Would an Account Model-Based L2 Rollup Be the Best Solution for High-Performance DEX on Cardano?

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Hi everyone,

I’ve been thinking deeply about Cardano’s current scalability strategy and the role of L2 solutions within the ecosystem. Cardano’s EUTxO model already offers great parallelism and predictable security, which gives it a strong foundation for L1 scalability. In many cases, this makes L2 scaling unnecessary purely for TPS reasons.

However, I believe there is a unique use case where an L2 solution could provide tremendous value to Cardano: a high-performance DEX or any application requiring shared state management.
The UTxO model, while brilliant for security and simplicity, has inherent challenges when it comes to shared liquidity pools, order books, or lending pools that require mutable shared states and high composability.

In Ethereum, we’ve seen account-based L2s (e.g., Optimistic Rollups, zkRollups) massively improve the user and developer experience for DeFi applications.
This leads me to ask:

Would an account model-based L2 Rollup (or an L2 that integrates some account model characteristics) be a practical and valuable addition for Cardano?
Could such a design allow us to maintain L1 security guarantees, while solving the usability friction of building high-performance DEXs on Cardano?

I’m not proposing to replace Cardano’s core EUTxO design. In fact, I believe it should remain intact at L1 for settlement, security, and data availability.
But as a purpose-driven modular ecosystem, it seems that an account-oriented L2 for shared state dApps could complement Cardano’s architecture perfectly.

This would allow Cardano to maintain its core philosophy, while providing developers with the flexibility and tooling needed for next-generation DeFi protocols.
In my view, this may even give Cardano a major advantage over Ethereum and other ecosystems, by combining security + decentralization at L1 + usability and composability at L2.

Is anyone aware of research, initiatives, or prototypes in the Cardano ecosystem exploring this hybrid direction?
Would love to hear feedback from both developers and researchers!

Thank you

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I’m not very familiar with technology, but as far as I know, Cardano should have a better technical roadmap called Starstream. You can take a look at this article to get a better understanding.
https://cexplorer.io/article/starstream-as-enabler-of-scalable-dapps-on-cardano