Author: dt, DODO Research

This summer, the blockchain world has seen an explosion of new chains, from Mantle, Linea and Base launched in July to Sei, opBNB and Shibarium in early August, as well as the “Quantum Leap” upgrade of the top-tier public chain Starknet. This summer has been extremely lively in the public chain space. For many players on the chain, new chains represent new opportunities, new projects and, most importantly, new tokens.

Below we will introduce how to bridge tokens to these new public chains and the current infrastructure & potential opportunities on the chain:

Starknet

In the past, Starknet was criticized by users for its extremely slow transaction confirmation speed. However, after the Quantum Leap upgrade, the user experience has been greatly improved, which has also contributed to a substantial increase in the on-chain TVL, reaching a maximum of 200M. TVL has now fallen back to around 100M, ranking sixth among all L2s.

The way to get to Starknet can refer to the official tutorial. Currently, there are relatively few projects on the Starknet chain. In addition to JediSwap, mySwap and 10KSwap, the top three DEXs in terms of TVL, the blockchain game projects on the Starknet chain are also worthy of our attention. The leader among them is Realms (for Adventurers). They are committed to building an open source on-chain multiplayer composable game on StarkNet. $LORDS is the functional token of the project and is also one of the few Starknet ecological protocols that already have tokens. For a more detailed introduction to Realm, please refer to the Realms X Bibliotheca Research article written by SaulDataman.

Starknet is expected to be the next potential airdrop opportunity due to its strong investor background and financing amount. Therefore, paying attention to Starknet and actively participating in on-chain projects is likely to get unexpected surprises.

Ｍantle 

Mantle is an Ethereum L2 incubated by BitDAO and has a close relationship with the Bybit exchange. It announced the opening of Mainnet alpha at the EthCC conference in mid-July. Unlike other L2 public chains, Mantle uses its token $MNT as the on-chain GAS instead of $ETH, $MNT is converted from the previous BitDAO token $BIT 1:1, and the current TVL on the Mantle chain is about 86M.

Due to its close relationship with Bybit, users can withdraw coins to Mantle through the Bybit exchange. It is also one of the few new public chains that are supported by exchanges as soon as they go online. In terms of cross-chain bridges, the official bridge supports cross-chain of multiple mainnet tokens such as $MNT and $ETH, and third-party bridges support orbiter.finance and Symbiosis.

In terms of ecological projects, Mantle has not been favored by mainstream Defi protocols, and currently no old projects have deployed it. In terms of native projects, Agni Finance and FusionX Finance, which currently have the highest TVL, are both DEX projects, and $MINU, which has performed best in Memecoin, has also fallen a lot from its highs.

Unlike many L2 public chains that have not yet issued tokens, Mantle had a protocol token as soon as it went online, which also reduced the number of airdrop hunter users. It is not easy to still have a good TVL performance under this condition. What needs to be paid attention to next is the support level of Bybit Exchange. Currently, no ecological protocol tokens have been launched on Bybit.

Line

Linea, a Layer2 network developed by the ConsenSys team using ZK Rollup technology, also chose to announce the opening of Linea Mainnet Alpha access to the entire community at the EthCC conference with Mentle. It has been nearly a month since then, but the current performance is not ideal, with a TVL of only 34M, ranking 13th among all L2 public chains.

Because it is backed by the ConsenSys team, Linea's mainnet is built into MetaMask by default. Users can skip the complicated process of manually adding a new network and directly switch to the Linea network in their own Metamask. Currently, they can transfer to Linea through the official bridge or a third-party bridge. Supported third parties include orbiter.finance, rhino.fi, and Symbiosis.

Currently, most of the ecological projects are still DEX or Lending, but because there is no oracle access, the currencies that can be provided by lending projects are not complete. Currently, only KyberSwap is deployed among the mainstream old-brand protocols. In terms of ecological projects, Linea is more poor than other L2s. Most of the users are airdrop hunters and there are few real users. There is not even the representative Memecoin.

Base 

The L2 public chain Base launched by Coinbase can be said to be the best performing among these new public chains. In less than a month since its launch, its TVL has exceeded 200M. It is now around 250M, ranking fifth among all L2s. The use of OP Stack also allows many projects to migrate their protocols here with almost no difficulty. Currently, first-line Defi protocols including Uniswap, Compund and AAVE have been or are being deployed on Base.

