Original author: Dasheng Web3
Original source: Vernacular Blockchain
In March, the issuance and distribution of Arbitrum governance tokens by the leading Layer 2 protocol set off a community carnival, and the related Layer 2 ecology continued to explode.
The narrative of new public chains is still eye-catching. New public chains such as Aptos and Sui, built by former Meta employees, have attracted the attention of top investment institutions before they were even launched. Aptos was launched in October 2022, and APT was valued at $13 billion on the day it went live. In January 2023, Aptos led the crypto rebound with a shocking 459% increase.
Under the current circumstances, what is the current development status of Layer 2 and new public chains? Which side will ultimately win? Below we will analyze and compare the new public chain and Layer2 based on the problems solved, ecological construction and application scenarios, technical architecture, performance, community and governance mechanisms.
What problems are solved?
Before that, let’s first understand what problems the new public chain and layer2 mainly solve.
As we all know, the blockchain world has always faced the problem of the "Impossible Triangle", that is, decentralization, security, and scalability cannot be achieved at the same time on a blockchain.
Ethereum solves the problems of decentralization and security, but it has insufficient scalability, low TPS, and insufficient operating efficiency. New public chains such as Solana, which broke out in the last bull market, have strong scalability and good decentralization. However, frequent downtime incidents have occurred, and their security is questionable.
To this end, whether it is Layer2 or new public chains such as Aptos and Sui, they are constantly optimizing on the "impossible triangle" to push the blockchain world forward.
Layer 2 is the general term for a series of off-chain scalability solutions. Currently, when talking about Layer 2, it is more of Ethereum’s Layer 2, so all descriptions below are based on Ethereum’s Layer 2.
Layer 2 processes data in a way that reduces the burden on the base layer (ETH mainnet) and enhances the scalability of the entire network by transferring part of the data processing of the main chain to Layer 2.
Processing efficiency TPS is an important indicator to measure the performance of the public chain. TPS (transactions per second) refers to the number that a network can process per second. The higher the TPS, the higher the efficiency of the public chain.
The TPS of the ETH main network is roughly around 15 transactions per second. Arbitrum's TPS has recently reached a maximum of 100 transactions per second, and the TPS has slightly improved (Ouke Cloud Chain data).
Aptos' TPS officially claims in the final document that it can reach 100,000+ transactions per second. However, according to Aptos blockchain browser data, the current TPS is about 10 transactions per second. We will pay attention to whether TPS will improve in the future.
Solana's TPS is roughly 2000+ per second, which is a high-performance public chain.
Ecological construction and application scenarios
In terms of ecological construction, Layer 2 is even better.
According to defillama data, the following figure shows the proportion of TVL in each blockchain. Currently, the leading layer protocol Arbitrum accounts for 4.36%, and Optimism accounts for 1.81%. However, the new public chain Aptos accounts for a very small proportion and is not listed separately.
In the overview, we can see that Aptos ranks 39th, with only about 36 million US dollars in locked positions, while Arbitrum ranks fourth, with about 2.2 billion US dollars in locked positions. Arbitrum’s locked position is roughly 60 times that of Aptos. The gap is not small. . Even Solana, which was a big hit in the first two years, only had $286 million, only one-eighth of Arbitrum.
When it comes to well-known projects in application scenarios, many projects in the Arbitrum ecosystem are familiar. For example, the derivatives Dex protocol GMX and GNS reviewed in the previous article, the full-chain borrowing protocol RDNT, and the game ecosystem Treasure DAO have all their tokens listed on Binance. They are both popular and well-known, and they have made great progress in the project mechanism. Innovation. Option protocol Dopex, Dex protocol Camlot, GMX Lego project GMD, jonesDao, etc. are all well-known high-quality projects.
Looking at the Aptos ecosystem, it can be said that there is no one who can beat it. Although many projects have joined the mainnet as soon as it was launched, most of them are assembly line projects. Aptos has low requirements for project parties, resulting in a large number of low-quality projects flooding the ecosystem. Today, some well-known projects have chosen to be launched on Aptos, but projects native to the chain have not performed well yet.
Of course, Aptos has only been online for half a year. There may be a turnaround in the project ecology in the future. We will wait and see.
New public chain and Layer2 technical architecture
New public chains such as Aptos and Sui have some innovations compared to previous public chains such as Solana that focused on performance.
Aptos introduces the move language
Currently, there are three most well-known programming languages for public chain development: 1. Solidity; 2. WASM; 3. Move.
Compared with Solidity, Move is more flexible and convenient; compared with WASM, it is more focused and safer.
Block-STM smart contract parallel execution engine
Smart contract execution has always been the main bottleneck limiting blockchain throughput. Current blockchains either execute sequentially or require parallel sequential execution (i.e. no internal conflicts) to improve performance.
