Stripping away the negative impact of layer2: How to Make Ethereum Great Again?
Just when I was thinking about where Ethereum layer2 will go next, many overseas communities have already voiced "Make Ethereum L1 Great Again". Indeed, in the past, with the development strategy centered on Rollup-Centric, the market placed too much of Ethereum's lifeline on layer2. If L1 and L2 are separated, what will happen from the perspective of Ethereum's own performance optimization? 1) @VitalikButerin previously said that Ethereum is the overall roadmap of Rollup-Centric. He first used the Cancun upgrade EIP-4844 to reduce fees to incentivize layer2, and then proposed to increase the interoperability between layer2s, and even weakened or even changed the original Sharding strategy to support layer2.
What do you think about Optimism fraud proof being adjusted to permissioned due to security issues?
Recently, @Optimism was questioned by the overseas community due to security audit issues with the Fault Proof System. After major security issues were discovered in the original permissionless fraud proof mechanism, the OP Foundation actually proposed to hard fork to fix the problem and convert it to a licensed proof? What exactly happened?
1) Simply put: Fault Proof System is a mechanism for verifying the correctness of Layer2 network status. Anyone can submit L2 status to the dispute virtual machine on L1 without permission and accept challenges from others. If the challenge is successful, a reward and punishment mechanism will be triggered.
What do you think of Sahara AI, which has recently raised $43M in funding?
The news that @SaharaLabsAI in the field of AI+Crypto has received a huge amount of financing of $43 million has been all over the screen. Indeed, the three major institutional buffs of Binance labs + Polychain + Pantera are enough to make everyone's imagination of AI narrative explode again. How should we view it? Next, I will briefly share my views:
1) Huge amounts of financing will become normalized in the AI+Crypto narrative direction, because AI is not just a pure narrative but also the core foundation of such companies. A company with AI genes can make sense by building a platform based on the Crypto framework, rather than just finding an AI direction and applying the Crypto model.
What do you think of ServerFi proposed in a new paper from Yale University?
What do you think of the ServerFi concept proposed in a new paper from Yale University? Will it become a new turning point in the lack of innovation in web3? After reading this paper systematically, I have extracted some key points and added some thoughts for discussion:
1) Traditional GameFis all use the slogan of Play to Earn, and usually use two internal and external economies to maintain balance (dual currency model): the internal currency builds a consumption and scarcity system, drives existing users to consume equity tokens in their hands through value-added equity, and reduces potential external selling pressure; the external currency drives the price growth of the currency by continuously introducing external users and funds, which in turn promotes the growth of external tokens and drives the increase in internal game activity, ultimately attracting more external users to participate in the positive spiral of growth.
Reflecting on Ethereum’s predicament: the most difficult moment under lack of innovation and competitive pressure?
Why are there so many voices in the market that are pessimistic about Ethereum? In short, the Ethereum ecosystem is indeed facing a tense situation of internal and external troubles. Internally, expansion solutions such as Layer2 have always been unable to stand up, and externally, killers such as Solana have always been determined to destroy the Ethereum. Ethereum has ushered in a difficult moment under the pressure of lack of innovation and competition. Next, let me briefly talk about my views:
1) The large and small ecosystems of Ethereum Rollups have taken shape. After the Cancun upgrade EIP-4844, the short-term technical benefits of Ethereum have been settled. The longer-term shard chain is no longer expected under the impact of Rollup, and the upgrades such as reducing node costs, simplifying protocols, and ZK-SNARKs of the underlying layer are just icing on the cake. The entire blockchain industry is waiting for the second dragon Ethereum to hand in a satisfactory layer2 answer sheet, but as of now, layer2 has not carried the "growth" expectations of Ethereum.
A summary of various Cross-L2 interoperability solutions
Recently, @VitalikButerin said that Cross-L2 interoperability is no longer a problem. Although he did not specify the specific project, combined with the wonderful discussion in the comment area, I summarized some solutions that can solve the interoperability of Cross-layer2, as follows: 1)Based-Rollup In the Ethereum layer2 camp, there are some projects that pursue compatibility equivalence. By allowing layer2 and layer1 to share components as much as possible, they achieve maximum compatibility with EVM, allowing layer2 to directly hand over the sorter function to the main network. Specifically, when retrieving Mempool transactions, the Proposer of the main network can use a special route similar to MEV-Boost to capture the Rollup Batch transactions, and then directly complete the sorting and chaining on the main network. Representative project @taikoxyz
Why is chain abstraction the hottest trend after modularization?
