In the last cycle, Ethereum’s strategy was to divide the country into different vassal states and to protect the central government, pushing L2s to the forefront. With low gas, high TPS, and high equivalence with Ethereum, it snatched TVL, developers, and active users from the EVM-compatible L1 ecosystem.
This strategy has been generally successful. Arbitrum and Base have frantically siphoned the ecological resources of Avalanche, Polygon, and Fantom. The once glorious EVM-compatible L1 has now become a "fallen phoenix" hated by all.
But what the Ethereum community did not expect was that a new project suddenly appeared - Solana.
Ethereum's core business model is to sell block space. Currently, the top three block space consumption demands are stablecoin transfers, long-tail asset liquidity capture, Rollup L2 verification, and DA fees.
Solana maximizes its extremely high TPS, fast final confirmation, and TX parallel processing capabilities to achieve PMF in the segmented scenario of long-tail asset (various dog coins, shitcoins) liquidity capture, and begins to reversely siphon Ethereum's ecological resources with cross-chain protocols such as wormhole and layerzero. Faced with Solana's powerful offensive in this segmented scenario, among the many L2s in the Ethereum ecosystem, only Base, relying on the background of Coinbase, is trying to compete head-on.
After successfully capturing the market share of Ethereum's long-tail asset liquidity capture, Solana began to vigorously promote Solana-based stablecoin payments and PayFi, further squeezing Ethereum's block space demand.
This is why Vitalik recently promoted Celo, a new member of the Ethereum L2 family, on Twitter. Ethereum needs a stablecoin protocol and PayFi with Ethereum characteristics to compete head-on with Solana.
Solana is also launching its own new primitives, Zk Compress and Network Extension, and is also competing with Ethereum in the parallel expansion (L2) scenario. Facing the fierce competitive offensive of the barbarian Solana, Ethereum's response seems a bit clumsy and slow due to its loose decentralized organizational structure.
However, in the face of environmental pressure, self-organization will find a way out and adapt to the new environment. After graduating from love, Vitalik, the king of Ethereum, issued a declaration called "Make Ethereum Alignment Clear and Identifiable", strengthening centralization and reducing vassal power, requiring 138 L2s to align with Ethereum in the following four aspects:
--Open source. The core code should be open source like Ethereum. The ugly behavior of copying ZK algorithms and registering ZK as intellectual property should not happen again. --Adoption of open standards. It must achieve full interoperability with Ethereum, compatible with existing standards and new standards such as account abstraction, cross-L2 transfer, L1 and L2 light client proof, address format standards, etc. that will be brought by Pectra upgrades.
--Decentralization and security. L2 must throw away the training wheels and transition from stage 0 to stage 1. Let Ethereum become the real settlement layer instead of continuing to rely on the introduction of social consensus (multi-signature).
--Positive-sum game. L2 joining Ethereum must bring about the strengthening of ecological network effects, rather than internal PVP snatching resources from each other. L2 must use ETH as the local Gas token.
Ethereum, which insists on an open, inclusive, and decentralized parallel expansion route, and Solana, which insists on a higher, faster, and stronger vertical expansion route, will attack and learn from each other in the fierce competition in the block space market, and will eventually bring us the GPT3.5 moment of large-scale adoption of Web3.
