This article will mainly expand on some key parts of L1&L2 in the past six months. This article is about 3,200 words and is worth reading.
The next article is about ecology, which will be completed every day.
Key disclosures🗝️
(1) The total market value of the crypto industry has increased by 37.3% since the beginning of the year. It increased by 60.2% in the first quarter and fell by 14.3% in the second quarter.
(2) Bitcoin#BTChas an inflow of about 14 billion, and L2TVL has reached 43 billion, an increase of 90% in the past six months.
(3) ARB has fallen behind OP and BASE chains in terms of ecosystem and daily transaction volume this year
1.BTC basic disk🔻
The Bitcoin ecosystem continues to accelerate the Ordinals protocol in all aspects to drive the new era of Bitcoin to make progress in the direction of Tokens and NFTs.
BTC L2 has also been noticed by the market along with this trend, and many key indicators of Bitcoin have increased. In addition to the significant increase in market value, the increase in trading volume is also quite obvious.
In terms of investment performance, comparing Bitcoin’s performance with other market investment targets, Ethereum and Bitcoin ranked at the top with returns of 48% and 43% respectively so far this year.
Alphabet and Amazon shares were the only ones in the control group to post year-to-date gains of more than 25%, while major market stock indexes lagged far behind, with many posting single-digit returns.
Gold, a commonly touted Bitcoin alternative, is up just 13% this year, while crude oil is up around 14%, a comparison that highlights Bitcoin’s potential diversification benefits and strong performance.
In terms of BRC-20, the comprehensive market value is about 1.3 billion, an increase of 50% since January this year. As the first BRC-20 token deployed, $ORDI is still the most popular inscription sector token in the market. The current market value of $ORDI exceeds 600 million US dollars, accounting for more than 50% of the BRC-20 market.
However, since the launch of Runes on April 20, it has eaten into a significant market share of BRC-20 (on average, it occupies more than 95% of the Bitcoin derivative token market). Looking at all current Bitcoin transactions, Rune transactions account for more than 60%.
The approval of BTC ETF in the first half of this year has helped add a new source of institutional demand to the Bitcoin market, a factor that has helped to increase the diversity and depth of incremental funds compared to previous cycles.
Now, a variety of U.S. institutional investors, from hedge funds to pension funds, can participate in the crypto market directly or indirectly.
Cumulative ETF inflows to date exceed $14.7B, with total holdings exceeding 865K #BTC
The trend has also spread to other countries, including Hong Kong, which approved spot ETFs for Bitcoin and Ethereum in April (although volumes have been limited compared to the U.S.).
➢Trend Outlook
(1) The emergence of a large number of Bitcoin L2
(2) More Bitcoin DApps enter the market
(3) BTC ETF benchmarking against gold will bring more incremental funds
2. Other L1 basic disks🔻
Ethereum is ahead of other L1s in many key indicators. The main narrative in the first half of the year revolves around re-pledge and its various related markets, EIP-4844, DeFi, and ETH spot ETF. ❖ Re-pledge has occupied the main narrative position in the ecosystem in the past six months. ❖ Dencun upgrade and EIP-4844: After Dencun, many L2 transaction fees dropped by more than 90%. EIP-4844 introduced "blobs", which provide L2 with a more efficient way to publish transaction data.
What is going to happen?
❖Pectra Upgrade: The Pectra upgrade is scheduled for the first quarter of 2025 and will be the next major upgrade of Ethereum and will include a series of different updates to the execution layer and consensus layer.
➢BNB
BNB Chain remains in the lead and has expanded in many directions. Some of the leading developments in the first half of the year include progress on opBNB, increasing its decentralized data storage capacity through BNB Greenfield, and the attention surrounding memes.
BNB Chain remains a leader in the DeFi space, with a TVL of over $7 billion, firmly ranking third among DeFi chains. PancakeSwap remains the leading DeFi dApp with a TVL of around $1.5 billion, followed by Venus with a TVL of $1.4 billion.
opBNB's daily active accounts have been growing steadily and have exceeded 3.5 million. BNB Greenfield already has about 2.15TB of storage space and has conducted 6.8 million transactions on about 35K total addresses.
➢SOL
Solana is performing well in 2024, with increasing on-chain activity and increasing market attention. Solana has been at the heart of the continued growth of the meme sector, with its weekly DEX trading data showing significant growth relative to the rest of the market. While this cannot be entirely attributed to the meme, it is undoubtedly a key growth factor.
DePin belongs to the category that is considered “only possible on Solana” due to its native low GAS fees and high throughput (relative to other networks).
Translator @Eric SJ Note: There are even some regional gaming factors
Solana Actions and Blinks: Solana recently announced the launch of Solana Blinks (short for blockchain links). Actions are APIs that return transactions on the Solana chain, while Blinks converts any Solana Action into a shareable link, which means that on-chain operations can be triggered anywhere a link can be shared.
From the user's perspective, this means that users can mint NFTs, vote on proposals, donate, and trade tokens without leaving the social software they are originally using.
Essentially, Blinks allows users to perform blockchain transactions from anywhere they share Blinks, making Solana dApps accessible from any platform where a link can be placed.
3.Layer2 basic disk🔻
L2 growth continues from 2023 to 2024, TVL has reached $430 and shows no signs of slowing down
The release of EIP-4844 (Ethereum Dencun Upgrade) makes Roll-up cheaper than ever before, with L2 transaction fees dropping by 96.8% after the upgrade. Coupled with the large number of new L2s launched in 2024, it may continue to push the L2 ecosystem to new heights by the end of the year.
