Despite the rapid shift towards a modular world and the promising scalability potential of rollups, creating a sustainable rollup ecosystem remains inherently challenging. This challenge arises from both existing rollup designs and the pain points faced by users. Resolving user pain points becomes crucial in practice as the rollup ecosystem grows: ensuring transaction security, fast finality, and a seamless experience for interoperability. In order to solve these pain points, a new rollup ecosystem called Radius was created. Radius is a novel and secure sequencing solution powered by cryptography, providing fast finality and seamless interoperability.

What is Radius?

Radius is a user-centric and economic growth engine for rollup that enables searches to capture revenue while protecting users. The main goal of Radius is to capture MEV (maximal extractable value) in a decentralized manner and connect it with searches (users) to capture any sustainable revenue opportunity. To avoid any harmful MEV attacks during transacation, Radius encrypts the MEV transacations from the mempool using a trustless sequencing engine to prevent sequencer attempts to censor, frontrun, or sandwich. Transactions remain encrypted until sequencers pre-confirm the order, and encrypted transactions are verified with zero-knowledge proofs (ZKPs), eliminating the amount of trust placed in sequencers. This process ensures that sequencers cannot decrypt the transactions until they have issued pre-confirmations to the user. Radius relies on two key components to ensure the secure and efficient operation of rollups: the lighthouse and Secure Block Building (SBB). Lighthouse connects rollups with searchers, enabling sustainable MEV revenue, while SBB facilitates fair and transparent block construction.

What is Rollup?

Rollup is a concept of Layer 2 system design to improve the scalability, speed, and cost-efficiency of blockchain networks, particularly Ethereum. When users interact with the rollup, it processes the transaction on a faster blockchain, known as Layer 2, and then sends the data to the main blockchain, known as Layer 1. All these processes can be done in a cheaper and faster way than parent blockchain. Significantly reduces congestion and fees while maintaining security and decentralization. There are two types of rollups: optimistic rollups, which assume all transactions are valid by default, and zero-knowledge rollups, which use cryptographic proofs to verify the validity of all transactions.

Radius Background

Founded in 2023, Radius is a South Korean-based financial services provider. The team behind the Radius project is anonymous and has shown only their made-up name. As mentioned, AJ is the founder of Radius, who is a blockchain visionary deeply entrenched in the world of zero-knowledge proofs and rollup technology, passionately advocating for decentralization and user-centric blockchain solutions. Meanwhile, Tariz, Jayden and Jongbeen are the co-founders. The team has conducted two seed funding rounds in 2023 and 2025 and has raised over $8.7 million from the leading investors, such as Pantera Capital, LambdaClass, Hashed, Crypto.com, and Nonce Classic.

Radius Features

• Cross-Rollup MEV: Radius has partnered with Avail to enable synchronous atomic transactions across rollups, unlocking cross-rollup arbitrage and other revenue opportunities.
• Based Sequencing: It provides new MEV revenue opportunities by bridging ETH liquidity with rollup.
• Encrypted Transactions: Radius protects users from harmful MEV attacks such as censoring, frontrunning, or sandwiching transactions by encrypting transactions using a trustless sequencing engine.
• Zero-Knowledge Proofs (ZKPs): It verifies encrypted transactions, reducing the need to trust sequencers while maintaining transaction privacy and security.
• Lighthouse Network: Lighthouse connects multiple rollups with searchers through permissionless auctions.
• Secure Block Builder: With the help of SBB, Radius encrypts transactions directly in the user’s browser within a second, without additional software.
• Distributed Key Generation (DKG): Provides encryption keys with delay functions.
• Slashing Mechanisms: Prevent a single transaction order from reordering transactions.
• Backrunning: Radius provides a Backrunning feature to enhance rollup profitability.

How Does Radius Work?

Radius enables rollups to capture Maximal Extractable Value (MEV) in a decentralized and user-protective way through two key components: Secure Block Building (SBB) and Lighthouse. Here’s how it works:

Lighthouse Network

Lighthouse is a decentralized network that allows searches to connect with rollup opportunities during block production. This Lighthouse enables rollups to harness MEV strategies that improve market efficiency, such as arbitrage and liquidations. It supports diverse MEV strategies like CEX-DEX arbitrage, atomic arbitrage, liquidations, cross-rollup arbitrage and Ethereum-rollup arbitrage. By using these strategies with Lighthouse, searches can identify potential opportunities and create MEV bundles. These bundles are submitted to Lighthouse for bidding, and the rollups execute winning bundles and earn fees, creating a sustainable revenue stream beyond transaction fees.

