Differences between Ethereum and SanChain
The Santiment L2 chain is built on the Bedrock release of the OP Stack to provide full EVM equivalence—meaning bytecode compatibility, identical gas semantics, and support for Ethereum’s debugging tools. Where it diverges is in the operational and architectural considerations: understanding how gas is split between L2 execution and L1 data costs, how finality windows work, and how to model trust assumptions in cross-chain interactions.
In comparison to Ethereum, the L2 chains based on the OP Stack introduce a two-layer separation: execution happens on L2, but security and data availability are anchored to Ethereum L1. As a developer, you're still writing smart contracts in Solidity, using tools like Hardhat, Foundry, and MetaMask, and deploying to an EVM-equivalent chain. However, your code is running on a separate execution engine—op-geth, a modified fork of Geth—outside of Ethereum’s direct consensus. This layer produces blocks independently via a sequencer, which orders and executes transactions rapidly and cheaply, without needing L1 confirmation for every step.
Because of this architecture, certain assumptions change. For example, finality on L2 chain is not immediate in the same sense as on Ethereum. Although transactions appear finalized quickly on L2 (often within seconds), they are only truly settled on Ethereum after the batch is posted and passes through the challenge window (in the case of optimistic rollups). Developers building dApps that depend on irreversible state transitions—such as bridges, high-stakes financial protocols, or liquidation systems—need to account for this delay in their logic or UI/UX.
Another difference lies in how data availability and state proofs work. On Ethereum, all state changes are directly recorded in the canonical chain. In Santiment L2 chain, transaction data is posted to L1 as blobs, but the actual execution and state live on L2. This means that the L2 chain has to regularly submit state roots to Ethereum, and any fraud-proof mechanism will depend on this data being available and verifiable.
Overall, from the standpoint of development experience, deploying to Santiment Chain feels almost identical to Ethereum. There are still some small behavioral discrepancies between Santiment Chain and Ethereum that developers should keep in mind when building applications on Santiment Chain.
You may refer to OP stack documentation for more details: