Written by: Haotian
Recently, @drakefjustin's statement "Solana's golden age is over" sparked heated discussions in the market. Previously, Ethereum's focus was on the grand strategy centered on Rollup, and the performance of Layer2 would directly affect Ethereum. Now that BeamChain's new direction is about to be finalized, I think that in order to achieve L1+L2 simultaneous enhancement, Ethereum should focus on: 1) zkVM; 2) Layer2 interoperability:
1）zkVMs
Justin said that the Ethereum Foundation will gradually invest tens of millions of dollars in zkVMs projects, including zkRISC-V, Poseidon cryptographic analysis, L2beat for zkVMs, etc. This will undoubtedly bring a great emotional boost to the market for zkVMs projects. Whether the golden age of Layer2 can reach the holiday, zkVMs hopes to have a silver age first. Why the Ethereum Foundation supports zkVMs, I have analyzed in the following article: 1) Ethereum's next route, including Verge, Purge, etc., will focus on Ethereum's realization of the underlying SNARKs; 2) Ethereum's proposed BeamChain is also to improve the consensus layer to access the SNARKs-based VM execution environment; 3) The VM execution layer will be customized and pluggable, and Layer2's excellent VM or other zkVMs may be mentioned at the Ethereum mainnet execution layer level;
In general, the implementation of SNARKs on the mainnet will completely replace zkVMs, which will be the inevitable choice for Ethereum to enhance the L1 mainnet.
Therefore, it can be predicted that excellent upstream ZK virtual machine solutions in the direction of zkVMs will be valued, including: zkVM built by @RiscZero team based on RISC-V and zkVM built by @ProjectZKM based on zkMIPs microprocessor instruction architecture. In addition, some Layer2s with better performance optimization of the off-chain execution layer environment may also be promoted and become the mainnet-level execution layer one day, such as @Starknet, a hardcore technical team that always brings special surprises in the ZK field; @zksync, whose airdrop is "hard to describe", but its product strength and engineering implementation capabilities in the zk direction are remarkable;
2) Layer 2 interoperability
Justin said that the sellers of Solana are actually Ethereum's Layer2, and I agree with this point of view. In the previous article comparing ETH and SOL, it was clearly expressed that Ethereum is definitely a top public chain in terms of ecological richness, application scenario expansion scalability, and technical center decentralization stability. There is no doubt about this.
Ethereum Layer2's grand strategy is currently stuck in a lack of application scenarios and excessive homogeneity of infrastructure, as shown in: 1) DeFi, MEME and other application scenarios that have been proven successful in the past have been slow to ferment and land on Ethereum, and public chains such as Solana and Sui have grabbed some of the market contributions on the grounds that they are more suitable for MEME dissemination and DeFi; 2) The prevalence of Rollup As A Service and OP Stack, ZK Stacklayer3's major business expansion strategies has led to serious homogeneity of Ethereum Layer2's infrastructure. Although "one-click chain launch" reduces the cost of chain construction, it also causes excessive homogeneity of infrastructure. The expectations of the Layer2 market are severely divided by the predicted swollen infrastructure market, which not only drags down everyone's expectations for the overall prospects of Layer2, but also threatens the market confidence in Ethereum L1. How to break the deadlock? In a series of articles recently by @VitalikButerin in the theme of the Devcon conference, it can also be found that: Layer2 operability and interactivity.
Because the excessive homogeneity of Layer2 has caused the segmentation of liquidity, and it is also unable to meet the differentiated configuration needs in some specific application scenarios, and the strategic optimization direction of "interoperability" will simultaneously enhance these two defects. On the one hand, in order to unify liquidity, each Layer2 will actively cater to the main network to optimize the data structure and optimize, give play to the advantages of the main network Helios light client and promote the standardization of cross-message chain advancement to enhance their respective interoperability capabilities; on the other hand, once the tradable operability capabilities are enhanced, differentiated feature applications will become the competitive advantage of the chain (focusing on classified application scenarios such as games, transactions, MEME, etc., rather than all-purpose chains), so each layer 2 will increase its efforts to differentiate itself to build its own trump card application.