Interactive · weigh the designs
Tradeoff explorer
Think of three ways to get parcels across a city. A private courier route between you and one neighbour. A separate postal network with a transfer desk at the border. A bulk shipper who lodges one sealed receipt at the central registry.
None of them is the best route. Each is fastest at something and slowest at something else. This page lets you say what you care about, then shows how channels, sidechains and rollups line up against it.
The ratings are conceptual, hand-assigned on a five-step scale, and open to disagreement. They are not measurements, and there are no performance figures anywhere on this page.
L1 · Mechanics
Say what matters to you.
Set a weight from 0 (ignore it) to 5 (this is everything) for each criterion. The radar and the ranking update as you go.
Your weights
How little you must rely on other parties behaving well.
How comfortably it handles many transactions at once.
How little capital you must park in advance for it to work.
How easy it is to understand and operate day to day.
The radar
By default each corner of a shape is the design's rating scaled by your weight, so a criterion you set to zero collapses to the centre.
What your weights favour
A weighted fit on the same five-step scale. Treat it as a conversation starter, not a verdict.
The comparison matrix.
The same ratings in words. Select a design to highlight its column, and notice how the row labels follow your weights.
| Criterion | Payment channels | Sidechains | Rollups |
|---|---|---|---|
| Fewer trust assumptions weight 3 |
4 of 5, goodFunds sit in a script both people signed, and either can usually leave alone. The catch: someone must watch for a stale state being published. | 2 of 5, limitedA separate chain has its own rules and its own security. Moving value in and out typically leans on a bridge or a group of signers that you must trust to some degree. | 3 of 5, mixedThe aim is to inherit the base layer's guarantees by posting data or proofs there. Real designs differ in what they still assume, and some depend on base-layer features that are still being debated. |
| Room for throughput weight 3 |
5 of 5, strongOnce open, two peers can update as fast as they can exchange messages. Reaching people you share no channel with needs routing, which adds coordination. | 4 of 5, goodIt has its own block space and can choose different limits. That independence is also the source of its extra trust. | 3 of 5, mixedMany transactions share one posted record. Capacity is still bounded by how much data the base layer is willing to carry. |
| Light on liquidity needs weight 3 |
2 of 5, limitedValue has to be locked in ahead of time, per channel. How much you can send or receive depends on how the funds are currently split. | 4 of 5, goodYou move value across once and then it lives in a shared space. There is no per-counterparty lock-up, though the bridge needs backing. | 4 of 5, goodDeposits go into a shared pool rather than into one channel per partner, so capital is more fluid. Exits may involve waiting. |
| Simplicity weight 3 |
3 of 5, mixedThe two-person idea fits on a whiteboard. Real use adds fee handling, watching for cheating, and routing. | 4 of 5, goodConceptually close to running one more ordinary chain. The hard part is hidden in the bridge. | 2 of 5, limitedCompact data, ordering, challenge or proof systems and exits: many moving parts that have to fit together correctly. |
L2 · Fine print
How to read this honestly.
- The ratings are opinions with reasons. They are a way to organise a discussion, not data from experiments. Reasonable people would move some of them up or down by a step.
- Higher is always better for the criterion. So "light on liquidity needs" scores high when little capital must be locked. Read each row label as the good thing you want more of.
- Each family is really a range. There are many ways to build a sidechain or a rollup, and the answers shift with the details. Treat each column as the typical idea, not a particular product.
- Rollups on Bitcoin are an open question. The idea is well known in general. How to do it on Bitcoin without extra assumptions depends on proposals that are still being discussed, so the rollup column is the most hedged of the three.
- The weighted fit is arithmetic, not wisdom. It is the average of the ratings, weighted by your sliders, on the same five-step scale. If every weight is zero there is nothing to compare, and the page says so.
What is deliberately missing. No transaction rates, no fee levels, no market sizes, no rankings of real projects. Those change, depend on context, and are easy to misuse. If you want a number, run the channel simulator and watch the two counters.
A good tool for choosing a delivery route is a map that shows the tradeoffs, not a leaderboard. This page tries to be the map.
Not affiliated. Layer Two is an independent explainer. It does not represent, rate or endorse any company, wallet, exchange or protocol.