What are blockchain rollups and how do they scale Ethereum

Ethereum can process roughly 15 transactions per second. That is less than a single Starbucks checkout line. Rollups are the technology that lets Ethereum handle thousands of transactions per second without sacrificing the security that makes it valuable in the first place. They work by executing transactions off chain and posting compressed proofs back to Ethereum, turning the base layer into a settlement court rather than a transaction processor. The standard narrative says that rollups make Ethereum faster. This is technically true but misleading. Ethereum itself does not get faster. It still produces a block every 12 seconds. It still processes roughly 15 transactions per second on the base layer. Nothing about Ethereum’s consensus or execution changes when a rollup deploys. What changes is where the work happens. Rollups move transaction execution off the Ethereum mainnet and onto a separate chain that can process transactions much faster because it does not need thousands of validators to agree on every state change. The rollup then compresses the results and posts them back to Ethereum, where they are verified and made permanent. The analogy that most explanations use is a c...