Rollup-as-a-Service Provider Comparison: How to Choose the Right RaaS Partner

Written by Alchemy

Reviewed by Brady Werkheiser

Published on June 13, 20247 min read

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A Rollup-as-a-Service (RaaS) is a managed service or platform that provides the infrastructure, tooling, and support to deploy and maintain roll-up based scaling solutions for blockchain applications. 

The offering is similar to a software-as-a-service (SaaS) model because end-users don’t need to set-up or maintain any part of the rollup, abstracting away all the complications and enabling users to focus on building impactful applications. 

The two main implementations are optimistic and zero-knowledge (ZK) rollups. By selecting the right RaaS provider, developers can ensure that their blockchain applications are scalable, secure, and cost-effective. 

In this article, we will explore the industry’s leading RaaS providers, factors to consider when choosing a RaaS, and how to get started right here on Alchemy. Let’s dive in.

What to Look for When Choosing a Rollup-as-a-Service

When selecting a RaaS, developers and creators should consider a variety of factors that align with their project’s requirements such as robust infrastructure, performance optimization, and seamless interoperability. Here are some key factors and questions to consider before finalizing your service provider:

Scalability

Rollups significantly increase transaction throughput by processing off-chain and only posting necessary data and proofs on-chain. In other words, scalability is a major advantage of using a rollup. 

Questions to ask yourself:

• How well does the platform handle increasing numbers of transactions and users?

• Can it scale efficiently to meet the demands of your dApp?

• Does the platform automatically adjust RPC resources when volume increases?

Performance

RaaS providers remove the complexities of building and maintaining rollups, enabling developers to leverage the performance benefits of Layer 2 scaling solutions without exerting maximum effort. 

Questions to ask yourself:

• What are the transaction speeds and throughput of the platform?

• Are its sequencers reliable and performant?

• How low are the latency and finality times?

Cost

Rollups leverage cost-effective data availability (DA) layers, which can significantly reduce transaction costs for end-users. How? The off-chain computation combined with on-chain proof submission reduces on-chain data and gas fees.

Questions to ask yourself:

• What are the fees associated with using the platform?

• Are there any costs or additional charges for scaling?

• What pricing model does the platform use to charge users?

• Is the platform transparent in terms of fee structure? 

Ease of Use

RaaS abstracts away all the complexities with set-up and maintenance of components like provers and data availability layers. Instead, developers can focus on building their application layer without worrying about the underlying rollup infrastructure and tooling, significantly reducing time-to-market. 

Questions to ask yourself:

• How user-friendly is the platform for developers?

• Is there comprehensive documentation and support available?

• Does the platform offer no-code or low-code deployment for custom rollips?

Vertical Integrations

Developers can use RaaS providers to build their own rollups or application-specific rollups (AppRollups) customized for specific verticals or use cases on top of their existing infrastructure. Rollups enable developers to create vertically integrated products for sectors like gaming, DeFi, and consumer applications. 

Questions to ask yourself:

• How well does the platform integrate with existing tools and infrastructure?

• Is it compatible with your preferred programming languages and frameworks?

• How quickly can you set up the integration?

• How does the integration impact the reliability and performance of the rollup? 

Customization

Developers can choose between general-purpose rollups and application-specific rollups customized to their decentralized application’s needs. In fact, customizable components like sequencers can allow tailored transaction processing, while improving efficiency and reliability.

Questions to ask yourself:

• How much control do you have over the rollup configuration?

• Can you customize the platform to meet the specific needs of your dApp?

Reliability

Rollup providers offer managed infrastructure, including globally distributed nodes, settlement layers, and data availability layers, ensuring reliable and uninterrupted service. Moreover, rollups inherit the security and reliability of the underlying Layer 1 blockchain while enabling high throughput and low fees.

Questions to ask yourself:

• What is the platform's uptime guarantee?

• How reliable is the platform in terms of maintenance and updates?

• Does the platform have a single point of failure?

