Around this time last year, if I had posted this opinion, I would have been cursed in the face, but now there are probably fewer people who are crazy about Layer2, so I would like to share some opinions about these two things.
1. The difference between the two types
- In the early days, blockchain had the first widespread smart contract, Ethereum, which developed. It also developed too quickly, causing network congestion and high costs to continuously occur.
- Ethereum has a sharding roadmap, which will split the network into many shards that run in parallel with each other to expand and reduce pressure. But creating these shards is too difficult, leading Vitalik and ETH to change direction and do the easy thing first - making Layer 2s.
- If you understand simply, to solve the problem of overpopulation in a city, it would be too difficult to expand the city's scale, so they decided to build more high-rise buildings!
2. Advantages and disadvantages of each type
- Of course there is a reason to do so and it has all its advantages and disadvantages. The advantage of L2s is that it is easy to build in the infrastructure structure, still achieving the goal of scaling, but it is only a temporary solution. position
- It can be understood that in terms of long-term infrastructure, L1 has better development space, but building L1 costs a lot, and the time is not short, especially for large L1s like ETH, the changes are a lot. year
3. Potential of L1 and L2 this season
- Because this season ETH still cannot do complete sharding, ETH has a roadmap for the rest of the following years, (you don't have to worry about ETH running out of updates), so this season L2s still occupy an important position in model of ETH. It can be said that L2 this season will be a major, indispensable player
- But now building L2s is increasingly easier with available tools and rollups. This season there will be a lot of L2s born and there will be a surplus of L2s, there will only be a few large L2s with their own paths that will have a large user base and a strong ecosystem.
- In addition, L1s are irreplaceable, if L2 is like "eating" the infrastructure, then L1 will develop long and persistently as the market matures. The two new generation L1s, $SUI and $APT, are highlights of their scalability and very high stability. I often say that SUI and APTOS are a more complete upgrade of $SOL
4. Perspectives on L1 and L2 next season
- When the end of this season will probably reveal the weaknesses of some major L2s, such as being too centralized or security, (both fast and cheap, security is still challenging)
- Next season with ETH's new updates, large L2s will tend to become an L1 side chain of ETH, not just an L2 to solve a temporary problem. And small L2s that swing the trend for one season will gradually lose users and will no longer be able to develop
- At that time, L1 was still necessary and developed sustainably with the market
*What are your opinions?