Even compared to the most active L1s like Solana and Tron, L2 plays an important role in keeping the Ethereum ecosystem closely relevant to user activity.
Currently, the total number of daily active addresses for the Ethereum mainnet and all its L2s is about 2.1 million. This figure is on par with TRON and ahead of the second-place Solana, which has 1.6 million daily active addresses.
As far as the competition within Ethereum L2 itself is concerned, Optimistic Rollup firmly holds the lead over other Layer 2s.
-ARB🔻
While the Arbitrum chain still retains its position as the number one L2 chain in 2024, the ecosystem has fallen behind Optimism due to the rapid growth of Base and the launch of Blast (both of which are based on Optimism).
The Arbitrum chain itself has the highest TVL among its L2 peers, maintaining a share of approximately 33.7% of the L2 market. The total TVL of all L2s is currently approximately 8.3 billion.
However, Arbitrum lags behind Base in terms of daily transaction volume in 2024 (Base recently hit a new all-time high of 3.5 million daily transactions on June 28 and surpassed the former second place zkSync Era in daily transaction volume in 2024)
➢Base
Base grew significantly in 2024, surpassing OP to become the second most popular L2 network. As Coinbase’s native L2 solution, Base Chain’s continued growth in the first half of 2024 shows that the chain’s staying power is higher than or even exceeds the initially popular friend.tech application.
Translator @Eric SJ Note: I think the order of importance here is reversed in the original text.
One year after the mainnet launch, Base’s TVL has exceeded $1.5 billion, and the on-chain ecosystem is thriving with more than 200 dApps, many of which are native to the L2 chain.
❖ Highest Revenue L2: Year-to-date, Base is the highest revenue L2 chain, with revenue of $42.6 million in the first half of 2024
❖ Solana is a strong contender for Meme dominance: The ecosystem on Base has been continuously developing. The total market value of memecoins is currently about 52 billion, of which memecoins on Base currently account for about 4%
This puts Base memecoins in third place, behind Solana memecoins which account for 14% (Ethereum remains the largest memecoin in terms of value capture)
In terms of total native memecoin valuation market share, Base Chain trails only Solana
➢OP Mainnet
Although OP has lost out to Base and Blast in terms of vitality and TVL, the rapid rise of these newcomers means that the size of the broader OP superchain ecosystem has grown significantly.
While Arbitrum remains the L2 chain with the highest TVL, the most popular Optimism ecosystem L2 (OP Mainnet, Blast, Base) has surpassed the Arbitrum ecosystem in total TVL, currently reaching approximately $3.7 billion.
As Optimism’s Superchain and Arbitrum’s Orbit initiatives make progress, evaluating the competition between the two may increasingly require a more comprehensive look, rather than evaluating individual L2 chains.
From the perspective of business model and revenue, Optimism will perform well in 2024, supported by the exponential growth of Base.
➢Blast
The airdrop incentives associated with the Blast mainnet launch attracted over $2 billion worth of assets to be transferred to the Blast bridge even before the mainnet debut.
After the mainnet was launched on February 29, Blast announced that it would continue to carry out airdrop/points activities to provide users with more airdrop expectations. The event was a huge success, and the TVL of the Blast mainnet soared to second place in the Ethereum Rollup in June.
However, after the airdrop, Blast’s TVL started to drop below Base again.
Seeing if Blast is able to maintain its TVL and post-airdrop activity over the course of the year will indicate the stickiness of its initial user base.
➢Scroll
Scroll zkEVM L2 launched in October 2023 and has seen a significant increase in TVL this year. Much of the increase in TVL can be attributed to the launch of “Scroll Sessions”, an L2 points event that began in May.
The campaign rewards users with Scroll Marks for bridging assets to L2 and interacting with the Scroll dApp. Scroll’s TVL is currently around $430 million, second only to Linea, which also saw significant growth after its own Linea Surge points and airdrop campaign began.
Scroll now captures over 30% of the total TVL across all ZK-rollup L2s.
➢Taiko
After nearly two years of development and seven testnets, Taiko officially launched on the mainnet chain on May 27 this year. In the initial stage, Taiko's rollup protocol contracts on Ethereum are managed through multi-signature configurations. The protocol will require SGX proofs at launch, and plans to transition to using ZK proofs for 50% of blocks in the long term to enhance scalability and security.
One of Taiko’s key differentiators is that it operates as a base rollup with ordering driven by the base Layer 1 (“L1”). Unlike other rollups, Taiko does not have a centralized orderer; instead, Ethereum L1 validators handle the ordering role.
➢Polygon zkEVM
The Polygon zkEVM chain itself currently has a TVL of about $14 million and is the first chain to form the Agglayer
In March this year, Polkadot ecosystem Astar launched a zkEVM chain, using Polygon’s Chain Development Kit (CDK) — a modular open source toolkit for building layer 2 networks using zero-knowledge (ZK) proofs.
Astar zkEVM is the first third-party network to integrate with Polygon’s AggLayer, and the second project to join Agglayer after Polygon’s own zkEVM. The current TVL of the Astar zkEVM L2 chain is about $5 million.
Final note: That’s about all the content about infrastructure. It should be noted that I did not put all the L2 descriptions in the original text in the text, and I did some language simplification to improve the fluency of reading.
Thank you for reading. If you like my content, triple-linking this article is the biggest support🙏🏻
