlined various metrics that we believe could be valuable to rollup maintainers and dApp developers in the OP Stack ecosystem. We are eager to receive feedback on these ideas. While all insights are valuable, here are some specific questions to guide your contributions:

• Is the proposed project solving a real need for dApps or rollups?
• Who will benefit more from such a tool - the dApp developer or the rollup maintainer?
• Is there anything we are missing or getting wrong?

If we find substantial evidence of interest in the proposed metrics, we are committed to moving forward with the development of an MVP.

Note: If you are developing your own rollup or have a contract deployed on a rollup, and are interested in any of the metrics discussed, please direct message me on Telegram (@ rmazur) or email (roman at walnut dot dev).

Some info about us:

• We are building a transaction debugger on Starknet: walnut.dev
• We also have a developer grant with Optimism to build a lightweight transaction explorer for the Superchain. We are working on this in stealth right now.