Original author: Lao Bai

Original source: twitter

Note: This article comes from @Wuhuoqiu Twitter, and Mars Finance compiled it as follows:

Recently in the primary market, the hottest track is undoubtedly AI, followed by BTC. 80% of the projects discussed every day are concentrated in these two tracks. Personally, I can talk about 5 or 6 AI projects a day at most.

It is foreseeable that the AI ​​bubble will reach its peak in the next two years. With the launch of hundreds of new AI projects, the market value of the AI ​​track will reach its peak. When the bubble finally bursts and everything is in chaos, a unicorn that truly finds the AI ​​X Crypto fit will be born, pushing this track and the entire industry forward.

So in the current AI overheated environment, let’s calm down and take a look at what changes have taken place in the Infra level in recent months, especially in the public chain Infra track. Some of the new things are worth mentioning.

1. ETH, or the further deconstruction of the monolithic chain

When Celestia first proposed the concept of modularization and the DA layer, the market actually took a long time to digest and understand it. Now this concept has been deeply rooted in people's minds, and various RaaS infrastructures have flooded to the stage where the number of infrastructures > the number of applications > the number of users.

The execution layer, DA layer, and settlement layer have undergone some different technical progress in the past few months. Each layer has derived new technical solutions, and even the concept of the settlement layer is no longer exclusive to ETH. Let's briefly talk about the representative technologies of each layer.

2. Execution Layer -

The hottest concept in the execution layer is undoubtedly Parallel EVM - represented by Monad, Sei, MegaETH, and some existing projects such as FTM and Canto are also planning to upgrade in this direction. However, just as not all ZK projects will protect privacy, the projects labeled Parallel EVM actually have different technical routes and ultimate goals.

Take a picture from Sei as an intuitive demonstration. It is obvious that in the optimistic case, the performance improvement from the existing sequential processing to parallel processing is still very obvious.

Parallel EVM can actually be divided into several different technical routes

From the perspective of how transactions are parallelized - There is nothing new under the sun, except the difference between a priori and a posteriori

Solana and Sui are representative of this, requiring transactions to explicitly state which parts of the chain state they modify, so that before packaging the block, they can detect whether there is a state conflict (such as access to the same AMM pool), and if so, discard the conflicting transactions.

Post-hoc is also called optimistic parallelism, represented by Aptos BlockSTM, which means that it is assumed that there is no conflict before accepting the transaction, and then checking it after execution. If a conflicting transaction is found, the transaction is declared invalid, the result is refreshed, and the transaction is re-executed. This step is repeated until all transactions in the block are executed. Sei, Monad, MegaETH, and Canto use similar solutions

We have also seen parallel solutions for state conflict scenarios (such as accessing the same AMM pool as mentioned above) in the primary market, but it seems that the project will be relatively complicated and it is not certain whether it is commercially feasible. It is still under evaluation.

According to the degree of importance attached to Parrallel EVM, it can also be divided into two schools

One is Monad, represented by Sei, which takes how to trade in parallel as the main expansion idea, that is, Parallelization is the main narrative. For example, in addition to optimistic parallel processing, Monad also has a specially developed MonadDB, and asynchronous I/O is specially used for parallel processing.

The other is the idea of ​​Fantom, Solana, and MegaETH. Parallelization is one of the expansion solutions, but it is only one of them. Parallelization is an auxiliary narrative, and performance improvement depends more on other technical solutions.

For example, Fantom's Sonic upgrade focuses on the FVM virtual machine + and the optimized Lachesis consensus mechanism. Solana's next phase will focus on the modular architecture of the new Firedancer client, optimized network communication mechanisms and signature verification, etc.

The goal of MegaETH @megaeth_labs is to realize Realtime-blockchain. First, based on the newly developed Reth high-performance client of Paradigm, further optimization and improvement have been made in the state synchronization mechanism of the full node (only synchronizing the state difference instead of all data), the hardware design of the Sequencer (a large amount of high-performance RAM with storage function for state access to avoid slow disk I/O), and the data structure improvement of Merkle Trie. This is equivalent to a comprehensive improvement in software, hardware, data structure, disk IO, network communication, transaction sorting and parallel processing, pushing the performance ceiling of EVM to the limit and approaching "Realtime Blockchain".

3. DA layer

There is no significant technological iteration at the DA level, so the competition in this track is far less intense than that at the execution level. There are only a few major players.

ETH's CallData has been upgraded to Blob, and the fees of various L2s have dropped significantly. Now ETH is a "less expensive" DA

Celestia’s greater role is that it was the first project to propose the concept of the DA layer after it went online, which raised the DA track from the ceiling of 2 billion FDV to 20 billion, and from then on, the pattern and imagination were opened up. Many new Layer2 Appchains naturally chose Celestia as their first choice of DA.

