Original article: "How did Metis, a new Layer 2 force in 2022, fall behind?"

Author:Chloe

At the beginning of 2023, Layer2 is definitely an area that needs to be focused on. If nothing unexpected happens, Starknet, Zk-sync, Scroll, etc. will be launched on the mainnet, and Arbitrum will also be airdropped.

But if we look back, we will find that Metis and Boba have long disappeared from the Layer2 discussion list, but they had the top 5 TVL at the beginning of last year. So what happened? This article focuses on the fall behind of Metis.

Metis is a hard fork from Optimism. It attracted attention at the time in large part because another non-profit organization founded by Metis co-founder Elena Sinelnikova, Crypto Chicks (which provides women with opportunities to learn and enter the blockchain field), has a co-founder, Natalia Ameline, who also has another identity, that is, the mother of Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin.

Of course, Metis’ vision is indeed very grand. While being compatible with EVM, it can also increase TPS and reduce Gas fees. Although this vision is also very homogeneous, it does have differentiated advantages in operation.

Metis key market differences

1. It only takes a few hours or even minutes to withdraw money from L2 to L1.

This adopts methods such as multiple virtual machines + DAC.

2. Developed DAC (decentralized company) standards.

DAC can be considered a subset of DAO. Each DApp is a decentralized company composed of community members who will conduct distributed cross-domain collaboration to accomplish a specific mission.

At present, various DAO projects are actually only responsible for proposals and voting, but these functions can be realized through some modules in the project, and there is no need to set up a separate DAO to do this. DAC is not only concerned with governance, but also management.

3. Save on-chain space.

Metis can save on-chain space by allowing each DAC to run a separate Metis Virtual Machine (MVM) through IPFS.

As long as the user holds the key to the file, the protocol can guide the user to search for specific files in the "IPFS node group", which is composed of many server nodes, each of which stores and backs up part of the file.

IPFS can be understood as Metis's built-in storage layer, allowing users and developers to access data from Metis through IPFS.

Subsequent development of Metis

Since Metis was launched on the Andromeda mainnet on November 19, 2021, in less than two months, the protocol's locked funds have reached a maximum of US$400 million, and now only US$40 million is left, while Optimism is US$530 million.

Metis did not make much progress in technology last year, only making progress in off-chain data storage and privacy.

With off-chain data storage completed through MemoLabs’s aggregated data and fraud prevention technology, transaction costs have hit an all-time low.

Launched the Reputation Power Matrix, allowing users to have full control over their personal data and truly separate the user's digital and physical identity.

But Metis has no technological breakthroughs in the most core areas.

The first thing that is affected is the lack of an automatic on-chain fraud proof system, and the proof system is the core part of Layer 2.

Metis's proof system has a mechanism risk that will cause the majority of dishonest validators to push invalid state (CRITICAL) roots to the chain, slashing the number of honest sequencers. Even if an invalid state root is submitted to the system, funds may be stolen.

Secondly, the decentralized file storage that Metis is proud of also has certain risks, because Metis entrusts the data to a decentralized file storage system called MEMO. If MEMO is invalid, it is equivalent to the third party that keeps the data disappearing or hiding the data. In other words, no one can successfully initiate a challenge, that is, anyone can be the first to claim that they have all the funds on the Rollup, and then wait until the challenge period is over and immediately transfer all the funds on L1.

This highlights that ZK is more qualified than Op in terms of data availability, because ZK's security is guaranteed by zero-knowledge proof, but Optimistic Rollup does not have this advantage, and its security relies on the challenge mechanism.

Metis, which has not made much progress technically, mainly focused on community and marketing development last year, promoting all the marketing activities that a public chain should have, such as the Metis Ambassador Program, the Community Governance Program CEG, and the industry sharing MetisFest. However, judging from today's results, it fully illustrates the truth that "if the skin is gone, where will the hair be attached?"

Summarize

Metis’ goals for 2023 are similar to those of other competitors, which are to provide EVM equivalence, fast transaction speeds, and the lowest transaction costs.

In the short term, as the L2 mainstream project mainnet gradually goes online this year, Metis will have fewer and fewer opportunities. In the long term, with the development of ZK-related technologies, the limitations of ZKRollup may be broken.

Metis’ story tells us that vision and marketing are effective in the short term, but will return value in the long term.

Of course, this is by no means to say that storytelling is useless, but it emphasizes that there must be the ability to deliver on the story later. Metis did a great job in the initial stage when storytelling was needed, but lacked the ability to deliver on the story (projects worse than Metis may have the ability to deliver on the story, but no one listens to the story, and it fails before it even starts...).