Something like the picture below: Ethereum is a one-lane road and all cars must line up. And both Solana and Aptos are four-lane highways, which obviously speeds things up. The four roads on Solana are arranged for specific vehicle access. The road selected by the vehicle is fixed and cannot be changed, while Aptos can be transferred to other roads to deal with other conditions. This enhances the reliability of Aptos, and Aptos, Sui, etc. are expected to succeed Solana to form a new public chain narrative.
Layer2 scaling solutions include channel, rollup and plasma. Currently the most mainstream and widely used is the rollup solution. Rollups rely on proofs, allowing Ethereum to verify the correctness of transactions without processing them.
There are two main types of rollups: Zero-knowledge (ZK) rollup and Optimistic rollup.
Zero-knowledge rollup uses zero-knowledge proof to achieve real-time exchange. Zero-knowledge proof means that the prover can convince the verifier that a certain assertion is correct without providing any useful information to the verifier.
For example, I have the password to my room, but I am worried about being discovered by the people next to me. How can I prove to everyone that I actually have the password without the risk of the password being leaked?
Now I can ask the verifier to place a marked water glass in the room, and I successfully got the marked water glass. This can prove that I do have the password, and also avoids being blocked when entering the password. People nearby saw it.
Optimistic rollup uses fraud proofs. Assume that all transactions are valid and set up a challenge period, during which anyone and nodes can question the data, and then the data is rolled back to L1, and the main network performs verification calculations to determine the authenticity.
This leads to a big problem. Assets from L1 to L2 can be transferred to the account in real time, but to return from L2 to L1, you have to wait for a week. This time is the exit period, which is to ask all nodes to verify Time for questioning.
This is very unfriendly to users. It takes a week to transfer an account, which I believe will drive everyone crazy.
Distribution of rollup technology used by Layer2, source: L2beat
At present, the Optimistic solution has the upper hand and is more compatible with EVM. The representative projects are Arbitrum and Optimism that have already issued tokens.
But the ZK series is more favored by V God, the founder of Ethereum, and has stronger security and privacy. Currently limited by EVM compatibility, development is difficult. Currently, the most well-known protocols are Zksync and Starknet.
Generally speaking, layer2 solves the scalability problem and improves operating efficiency, but there are also problems of weak interoperability and fragmented liquidity between layer2 solutions.
Community and governance mechanisms
As an extension layer of ETH, Layer2 still uses ETH as a gas consumption token, but issues governance tokens as tokens for project development and governance. Holders generally exercise voting rights through pledges and jointly participate in the governance and project development decisions of the DAO organization. formulation.
However, the recent opacity of the community governance of Arbitum, a Layer 2 protocol, has triggered heated discussions in the market. The incident dates back to the days following the ARB airdrop spree.
On March 28, the Arbitrum community initiated a vote on the Arbitrum Improvement Proposal 1 (AIP-1) proposal to introduce a decentralized autonomous organizational structure called ArbitrumDAO, which will be managed by ARB holders to manage the Arbitrum Foundation and serve as the ArbitrumDAO Community services.
The proposal mentions the allocation of 750 million ARBs (worth approximately more than $1 billion) to Lemma, a service provider of the Arbitrum Foundation. There seemed to be nothing wrong, but community members discovered that the Arbitrum Foundation had created an address in advance and received nearly 700 million ARBs.
The matter immediately exploded in the community, and later the official claimed that the proposal was just to inform the decision that had already been made. The final proposal received 82.56% of the votes against it. Under pressure, officials re-disassembled the AIP-1 proposal and launched a revised version. On April 9, the community initiated a vote to check the popularity of the AIP1.05 proposal, proposing that the Arbitrum Foundation return 700 million ARB to the DAO Treasury. The vote will end on April 15, with 51.64% currently voting in favor.
April 9th AIP-1 proposal voting results
But in any case, we can see that the current governance transparency of Arbitrum is poor and community governance needs to be improved.
The community governance of new public chains such as Aptos remains stable and satisfactory.
summary
Generally speaking, layer2 has a greater advantage in current project development. At the same time, relying on the multi-chain system formed by ETH makes layer2 form a powerful whole. But whether it is Aptos, Sui or single-chain operation, and there has been no high-quality project out of the circle, if the pace cannot be accelerated, the gap may become wider and wider.
Of course, new public chains such as Aptos and Sui are projects strongly supported by star teams and capital. At the same time, Aptos is the first public chain to use move as its programming language, which has its advantages. For emerging concepts, you can give some time.
(The above content is excerpted and reprinted with the authorization of partner MarsBit, original text link | Source: Vernacular Blockchain)
Statement: The article only represents the author's personal views and opinions, and does not represent the objective views and positions of the blockchain. All contents and opinions are for reference only and do not constitute investment advice. Investors should make their own decisions and transactions, and the author and Blockchain Client will not be held responsible for any direct or indirect losses caused by investors' transactions.
This article Ethereum Layer 2 is coming to fruition! Is there not much time left for new public chains such as Aptos and Sui? First appeared in Block Guest.
