How do you view the @Marlin Protocol that seems to have taken all the hot narrative directions such as MEV, Oracle, ZK and even AI? There are many stories about old chains sprouting new ones in this round, and Marlin was positioned as an upstream "decentralized node enhancement service" at the beginning. The new narrative of Ethereum node AVS tells us that when the operation and maintenance capabilities of upstream nodes in the chain are "commoditized" and packaged, many narrative methods will be derived. Next, let me briefly talk about my observations:
1) The essence of the "commoditization" packaging of the Ethereum AVS node network is to enhance the capabilities of the Ethereum Validators Operator. Therefore, AVS can undertake a variety of expansion businesses such as decentralized Oracle and Sequencer, while Marlin is officially positioned as a trust-based coprocessor that supports technologies such as TEE (Trusted Execution Environment) and ZK (Zero-Knowledge Proof), and provides developers with decentralized computing solutions based on SDK and API.
Simply put: Marlin is a decentralized distributed node network system that supports TEE and ZK. It can provide network resource services such as node computing power and storage for application scenarios such as Oracle oracle, ZK Prover system, and AI artificial intelligence.
Since the core technology of Marlin is a reliable node network with strong operation and maintenance capabilities and a wide range of business loads, various services can be encapsulated and exported through SDK and API. The operation and maintenance service scope of the node itself is equivalent to its business coverage to some extent.
2) What business service scenarios can be expanded? As follows, Marlin listed several directions in his tweet introducing Oyster network services:
1. Secure ZK proof generation: With the Oyster system, ZK applications and users can delegate the work of generating proofs to Marlin’s secure enclaves. Marlin’s distributed nodes come with a TEE executable environment, so enclave space can be isolated in the execution environment to generate ZK proofs;
2. Web3 getaway: It can be used as a secure gateway from web2 to web3, providing a reliable web3 access portal for some traditional web2 applications, lowering the entry threshold for users, and making up for the defects of the browser itself, such as storage, RPC interface, indexer index, relay service, identity authentication and authorization, etc.;
3. Decentralized Frontends: Provide decentralized frontend services based on distributed storage for applications in Web3, avoiding "service" interruptions caused by centralized AWS cloud service downtime, which may cause the product to lose service capabilities;
4. Oracles: The distributed node system of the Oyster system can collect Oracle information from multiple data sources, and use the Enclave security environment within the node to quickly calculate prices and update price information, providing competitive Oracle services;
5. Decentralized AI: As AI large model training becomes increasingly important, the TEE-based trusted execution environment coprocessor can provide a secure and private model training and computing environment for AI model training. At the same time, it can also build a decentralized, transparent and verifiable incentive environment, allowing the distributed node network to transform into a decentralized cloud computing power "rental" service network.
3) It is not difficult to see that Marlin can serve a wide range of services based on distributed node enhancement, mainly because the starting threshold for building a node network is relatively high:
On the one hand, each node operation and maintenance is equipped with TEE, which means that the hardware performance is more outstanding. At the same time, a secure and isolated Enclave environment can be built in the storage system, with a strict privacy transaction environment and Access permission management system to ensure that information is not spied on or tampered with when computing and storing data. The enclave environment is an isolated environment in the storage system that is absolutely private and has no built-in network, and has high security attributes;
On the other hand, each node has strong interoperable communication capabilities based on ZK. Through the ZK protocol, nodes can prove the correctness of their calculation results to other nodes without leaking original data. This greatly improves the efficiency and credibility of interactions between nodes. Therefore, its entire distributed node network can achieve flexible service construction that can be plugged in and out at any time. zkVM can efficiently communicate information between nodes and verify and incentivize proof of computational workload, which is also another technical support point for its strong node service capabilities.
In general, it is difficult to understand what Marlin does and can do in a single scenario, because it is essentially a Zero layer infrastructure protocol layer. Based on the TEE high-performance node enhanced network and ZK verifiable communication network, it can be applied to many popular narrative scenarios to play a corresponding landing value.
In my opinion, strong node service capabilities can indeed extend various narrative directions in the current highly interactive and composable public chain network environment.
However, I personally believe that apart from other application scenarios, in the future AI+DePIN narrative wave, Marlin is expected to develop a main business:
1) AI large model training requires a lot of computing resources, and Marlin nodes already have GPU computing resources reserves, which gives them a first-mover advantage;
2) Marlin's advantages in distributed node data privacy processing and calculation, efficient task allocation and scheduling mechanism are very suitable for AI training scenarios such as large AI model training and small and medium-sized model fine-tuning.
I think this is also the main reason why Marlin, an old project, can catch this wave of AI train and set sail again. AI will also be its core narrative direction in the future.