Avail has become independent from Polygon. Technically speaking, it is more like an "enhanced version of Celestia". For example, it uses Polkadot's Grandpa+BABE consensus mechanism. Compared with Celestia's Tendermint, it can theoretically support the decentralization of more nodes. It also supports Validity Proof, which Celestia does not support, etc. Of course, the technical differences are far less important than the ecology. Avail still needs to catch up in terms of ecology.

EigenDA was also launched together with the EigenLayer mainnet two days ago. As one of the strongest narratives and the most commercially cooperative projects in this round, I personally feel that the adoption rate of EigenDA will not be low. In theory, as long as it feels "safe and cheap", not many projects really care whether you use Validity Proof or Fraud Proof, whether DAS supports it, etc.

What is more worth mentioning is the following three DAs

1. Near DA - Near is a magical public chain. It was originally designed for sharding and is still doing it now. But while doing sharding, it also developed DA - cheaper than Celestia and supports fast settlement of L2; chain abstraction - Near recently launched chain signatures, allowing users to request signatures for transactions on any chain through a single NEAR account; AI - Founder illia is one of the eight Transformer members, the one who was tapped on the shoulder by Mr. Huang at the NVIDIA conference. He is now planning to hire AI engineers and will release an announcement related to http://near.ai next month... Hexagonal warrior, I also threw it into the DA track

2. BTC&CKB - Because the first layer of BTC does not support smart contracts and cannot be directly settled, dozens of BTC EVM Layer2s are now basically using BTC as DA. The only difference is whether to throw ZK Proof directly onto BTC or throw the Hash of ZK Proof onto it, as if they cannot call themselves "BTC Layer2" if they don't do this. Recently, I actually encountered a new project that said, "I don't pretend anymore, I am ETH L2, DA settlement is all on ETH, but I serve the BTC ecosystem!", which is quite funny... The only alternative expansion solution is RGB++ launched by CKB. In this framework, CKB has become a DA-like existence, and BTC has become a settlement layer of RGB++ because of the black technology of UTXO isomorphic binding.

2. New DA - I will talk about two new ideas for DA, but I won't mention the project names. One is to combine DA with AI. In addition to being a high-performance DA, it can also serve as a storage layer for large AI models, training data, and training trajectories. The other is to improve the error correction code mechanism of Celestia and other DAs, which can provide a more robust network status in an unstable state such as a dynamic network (several nodes are randomly disconnected in each round).

4. Settlement Layer

Originally, this layer was almost exclusively owned by ETH. DA had Celestia competing with it, and it had a number of L2s to execute itself. The only difference is settlement. Other chains like Solana and Aptos do not have L2 yet. BTC’s L2 does not use BTC and cannot be used as settlement. Currently, the only settlement layer you can think of is ETH.

However, this situation will soon change. We have seen several new projects heading in the direction mentioned at the beginning of the article.

, some old projects have also begun to transform in this direction, namely - ZK verification/settlement layer - further deconstructing ETH (stealing ETH's business)

Why did such a concept come about?

The reason is that running contracts on ETH L1 to verify ZK Proof is not the best choice in theory.

Technically, in order to verify the correctness of ZK Proof, developers need to write verification contracts based on Solidity according to the ZK project and the ZK Proof System they choose. This requires relying on a lot of cryptographic algorithms, such as the need to support different elliptic curves. These cryptographic algorithms are usually relatively complex, and the EVM-Solidity architecture is not the optimal platform for implementing these complex cryptographic algorithms. For some ZK projects, the cost of writing and verifying these verification contracts is also very high.

This has hindered some ZK ecosystems from natively joining the EVM ecosystem to some extent, so ZK-friendly languages ​​such as Cario, Noir, Leo, and Lurk can only be verified on their own Layer 1. At the same time, when updating or upgrading these things on ETH, it is always "difficult to turn around".

In terms of cost, although the "protection fee" DA paid by L2 accounts for the majority, ZK contract verification also requires Gas fees, and verification on Ethereum is definitely not a cheap option. In addition, ETH Gas fees soar from time to time and become a "noble chain", the verification cost will also be greatly affected.

As a result, new ZK verification/settlement layer concept projects have emerged. New projects are still relatively early, with Nebra as a representative. Old projects have also pivoted in this direction, such as Mina and Zen, which just passed the new proposal.

The overall idea of ​​most projects in this track is basically

1. Support multiple ZK languages

2. Support ZK aggregation proof, more efficient and cheaper

3. Faster Finality Time

At present, it seems that the ZK settlement layer and the decentralized Proof Market are likely to be tied together. After all, you need computing power in addition to technology. We may see some settlement layer projects cooperating with Proof Market projects, or the settlement layer with computing power may directly build a Proof Market, or the Proof Market with technology may come out to build a settlement layer. The market will have the final say on how to go.

There should be many articles on other areas of Infra, such as OEV in the field of Oracle and MEV, and ZK light client in the field of interoperability. I will not repeat them here. Next time I see something new and interesting, I will share it with you.

Finally, thanks to our Tech Lead @cyodyssey for his review and revision :)