Recently, @drakefjustin's statement 'The golden age of Solana is over' sparked heated discussions in the market. Previously, Ethereum's focus was on a strategy centered around Rollups, and the performance of Layer 2 directly affects Ethereum. Now, the new direction of BeamChain is about to be finalized. In my view, for Ethereum to achieve synchronized enhancement between L1 and L2, it should focus on: 1) zkVM; 2) Layer 2 interoperability.
1) zkVMs
Justin stated that the Ethereum Foundation will gradually invest tens of millions of dollars into zkVM projects, including zkRISC-V, Poseidon cryptanalysis, L2beat for zkVMs, etc. This will undoubtedly bring a significant emotional boost to project parties developing zkVMs in the market. Whether the golden age of Layer 2 can arrive soon, zkVMs hope to usher in a silver age first. Why is the Ethereum Foundation supporting zkVMs? I have analyzed this in the article below.
1) The upcoming focus of Ethereum's roadmap, including Verge and Purge, revolves around achieving underlying SNARKs.
2) The BeamChain proposed by Ethereum is also aimed at enhancing the consensus layer to facilitate vehicle access to a SNARKs-optimized VM execution environment.
3) The VM execution layer will be customizable and pluggable. Excellent VMs from Layer 2 or other zkVMs may be mentioned at the execution layer level of the Ethereum mainnet.
Overall, the implementation of SNARKs on the mainnet will fundamentally replace zkVMs, which is inevitable for Ethereum's L1 mainnet enhancement.
Therefore, it is foreseeable that excellent upstream ZK virtual machine solutions in the direction of zkVMs will receive attention, including: @RiscZero team's zkVM built on RISC-V and @ProjectZKM's zkVM based on the zkMIPs microprocessor instruction architecture. In addition, some Layer 2 solutions that improve performance in off-chain execution environments may also be elevated, potentially becoming mainnet-level execution layers someday, such as @Starknet, a hardcore tech team that consistently brings special surprises in the ZK field; @zksync, whose airdrop was described as 'difficult to explain,' but has commendable product capabilities and engineering implementation in the zk direction.
2) Layer 2 interoperability.
Justin said that the sellers of Solana are actually Ethereum's Layer 2, and I agree with this viewpoint. In previous articles comparing ETH and SOL, I clearly expressed that Ethereum is undoubtedly a top public chain in terms of ecological richness, application scenario expansion, and technical center stability, which is beyond doubt.
The current major strategy of Ethereum Layer 2 is facing a scarcity of application scenarios and excessive homogeneity in infrastructure, manifested in: 1) The speed of applications like DeFi and MEME, which have been previously validated, fermenting and landing on Ethereum is relatively slow, as they are being partially seized by public chains like Solana and Sui that are more suitable for MEME dissemination and DeFi. 2) The prevalence of Rollup As A Service and OP Stack, ZK Stack layer 3 large commercial expansion strategies has led to serious infrastructure homogeneity in Ethereum Layer 2. Although 'one-click chain creation' has reduced the construction costs of chains, it has also caused excessive homogeneity in infrastructure, and the expected Layer 2 market has been severely fragmented by the inflated infrastructure market, which not only undermines everyone's expectations for the overall prospects of Layer 2 but may also threaten market confidence in Ethereum L1. How to break this deadlock? Recently, in a series of articles during the Devcon conference themed by @VitalikButerin, it can also be found that the answer is: Layer 2 operability.
The excessive homogeneity of Layer 2 has resulted in fragmented liquidity and has also failed to meet the differentiated configuration needs in certain specific application scenarios. The strategic optimization direction of 'interoperability' will strengthen both of these shortcomings. On one hand, to unify liquidity, various Layer 2s will actively adapt to the mainnet by optimizing data structures and optimizing, leveraging the advantages of the mainnet Helios light client and promoting the standardization of cross-message chains to enhance their interoperability capabilities. On the other hand, once the tradable operability capabilities are enhanced, differentiated characteristic applications will become a competitive advantage of the chain (focusing on categories like games, trading, MEME, etc., rather than an all-purpose chain). Therefore, each Layer 2 will intensify efforts to create differentiation to build their flagship applications.
