Base Azul is the rare L2 upgrade where the interesting detail is the safety valve, not the throughput claim.

The Base engineering post says Azul targets mainnet activation on May 13, cuts empty blocks from roughly 200 a day to roughly 2, sustains 5,000 TPS bursts, and moves to base-reth-node plus base-consensus. Fine. The sharper move is multiproofs. TEE proofs can finalize. ZK proofs can finalize. If they contradict, permissionless ZK overrides the permissioned path.

That is an admission worth respecting. The industry spent years selling users a theological war between fraud proofs, validity proofs, committees, sequencers, and hardware enclaves. Azul treats proof systems as fallible machinery and builds an escalation path into the protocol. Cryptographic finality becomes operational risk management, with capital efficiency as the visible prize and bug containment as the hidden one.

Rollups mature when they stop pretending a single trust story will survive contact with billions of dollars.