• Are there redundancy and failover mechanisms in place?

Interoperability

Another advantage of rollups is their interoperability with the base layer, enabling seamless asset transfers and data exchange. Also, direct integration with bridges and indexers allows rollups to interact with external data sources and other blockchain ecosystems.

Questions to ask yourself:

• How well does the platform interact with other blockchains and systems?

• Are cross-chain functionalities supported?

• Does the platform offer uninterrupted data exchange with other technologies and applications?

Top 9 RaaS Providers

Alchemy

Alchemy’s best-in-class development platform powers every part of the chain and is used by the leading companies in the decentralized ecosystem. The platform’s infrastructure is trusted by over 2 million global developers and has already powered $100+ billion of onchain transactions for 100+ million end-users. Alchemy provides virtually every product, tool, and API through a single platform to build applications onchain. The highly available platform’s 99.999% uptime ensures unmatched sequencer reliability meaning developers can scale their applications to meet 10x, 100x, or higher growth needs. With automatic monitoring and robust alerting capabilities, developers can assess their rollup’s health in real-time and preview onchain transaction behavior to keep assets secure. Developers interested in performant infrastructure that takes care of all their rollup needs with 24 x 7 global support from real engineers should look no further than Alchemy. 

Conduit

Conduit is a crypto-native infrastructure platform that empowers developers to deploy production-grade rollups with minimal support. It’s a self-service platform that handles scalability, reliability, and upgrades, allowing developers to build powerful applications.Not only does Conduit simplify the deployment of OP stack and Arbitrum Nitro rollups but also provides access to logs, monitoring, and transaction tracing capabilities.

Conduit is ideal for developers who’re on the lookout for a seamless deployment experience without extensive operational overhead. The platform is designed to offer scalable and reliable RPC nodes, making it a robust choice for developers looking to ship DeFi, gaming, and enterprise applications. Developers also automatically receive new components as upgrades are made available. 

Caldera

Caldera provides developers with the tools to build high-performance, customizable, and application-specific applications on layer-two blockchains using Arbitrum and the OP stack. Caldera simplifies the launch of optimistic rollups by providing robust infrastructure and support. Its chains offer high throughput, low latency, and customizable features for optimizing the performance and user experience of decentralized applications.

The RaaS can process hundreds of transactions per second and sub-second confirmation times. Caldera’s focus on performance and customization makes it a competitive option for developers looking to deploy specialized rollups for various applications like gaming and DeFi solutions, where transaction speed and cost efficiency are critical. 

AltLayer

In a nutshell, AltLayer is a decentralized and elastic RaaS protocol for developers to launch high-scalable application-tailored execution layers that can be temporarily spun up to meet excessive end-user demand. Its elastic nature allows the platform to scale according to the ever-changing needs of the application.

AltLayers offers both Flash Layer and Persistent rollups. AltLayer’s Flash rollups provide a unique approach to handling peak loads, allowing applications to scale dynamically and efficiently. These layers can be quickly deployed and discarded, offering flexibility and cost savings. On the other hand, AltLayer’s persistent rollups are standard optimistic rollups that are application-specific and compatible with both Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) and WebAssembly (WASM). The platform has been designed for developers and projects that require a high degree of scalability and flexibility. AltLayer is particularly well-suited for use cases such as NFT mint events, games, and event ticketing. 

SnapChain

SnapChain is designed to support numerous rollup technologies, ensuring high performance and security for blockchain applications. The platform supports both the optimistic and ZK rollups, catering to a wide range of use cases with robust security measures and efficient transaction processing. Its private and secure platform enables developers to host and scale their own decentralized private network without compromise, from fully on-chain games to transaction-intense DeFi applications.

SnapChain offers a streamlined platform for deploying rollups and provides comprehensive infrastructure support, including monitoring and management tools to ensure reliable operations of deployed rollups. Developers that are looking for a quick and efficient solution to deploy rollups without compromising on speed and reliability should consider using SnapChain.