Secure Block Building (SBB)

Secure Block Building (SBB) is a cryptographic component designed to protect users from harmful MEV attacks. Customized and integrated by Radius for each rollup, SBB ensures that transactions are encrypted directly within the user’s browser in under a second, without requiring additional installations or software. This is done by encryption technologies called Practical Verifiable Delay Encryption (PVDE) that eliminate any external trust in key generation to create proofs for complex cryptographic operations. To ensure the continuous operation, Radius has included several key components that collaborate to maintain network integrity and secure transaction processing:

• Seeder: Maintains and verifies the IP addresses of transaction orderers.
• Secure Remote Procedure Call (RPC): Encrypts sensitive transaction data within a blockchain or rollup environment.
• Distributed Key Generation (DKG) Service: Generates aggregated encryption keys through a collaborative process. Users encrypt their transactions with these keys, which transaction orderers later decrypt.
• Liveness Service Manager Contract: Responsible for block creation and transaction ordering, maintaining the availability of transaction orderers.
• Validation Service Manager Contract: It facilitates transaction order validation and reward distribution through several processes.

Radius AVS and NFFL

Among the many innovations in rollup infrastructure, AVS (Actively Validated Services) and NFFL (Nuffle Fast Finality Layer) are two critical components for enhancing decentralization and high-speed transaction settlement. Radius has now implemented these features, providing developers with a secure solution for building efficient rollups.

Radius AVS is a decentralized sequencing solution that integrates directly into rollups, addressing challenges like censorship and system failures while maintaining high performance. Different from traditional security check-ups that required periodic monitoring, AVS does this continuously without affecting users or operations. It protects users against malicious activities such as frontrunning and ensures network liveness even if a sequencer fails. Currently live on testnet, Radius AVS is progressing toward a mainnet launch.

Source: HashKey Cloud

On the other hand, Radius NFFL acts as a fast settlement layer that boosts both speed and security for rollups. The main work of Radius NFFl is to enable participating networks to quickly and securely access information from other networks. Currently, Radius uses NEAR and EigenLayer to provide interoperability features. Both combinations enable applications to securely verify cross-chain states in 2-3 seconds—orders of magnitude faster than canonical bridge settlement.

Source: @2077research from Hackernoon

Radius Ecosystem

Radius has partnerships with leading rollup platforms and infrastructure providers. It supports stacks like OP Stack, Polygon CDK, Madara, Arbitrum, and ZK Stack. While for rollups it supports Swell, Fuse, Ternoa, LIFT and VESSEL. And more such as:

• Stake: OP Stack, Polygon CDK, Madara, Arbitrum, and ZK Stack.
• Rollus: Swell, Fuse, Ternoa, LIFT and VESSEL.
• Infrastructure: Avail, WitnessChain, Nuffel, Pragma, STARKNET and RISE.
• Restaking: Symbiotic and EngineLayer.
• RaaS: Caldera, AltLayer and KARNOT.

Radius Roadmap

The key milestones include:

1.SBB 2.0: Backrunning on a Single Rollup

SBB 2.0 enables searchers to submit backrunning bundles directly to rollups. This allows rollups and searchers to capture MEV opportunities, including CEX-DEX arbitrage.

• Q1 2025: Integration on rollup testnet
• Q2 2025: Integration on rollup mainnet

2.Lighthouse 1.0: Expanding Across Rollups

Lighthouse 1.0 connects a network of multiple rollups and searchers for good MEV capture. Rollups earn revenue from these bids by executing MEV bundles from searchers.

• Q2 2025: Testnet launch
• Q4 2025: Mainnet launch

3.Lighthouse 2.0: Expanding to L1

Lighthouse 2.0 extends good MEV capture across L1 and L2. This unlocks greater value creation for rollups, L1 validators, and searchers through L1-L2 arbitrage.

• Q2 2026: Testnet launch
• Q4 2026: Mainnet launch

Conclusion

While blockchains strive to be a secure, scalable, and decentralized network, the current mismatch in system design and value extraction presents challenges for Ethereum rollups to adopt a user-centric approach. As part of the expanding modular ecosystem working to optimize rollup efficiency, Radius helps rollups navigate through these challenges for users to transact securely and confidently, creating a strong, resilient, and sustainable rollup ecosystem.