Currently, the ways to go to Base can be divided into official bridges and third-party bridges. Coinbase Exchange has not yet opened ETH deposits and withdrawals of Base, but if nothing unexpected happens, it will be supported soon. Due to the restrictions of Optimistic Rollup, the official bridge still requires a seven-day inspection period to return to the main network, while the third-party bridge is not subject to this restriction. orbiter.finance, synapse or the aggregation bridge bungee.exchange all provide cross-chain services.

In addition to many old-fashioned protocols currently deployed on the Base chain, native protocols include the recently popular friend.tech. It can be expected that more and more derivative protocols related to friend.tech will emerge in the future. In terms of native infrastructure, Aerodrome, which has not yet been launched, is being watched by many people. Ve33 DEX, launched by the Velodrome team, which has the highest TVL on the OP chain, has reached cooperation with many cross-chain deployment projects before it goes online, including Thales, Liquity, QiDAO and other well-known protocols. It is expected to have many opportunities when it goes online.

Be

Different from the recently popular L2 public chain, Sei is a high-TPS parallel Layer1 public chain built on cosmos. It is also Binance's latest Lauchpool project. It was listed on many exchanges on the first day of the coin issuance. With the ongoing airdrop activities, the TVL on the chain has also risen, and currently it has reached about 3M USD.

Sei is currently conducting airdrop activities for active users of the six major networks of Solana, Ethereum, Arbitrum, Polygon, BNB Chain and Osmosis. The airdrop rules are that active addresses that comply with the rules will have a chance to obtain varying amounts of funds by bridging funds to the Sei network. $Sei token airdrop supports cross-chain bridges including cosmos’ inter-chain communication ibc, Wormhole and Axelar.

opBNB 

opBNB is part of the BNBCHAIN ​​roadmap of Binance Exchange. It will be open to users on August 17, 2023. It is an Optimistic Rollup L2 upgrade based on Binance Smart Chain (BSC) using OP Stack technology. With the strong support of Binance, it has also received considerable attention. Currently, the total TVL on the chain is only 840K, which is not ideal.

opBNB does not currently support token deposits and withdrawals on the Binance exchange and can only be used through a cross-chain bridge. Due to the use of Optimistic Rollup technology, the official bridge needs to go through a seven-day inspection period to return from opBNB to the BSC mainnet. Supported third-party bridges include rhino.fi and Polyhedra Network.

Currently, its ecological projects are also mainly DEX, such as Binary Swap, and there is no migration of old BSC projects. There were many Memecoins on the first day of launch, but now as the market cools down, most of them are not performing well. It is necessary to continue to observe the positioning of Binance Exchange, or the implementation of incentives such as ecological funds.

Shibarium 

The Shibarium Ethereum Layer 2 public chain, which was developed by the Shib Inu team and has been in preparation for nearly a year, was announced to be launched on August 17 last week, but it encountered problems as soon as it went online. Officials said that due to the traffic exceeding expectations after the launch, the network entered the "fail safe mode" and the cross-chain bridge function was abnormal, resulting in more than 1.7 million US dollars in user assets being stranded. The chain is currently shut down to ensure the safety of funds.

At present, cross-chain funds are still in a stage that users cannot control. Shib's main developer said that the network is "almost ready to reopen to the public" and has put in place mechanisms to prevent another outage, but a clear recovery time has not yet been announced.

Author’s opinion

Although the chain is new, the players are still the same group of people in the case of the unchanged environment. Even the project parties are the same, they just keep starting businesses or migrating on different chains. The new public chain means that the players on the chain are the same people, with the same funds, but they continue to compete with each other on a different public chain. The beginning of each new public chain almost follows the same set of SOP standard processes: the first step is DEX, then Memecoin, Lending Protocol, Launchpad IDO, etc. This gameplay is played in turn on different chains.

At the same time, since these new public chains are launched at almost the same time, this indirectly makes the liquidity on the chain more dispersed. From the situation of competing for TVL between projects, it has changed to the situation of competing between public chains. The final comparison is which public chain has a better background and obtains more infrastructure support. Such a public chain can become the winner in the competition. In a bear market with reduced liquidity, there is usually no more than one winner. The winner takes all. Only with deep liquidity can more whales and more powerful developers be attracted.

Only when a popular project that does not just follow the SOP standard process appears (the moat of such projects is too weak, and if Uniswap/AAVE and other old mainnet projects migrate and deploy, they will soon lose their advantages), can a positive cycle be achieved, and derivative projects built on this popular project will be generated. At present, BASE, which is supported by Coinbase and gave birth to the friend.tech popular project, is the current winner.