ARK Point: Espresso can solve infrastructure gap between finance, blockchain

The shared sequencer solution Espresso can resolve the system gap between global financial and consumer applications and the blockchain, according to a new report from South Korean blockchain consulting firm ARK Point. In the report, titled "Espresso: Building a Global Baselayer for the Rollup Economy," the firm argues that while rollups have successfully scaled transaction execution, they have also created a fragmented ecosystem of chains. Relying on the Ethereum Layer 1 as the underlying infrastructure to connect these chains is insufficient for the real-time services required by modern applications, as finality on Ethereum still takes 12 to 15 minutes. Espresso aims to solve this infrastructure gap by providing a high-performance, decentralized consensus and finality layer—a "baselayer"—specifically designed to unify the rollup ecosystem. The project offers transaction finality in two seconds and has a roadmap for achieving sub-one-second finality. The report notes that major industry players, including Celo (CELO), Arbitrum (ARB) developer Offchain Labs, and Polygon (POL), are moving beyond testing and are now integrating Espresso as core infrastructure.