Saga

Saga is a Layer 1 protocol for automatically spinning up parallelized and interoperable chains that elastically scale with application requirements. Saga’s network is best leveraged as a scalability layer for infrastructure upgrades. Developers selecting Saga as their RaaS provider benefit from high performance, predictable chain fees, and seamless interoperability with the wider ecosystem.

Using shared security, innovations in validator orchestration, and an automated deployment pipeline, Saga makes launching a dedicated blockchain as easy as deploying a smart contract. In fact, developers can enjoy their own dedicated chains, enabling optimal flexibility and customization. The network’s parallelized chains and horizontal scalability translate to fewer performance bottlenecks because of lack of blockspace. 

Alembic

Alembic is a cutting-edge platform that enables developers to build and operate their own games and applications. The platform’s open, modular, and highly extensible architecture serves as the bedrock for DApps. Alembic has some powerful features ranging from account abstraction as a service (AaaS), where developers can integrate and manage user accounts, to support for Layer 2 solutions, ensuring full compatibility with the EVM either through an optimistic chain or dedicated application-chains.

But that’s not all. Alembic provides a comprehensive set of APIs like Relayer and Indexer empowering developers to leverage existing infrastructure and enhance the functionality of their applications. Leveraging Cometh, developers have an opportunity to turn their innovative ideas into real projects in little to no time. 

Vistara

Vistara is a one-click rollup deployment framework for designing and maintaining hardware resources at scale. Think of Vistara as the hardware availability layer for the decentralized web, which democratizes access to decentralized hardware and is designed from the ground up to meet the needs of developers. The framework’s approach centers on making computing resources like CPUs, GPUs, and storage easily accessible and programmable, breaking free from the constraints of centralized cloud computing infrastructure.

By ensuring advanced technological resources are available to a larger number of developers, Vistara lowers the barriers to entry for development of creative solutions. Using Vistara, developers can create and maintain customizable rollups in a minimal amount of time. The low-friction experience allows developers to compose, build, test, fail, iterate, and succeed quickly.

Zeeve

Zeeve enables developers to launch enterprise-grade ZK and OP rollups infrastructure using its highly configurable and cost-optimized no-code platform. The RaaS provider removes the complexity of launching your own blockchain and offers end-to-end rollup solutions that adhere to the demanding requirements of enterprise-level service agreements from security to technical support. Moreover, Zeeve provides deployment options across 9 cloud providers and 150+ regions while complying with ISO 27001 and SOC 2 Type 2 standards. Not only does Zeeve offer migration assistance with limited downtime or data loss, but its strong partnership network allows developers to easily extend the functionality of Optimistic and ZK rollups.

Which RaaS Provider is best for you?

Choosing the right RaaS provider depends heavily on the specific needs and goals of your project. For high reliability and extensive support, Alchemy is unmatched. If seamless deployment with minimal overhead is crucial, Conduit is a strong contender. For performance-critical applications, Caldera's high throughput and low latency make it ideal. AltLayer offers unique benefits for temporary scalability, while SnapChain is best for secure and intensive transaction processing.

For projects needing flexible and scalable infrastructure, Saga is a top choice, whereas Alembic is suited for modular and extensible applications. Vistara is ideal for developers requiring extensive hardware resources and quick iteration. Finally, for enterprise-grade applications needing robust security and compliance, Zeeve stands out. Developers should carefully evaluate the features, benefits, and use cases of each platform to determine the best fit for their specific project requirements. 

Get started with Alchemy Rollups

Imagine your blockchain application running seamlessly and scaling effortlessly. With Alchemy's Rollups, this vision is a reality. Trusted by over 2 million developers, Alchemy's infrastructure boasts 99.999% uptime, real-time monitoring, and 24/7 global support. Scale from 10x to 100x growth effortlessly with our best-in-class platform.

Choose Alchemy, the complete dev platform, for all your rollup needs.