Yesterday, the news that @ParticleNtwrk received investment from Binance labs sparked heated discussions in the market. I would like to reiterate my view that "chain abstraction" will become a hot topic after "modularization". In addition to the enthusiasm of VCs and exchanges, the entire track's upstream and downstream supporting facilities have been cultivated for a long time. 1) Although chain abstraction and modularization are of the same origin, the goal of modularization is to improve the efficiency of development combinations and promote the prosperity of market infrastructure, while the goal of chain abstraction is to enhance user experience and pave the way for the rapid expansion of incremental users. Therefore, both are essentially injecting productivity into Crypto, and "chain abstraction" is more down-to-earth and is the next stop of "modularization".
In the second half of the competition among hundreds of chains, where will the BTC layer2 market go?
Recently, the entire primary and secondary markets have been under a cloud of depression, and many people have asked, what is the next step for BTC layer2? The answer is obviously not as simple as Eastern and Western capital not taking over each other. After in-depth research on multiple representative projects, I have a deep understanding. In my opinion, there are three main breaking points: 1) "new" narrative of asset issuance; 2) narrowing of layer2 "standards"; 3) the opening of BTCFi interest-bearing. Next, let me tell you my opinion: The “new” narrative of asset issuance With the development of Ordinals, BRC20, BitVM, Runes, and Layer2, the BTC ecosystem has fallen into a dilemma where the technology is becoming clearer, but the wealth-creating effect is becoming weaker. Why? The fundamental reason is that wealth creation only comes from the information game of existing funds, and technological iteration cannot attract incremental funds to enter the market.
Why has chain abstraction become the hot narrative after modularization?
Why has "chain abstraction" become another mainstream hot narrative after "modularization"? In addition to the seemingly "empty" goal of Mass Adoption, I think the real core reasons are as follows: 1) Chain abstraction is inevitable after modularization reaches a certain stage, because the blockchain technology architecture roughly includes consensus layer, execution layer, DA layer, interoperability, settlement layer, etc. In the traditional sense, a monolithic single chain needs to coordinate and strengthen each layer, but modularization breaks this situation. The DA layer, interoperability layer, and even the execution layer can all be taken out for performance optimization and function in a composable collaborative manner. Therefore, "modularization" has become the mainstream paradigm for developers to seek differentiation in chain construction. This low-cost and narrative-rich entrepreneurial methodology, which is key and does not require excessive concerns about long-term issues such as ecological operations, has gradually become mainstream.
What do you think of layer3: a bounty platform that relies on unique Tokenomics to break through?
What do you think of the decentralized attention commoditization cryptocurrency protocol @layer3xyz ? Specifically: layer3 aims to build a Web3 bounty matching platform that can define the full-chain user activity (attention) and the project party's task incentive token distribution mechanism (commoditization) through the unique Tokenomics of Staking+Burn. It belongs to the same Web3 traffic accumulation and distribution track as Galaxy, RabbitHole, etc. Next, let me talk about my opinion: 1) Most people will be confused as to why a Web3 traffic distribution platform is named Layer3. This conflicts with Layer3, a multi-chain application track on the upper layer of Layer2 Stack, which may cause ambiguity.
It is reasonable to see @SolvProtocol has a new positioning as a decentralized Bitcoin reserve center. At first glance, it feels grand and epic. If you don’t understand, you can understand it from the following three perspectives:
1) It wants to build a unified liquidity consensus network for various chains, dApps and TradFI, and provide a set of BTC asset dispatching centers with cross-chain interoperability, transparency and security based on refined smart contract management technology.
This is the current situation where BTC assets are too decentralized in various heterogeneous chains, so that BTC Yield has not been able to gather energy. Solv Protocol aims to become this unified asset dispatching layer to further release the potential of BTCFi.
2) Solv Protocol’s fund reserves have grown rapidly in the past few months. SolvBTC has exceeded 19,000 BTC, which has exceeded the holdings of public chains such as Arbitrum and Avalanche and several BTC ETFs. Among them, the BTC on BNBChain alone has exceeded 10,000, which is a rapid increase. The overall Solv protocol reserve funds are still growing.
Why is it growing so fast? I have previously discussed that compared with traditional web2 asset management platforms, Solv is a digital asset management platform that is closest to the web3 native environment, and compared with pure web3 liquidity asset aggregation platforms, Solv is a more friendly platform in terms of compliance, RWA, etc. Therefore, in the context of BTC, ETH and other assets being included in ETFs, Solv Protocol will get a huge growth buff bonus.
