Rome Protocol: A Shared Sequencer Breakthrough for Crypto

1. What is Rome Protocol? A Distinctive Operating Model

Rome Protocol is an infrastructure solution in the crypto space designed to address the limitations of conventional Ethereum rollups. Instead of each rollup operating its own sequencer—leading to congestion, censorship risks, or unfair ordering—Rome introduces a shared sequencer that runs on Solana, a high-speed and low-cost blockchain.

The system operates in two parts: Rhea collects and orders transactions across rollups, while Hercules executes them and updates the state. Each rollup is deployed as an instance of Neon EVM, a fully Ethereum-compatible environment that runs directly on Solana. This means dApps can interact using standard Ethereum RPC and smart contracts, while still benefiting from Solana’s speed and efficiency.

Rome Protocol goes beyond speed optimization. It aims to tackle liquidity fragmentation and cross-rollup interoperability. With its novel architecture, the crypto ecosystem can share liquidity, minimize MEV extraction inefficiencies, and enhance composability across rollups in a secure and decentralized manner.

2. Key Advantages and How Rome Benefits the Crypto Ecosystem

Rome Protocol introduces several groundbreaking advantages for developers and users in the crypto world. First, it eliminates centralized sequencers—a longstanding vulnerability in many current Layer 2 systems. By moving the sequencer layer to Solana’s decentralized infrastructure, Rome significantly reduces censorship and downtime risks, ensuring greater fairness and reliability.

Second, Rome enables atomic transactions across rollups and even across blockchains such as Ethereum, Solana, Cosmos, and Bitcoin. With the Rome Interop SDK, developers can build cross-chain applications that maintain full consistency and security. This is particularly vital for DeFi, cross-chain swaps, and crypto arbitrage, where transaction finality and speed are non-negotiable.

In addition, Rome offers Rollup-as-a-Service (RaaS), allowing teams to deploy Ethereum-compatible rollups without worrying about running their own sequencers, data availability layers, or bridges. This drastically lowers the technical and financial barriers for new crypto projects to launch scalable and interoperable applications.

3. Rome Protocol’s Roadmap and 2025 Outlook

As of mid-2025, Rome Protocol has successfully raised over $9 million USD from prominent investors including HashKey, P2 Ventures, and notable individuals such as Solana co-founder Anatoly Yakovenko. Rome has launched a public testnet, attracting attention from developers, MEV searchers, and validators actively experimenting with its architecture. Given its robust foundation, Rome is emerging as a key infrastructure layer for the next generation of crypto rollups.

In the coming months, Rome plans to integrate with major Ethereum Layer 2 ecosystems such as Arbitrum, zkSync, and Polygon. Notably, the protocol's connection with Polygon AggLayer will improve zk-liquidity aggregation and inter-rollup interoperability—two pressing issues in today’s fragmented DeFi landscape.

Looking ahead, Rome is also expanding its SDK to empower the broader crypto developer community. Features such as native state syncing, inter-rollup messaging, and liquidity routing are set to become more accessible. With a clear vision and ambitious roadmap, Rome is quickly becoming a strategic choice for crypto builders seeking speed, scalability, and composability in one unified stack.