Note: The original text comes from @tmel0211 who posted a long tweet.
The soaring speed of blast's 200 million+ TVL in 2 days has really made the entire Layer2 market, which has been sluggish for several months, tremble, and it feels like "a vampire is coming." Task PUA, airdrop bait, to Vitalik's internal circulation, etc., blast's stirring has completely exposed the shameful underwear of layer2. My opinion: @Blast_L2's raid on layer2 may not be its success, but it must be a great blessing for the layer2 industry.
Why do we say that? It is not difficult to understand if we reflect on the current status of the layer 2 industry from a macro perspective.
1) According to L2beat statistics, there are more than 60 layer2 projects of various types, involving OP-rollup, ZK-rollup, Validium, Plasma and other categories, but most of these projects are still in the stage of competing in technology architecture and narrative. The debates surrounding the OP-rollup and ZK-rollup have been going on for rounds. In the end, technically, ZK-rollup won, and then a large number of ZK-rollup solutions emerged, each with its own characteristics.
Starknet was the first to realize the open source and decentralization of the Prover component, with a maximum TPS of over 890,000+. Scoll and Taiko were sought after for being more equivalent to EVM. zkSync was praised for its hidden ERC4337 account abstraction experience. There is also zk+Plasma, which may once again set off a new narrative recently.
VCs are busy and happy, and the money-making party is also on the road to spring ploughing at any time. The Layer2 market presents an unprecedented prosperity of technical narratives, but is this the end game for Layer2 to expand capacity?
2) Putting aside technical factors, in terms of ecology, the two most popular OP-rollup platforms, Arbitrum and Optimism, have already gained a crushing ecological advantage and are far ahead. Arbitrum is the leader with over 600 ecological protocols and a TVL of over 7B, while zkSync, which is regarded as the final rollup, has only a TVL of 500M after more than half a year of development.
Moreover, after issuing its own token, Arbitrum has not seen any significant data growth. The meme season led by PEPE did not happen on layer 2, and Bitcoin is trying to start over and recreate the glory of layer 2.
The entire Ethereum layer 2 ecosystem has always been stuck at a level that is neither going up nor down.
Few people have discussed the core reason. I think it is that Layer2 has not found its own native application stimulus. The three pillars of pure financial applications and DeFi (DEX, lending, Derivatives) cannot drive the growth of the layer2 ecosystem at all.
Layer2 should, as its name suggests, attract long-tail Mass Adoption users who are sensitive to gas fees and user experience UX thresholds. If it just tries to relocate miners, farmers, scientists, institutions and other financial giants who have already stabilized on the main network, it will be a disaster.
Sorry, they care more about "security" than performance improvements. The much-criticized layer2 Sequencer centralized security issue has been quietly rationalized. On the other hand, the more popular ZK-rollup only increases the threshold for developers in the ZK circuit, and there are no killer applications that cannot be separated from ZK.
With such an ecological foundation and the lack of stimulation from large capital inflows outside the bull market, Layer2 is destined to be in an awkward situation where the technical narrative is grand but the ecological implementation is poor.
The market is silently waiting for the Cancun upgrade, expecting a clear breakthrough after Cancun. Maybe, but unfortunately, Cancun EIP-4844 only makes some optimizations on the gas fee and cannot directly drive the ecological transition.
3) Let’s look at the Stack strategy that the Big Four are proud of. From the perspective of long-term narrative construction, layer2 modularizes core components such as Sequencer and Prover, and uses these shared components to strengthen layer2 and layer3 multi-chains. This strategy cannot be said to be wrong, but there is always a sense of haste.
Take zkSync as an example. Its own ecosystem is slow to develop, so it launched the zk-Stack strategy. Suddenly, zkSync became a part of the ecosystem application. What a wise move, leaving everything to the developer community. The subtext is that zk-stack is developing slowly, and zkSync is already a good model chain. After all, it has a group of loyal pay gas users... (%&**&*% omitted here).
Optimism has built a solid reason to build a centralized Sequencer with Op-Stack. After all, it makes sense to share the Sequencer and build Superchain with the governance ideas of the committee to make up for the lack of decentralized work.
Therefore, the Stack strategy is actually a tricky strategy that avoids the various shortcomings of layer2's current technology and ecology and is an abstract advanced strategy. Looking at various Stack strategies now, apart from adding some more grand narratives and integrating the industry's scarce developer resources, C-end users will not see any benefits in the short term.
that's all.
Back to the topic, in my opinion, it is not an exaggeration to say that blast's entry into layer2 is purely to disrupt the situation.
In the short term, it will drain away the scarce liquidity that other layer2s already treasure. In the long term, it will make a layer2 that is in urgent need of building prematurely adopt a passive approach of earning money by lying down. It is no exaggeration to say that this completely goes against the original intention of the layer2 to expand the ecosystem.
Blast was poisoned by paradigm's web3 Tokenomics economics. Seeing that the layer2 ecosystem is now lifeless, it tried to use a drastic measure to stimulate it.
From the perspective of building layer 2, this starting point is wrong. No matter how high the TVL is or how large the number of users is, it is just internal consumption of the existing market. Its individual success does not have much significance. But from the perspective of an industry disruptor, we must applaud it.
It is foreseeable that the disruption of blast may bring two direct effects:
1) Layer2 token issuance boom. Imagine if blast drains away most of the market liquidity, what other layer2 players whose ZK-rollup is already unpopular have any choice but to issue tokens to stimulate traffic? Even if they are not in a hurry, the VCs who have invested heavily behind them will also push hard;
2) Layer2 reshuffle. Needless to say, there are already too many layer2s in the market. After the veil is torn off, the layer2 industry is bound to accelerate the reshuffle and the survival of the fittest. In particular, some quick-made or patchwork layer2s will be brought back to their original form, which will open up a new situation for the layer2 market.
In short, blast will not necessarily bring a governance token DeFi Summer like Compound to layer2, but it will at least accelerate the layer2 industry to the eve of Summer.
Note: The pictures are generated by AI. Do you feel like a vampire slaughtering a city?
