Apparently ENS went with a currently-capable-of-ZK-chain for Namechain over optimistic was because they seem to be under the impression that "finality takes 7 days" for optimistic rollups, an unfortunately common misconception. If you run a full node (and ENS certainly would do at least that) and you believe the fraud proof system works, then finality happens the moment the state root is posted to the L1 (5-10 min) and you confirm it matches your local root. This is no worse than a ZK rollup.

The benefit of current ZK rollups over Optimistic is the shorter withdrawal window, and little else. The additional complexity they involve unfortunately brings with it a host of additional attack surface area. I believe all L2s will eventually be ZK-powered, but IMO the current generation of ZK chains are reyling mostly on security through obscurity.

In the case of ENS, I believe this is the correct view because the rollup needs to interop with L1 state.

A doodler and computerer. I like permissive/permissionless open source, smart contracts, p2p systems, room-scale VR, and NixOS.

shazow.net

Currently: WhatsABI

I was talking to some of the folks at ens while they were deciding. It’s this part. However, I did need to explain the optimistic rollup finality thing too

Yeah… we ended up adding a page to our docs to address this but at this point I think a lightning talk is warranted so we can answer it with a video link

Yeah I hear that sooo much it just kind of makes me 🤦.