Taiko RPC: The L2 With No Sequencer

Every OP Stack chain we've covered — Base, Unichain, Zora — has a sequencer: one privileged party that orders transactions, and the thing you're implicitly trusting for liveness and fair ordering. Taiko doesn't have one. It's a based rollup : Ethereum's own validators propose Taiko's blocks as part of normal L1 block production. That single architectural choice cascades into everything a developer cares about — liveness, finality, MEV, and reliability. And because Taiko is also a Type-1 zkEVM , your Ethereum tooling works with zero changes. Here's the map for chain ID 167000 . The essentials Taiko mainnet ( Alethia ) is chain ID 167000 , an EVM Layer 2 with: ETH as the gas token (18 decimals) — no separate gas token to source. ~12-second blocks , aligned with Ethereum's slot times — because block proposing rides on L1, the cadence follows L1. Type-1 zkEVM equivalence — the most Ethereum-equivalent zkEVM design. Contracts deploy bit-identically; opcode behavior is exact. Connecting is completely standard EVM: import { createPublicClient , http } from " viem " ; import { taiko } from " viem/chains " ; // chain ID 167000 const client = createPublicClient ({ chain : taiko , transport : http ( " https://rpc.swiftnodes.io/rpc/taiko?key=YOUR_API_KEY " ), }); await client . getBlockNumber (); // just works What "based" changes: no sequencer to trust — or to fail On a typical rollup, a sequencer receives your transactions, orders them, and produces L2 blocks ( what a sequencer does ). It's efficient, but it's also a single point of trust and a single point of failure — sequencer outages have taken major L2s offline for hours. A "based" rollup removes it entirely: Block proposing happens on Ethereum L1. Taiko blocks are proposed via L1 transactions, so Ethereum's proposers include them as part of normal block production. There is no separate Taiko sequencer. Liveness = Ethereum's liveness. As long as Ethereum is producing blocks, Taiko is producing blocks. There is no "the se