3) Solv Protocol currently includes SolvBTC, SolvBTC.BBN, SolvBTC.ENA, etc., which have been widely used and circulated in the top ecosystems such as BTC, ETH, BNBChain, Arbitrum, Linea, etc., becoming a strong barrier for Solv's further expansion in the future.
For example, SolvBTV.BBN is a liquidity asset aimed at preparing for the launch of the Babylon mainnet. Babylon's positioning as a shared security layer of the Bitcoin ecosystem is well known. If we compare the weight and proportion of Eigenlayer's asset lock-up in the Ethereum ecosystem (over 13B), the future market potential of SolvBTV.BBN, which is deeply bound to Babylon, is also worth looking forward to.
Last night, the first project based on the VM execution layer as an abstract architecture @lumioFDN announced its official access to Solana, becoming another project built on Solana after Eclipse. What do you think? A few quick comments:
1) The controversial topic of whether Solana needs layer2 has been answered. In theory, whether the Solana chain is willing or not, projects that can use SVM as an execution layer and bring ecological projects and user transactions to Solana can be defined as Solana's layer2.
However, the term layer2 will eventually become a thing of the past. Projects that are capable of directly building abstract chains on a single chain execution layer will not be limited to building XXX's layer2. Because it can connect to SVM, connect to MoveVM, and directly have parallel EVM capabilities, this type of unified abstract chain will serve as the entry layer of other monolithic chains, and it seems that anyone can say it is layer2.
2) Lumio is one of the builders of the new unified abstract layer and the new narrative direction. By integrating MoveVM, SolanaVM, parallel EVM and other execution layers, the execution layer advantages of high-performance chains are modularly shared. Doing so will definitely put pressure on the execution layer advantages promoted by some high-performance chains.
But in fact, under the influence of modularization and chain abstraction, the narrative of a single high-performance chain is bound to weaken, and some abstract chains that can better solve cross-chain interoperability and unified experience upgrades at the entry layer will come on the stage of history.
3) In fact, the aggragation layer that @0xPolygon has called for a long time, @ProjectZKM that has become the unified liquidity layer of Cross-Chain based on ZK underlying technology, and @ParticleNtwrk who has spared no effort in advocating chain abstract narrative in the industry, are all leading a narrative trend:
Overall, the dominance of a single chain will gradually fade, and even the expansion layer2 and layer3 around a single chain are also declining. An abstract layer that can unify the application environment of the entire chain and provide a better experience and a more convenient entry will become the main direction of the next narrative.
How to understand ioTex2.0: Is it feasible to build a modular unified layer for DePIN?
How to understand the 2.0 white paper released by @iotex_io, a seven-year-old IoT concept chain? In simple terms: IoTeX has upgraded from the narrative of focusing on the digital payment settlement layer on the chain to a modular universal layer dedicated to serving AI+DePIN. Its years of experience in payment, ledger, and hardware device connection have finally formed a synergy under the new trend of DePIN? Next, let me talk about my understanding: If you are familiar with the development history of IoTeX, you will find that IoTex1.0 has evolved from a global payment layer at the beginning to a solution for hardware device data ownership and privacy. Although the main narrative has changed, it has always been centered around hardware devices and data sovereignty.
What do you think of Solana Blinks: Is it a technological innovation?
What do you think of the recently hotly discussed @solana Actions and Blinks? Although I have heard a lot of voices such as "innovative progress" and "catalyst for large-scale applications", in my opinion, Blinks does not have much technical innovation, and it is too early to talk about Mass Adoption. Its appearance has strengthened the market impression of Solana as a new generation of consumer application blockchain, which is a beneficial exploration. Next, let me talk about my opinion:
1) From a technical perspective, Solana Actions and Blinks are a set of development tools that make it easier for developers to integrate applications.
Actions can be seen as a development adaptation standard. This standard is a backend framework that defines how users can trigger on-chain transactions through a unified URL interface in the App environment, including asset transfers, NFT interactions, voting, staking, rewards, and other operations;
How do you view the problems existing in the AI+web3 integration track?
Everyone is looking forward to AI+Web3 becoming the catalyst for this round of bull market, as can be seen from the high valuations and heavy bets given by VCs. The question is, what are the current problems in the AI+Web3 integration track? Let me share my views:
1) AI training requires large amounts of data, and Web3 is useful for data tracking and the incentive effects derived from it. In the long run, AI will definitely need the help of web3, but it needs to be clarified that web3 can only solve limited problems of AI.
