Glossary
Sovereign Rollup
A rollup that publishes its transactions to a data availability layer but settles and decides its own fork choice itself, without a settlement contract on another chain.
A sovereign rollup posts its blocks to a data availability layer such as Celestia, but unlike a "smart-contract rollup" it does not rely on an L1 contract to verify proofs or settle disputes. The DA layer only orders and stores the data; it never executes or validates the rollup's transactions.
Instead, the rollup's own full nodes run the state-transition and fork-choice rules, so the community can upgrade the chain or fork it without permission from any settlement layer. The trade-off is weaker interoperability: there is no L1 contract to trustlessly bridge against, so cross-chain transfers lean on external bridges.