In August this year, Japanese electronics giant Sony officially announced that it would release its own Ethereum second-layer extension Soneium.
Four months later, German banking giant Deutsche Bank also announced that it would release its own Ethereum Layer 2 extension.
For a detailed introduction to this news, please refer to the PANews article in the link at the end of the article.
The news was announced by Deutsche Bank's head of application innovation in Asia Pacific. The project is called Project Dama 2. Its beta version was launched as early as November. The official version is expected to be released next year after waiting for regulatory approval.
This second-layer extension launched by Deutsche Bank is built on the zkSync Stack architecture. There are two main features that I find interesting:
Firstly, it uses soulbound tokens (Soulbound Token) to achieve digital identity.
Another aspect is that it uses Paymaster to allow users to pay the network's transaction fees.
Soulbound tokens were quite a popular technology a year or two ago.
I remember when this technology was first introduced, the positioning of projects and users in the ecosystem was mainly to issue various honorary tokens, such as the activities users participated in and the rewards they received.
At that time, people's imagination about it was still relatively narrow, so the hype didn't last long and not many people mentioned it again, let alone launch any large-scale applications based on this technology.
Now, this project uses it to establish users' digital identities, which feels very similar to representing traditional bank personal user information with soulbound tokens.
This perspective is significantly different from before. Although this is purely a centralized application, it has allowed this technology to be used in ways that were previously unimagined.
So sometimes, the application of technology can really exceed our imagination—it's possible that the A scenario we yearn for does not materialize for a long time, but the B scenario we never imagined does.
Paymaster is a tool that I really like. I just mentioned this application in an article a few days ago. Its biggest feature is that it allows users to choose other tokens (non-blockchain mainnet tokens) to pay transaction fees.
The most frequent scenario I use this tool is in zkSync's Layer 2 expansion. In these Layer 2 expansions, when I swap various tokens on the DEX and need to pay fees, I generally do not choose ETH, but select some small altcoins.
This tool provides great convenience for users while also empowering the tokens.
One can imagine that if this tool were used in Deutsche Bank's Layer 2 expansion, users could completely use various stablecoins supported by Deutsche Bank to pay transaction fees, without needing to use Ethereum.
For the average user, they might not even feel the existence of Ethereum or even blockchain at all. What they see are just various stablecoins on the chain: such as USD stablecoins, Euro stablecoins, and so on.
Compared to Sony using OP Stack technology to build its own Layer 2 expansion, Deutsche Bank chose zkSync. I think the main reason here is probably due to security considerations.
Layer 2 scaling based on zkSync technology does not require a 7-day waiting period; each transaction can be confirmed promptly, which is much better in terms of security, but still has shortcomings in efficiency. It sacrifices efficiency for security priority.
I remembered that a reader commented at the end of an article a few days ago, asking whether it is worthwhile to hold the Starknet tokens they bought.
In the beginning, I was optimistic about zkSync being much greater than OP. But later, the development of the two ecosystems showed a clear difference, and zkSync fell behind OP, which made me doubt whether zkSync would still have the chance to catch up in the future.
Looking at it now, if the financial industry, especially financial sectors like banks, follow Deutsche Bank into Ethereum's Layer 2 expansion, they will most likely choose zkSync based on security considerations. If this trend continues, zkSync still has a great opportunity, though it may take some time.
All of my tokens related to zkSync Layer 2 scaling are still held, and I have never sold them.
I look forward to the resurgence of zkSync technology.