For example, the main driving forces of traditional large-scale data training, continuous algorithm optimization, computer vision, speech recognition technology, game AI and other core areas still rely on large-scale centralized computing power and hardware and software adaptation optimization such as chips and algorithms. Directions such as deep learning convolutional neural networks, reinforcement learning, and brain-like computing models that expand the boundaries of AI capabilities have no possibility of Web3 gaining a foothold in the short term.
How to understand the Bitcoin native expansion white paper released by Goat Network?
How to understand the latest Bitcoin Native extension white paper released by @GOATRollup? In short, the GOAT network proposes a decentralized and secure Bitcoin layer2 solution based on the BTC script locking native security mechanism provided by the Optimistic Challenge Proof (OCP) and the interoperable unified liquidity settlement layer provided by @ProjectZKM Entangled Rollup. How to do it specifically?
Due to the natural limitations of the BTC mainnet scripting language, it is impossible to use conventional ZK Proof of Validity to ensure the immediate finality of cross-chain asset deposit and withdrawal transactions, which means that common Bitcoin Layer 2 expansion solutions require a "third-party trusted entity."
What do you think of io.net: the "Nvidia of the cryptocurrency world" in the main uptrend of the AI+DePIN bull market?
How do you view the subsequent market impact of @ionet's decentralized cloud computing network? In general, io integrates the three major narrative directions of AI+DePIN+Solana, which is related to whether the Crypto industry can find a main rising wave to trigger a bull market through AI. To some extent, it is not an exaggeration to call it the "Nvidia of the cryptocurrency circle"? Next, let me briefly talk about my opinion:
1) io has been highly anticipated since its birth. Whether it is VC, miners or retail investors, they are eager for io to set a good sign in the direction of Crypto integrating AI, and there are great expectations for leading projects in the AI direction. The decentralized cloud computing solution provided by io hits a primary contradiction in the direction of AI large model training: the huge computing power "demand" for small and medium-sized model training, fine-tuning, and reasoning, and the increasing "cost" of centralized computing power.
What do you think of Paticle Network and Babylon’s collaboration: Introducing the dual-staking security model into the POS public chain?
What do you think of the cooperation between ParticleNetwork and babylon? In short: Particle's Omini unified entrance built on the chain abstract framework needs to coordinate and handle a large number of cross-chain communications and transactions. After introducing Babylon's Dual Staking model, the dual security of $PARTI + $BTC can provide "double insurance" for the underlying security operation mechanism of the Particle POS chain. Next, let me briefly talk about my understanding: 1) The chain abstraction L1 network provided by Particle Network is built on the modular underlying architecture of Cosmos SDK, which enables it to simultaneously connect the EVM environment, BTC stateless chain environment, and other POS chain environments that support smart contracts.
What do you think of Starknet’s announcement to enter the BTC layer2 field?
What do you think of @Starknet's announcement to enter the BTC layer2 field? In short: 1) The prerequisite for Starknet to expand Bitcoin is that the OP_CAT proposal is passed first, which is uncertain; 2) Starknet's entry into BTC layer2 may break the embarrassing situation of BTC's ecosystem being bright in the east and not in the west; 3) The trend of layer2 tending to layer1 is strengthening, and high performance will become Starknet's differentiated advantage? Next, let me talk about my opinion:
1) OP_CAT can realize the combined link processing of multiple UTXO unlocking Script byte strings, thereby greatly improving the programmability of the BTC main network. OP_CAT allows script fragments to be combined, and STARK proof is a very simple and efficient way of computational verification. With the foundation of OP_CAT, Starknet naturally has the ability to batch transactions to the BTC main network through STARK proof and perform ZK Validity verification.
What do you think of API3, the dark horse in the oracle track: open source protocol + DAO governance has a broader commercial space?
What do you think of @API3DAO, which is known as the dark horse in the oracle track? Recently, the news that DWFlabs led the investment of $4 million in API3 has aroused market discussions about the growth potential of API3. Compared with oracle service providers such as Chainlink and Pyth, the "lightweight" integration method of the API3 protocol and DAO governance models such as API3 Market + OEV Network have shown it a broader business imagination space. Next, let me talk about my opinion: 1) Simply put, API3 is an Oracle connector that is driven by an open source protocol and incentivized by the DAO economy, directly connecting API data providers and DApp smart contract data demanders. Different from Chainlink's "middleware" node service third-party network, API3's first-party oracle eliminates the "trust" link of the third-party network.