The false prosperity of zkSync ecosystem under L2’s market value of 10 billion
The overall TVL of the Layer 2 track has recently touched the tens of billions of dollars mark, and the ecology of the second-layer chain is showing a "thriving" scene. zkSync still ranks third in the L2 track, behind Arbitrum and Optimism, with an on-chain TVL of nearly $500 million. Why do you say that the prosperity of the zkSync ecosystem is false prosperity? Before answering this question, let’s take a look at the recent TVL trends of Arbitrum and OP, the two big brothers on the second floor. According to L2Beat data, Arbitrum TVL fluctuates within a narrow range around US$6 billion; OP has seen many positives recently, TVL has also hit new highs, and ATH has exceeded US$2.5 billion; both TVLs account for nearly 85% of the L2 track, occupying an absolute share Dominance.
If you can’t beat them, join them. Gnosis Chain @gnosis_ is transitioning from a sovereign-independent L1 to a highly Ethereum-aligned L2—just one step away.
The GIP-153 proposal was jointly drafted and submitted by Gnosis’ founder @tw_tter along with two other core team members. It is a top-down reform. As of now, the support rate for the proposal is as high as 98.4%, with voting set to close in 5 days—almost a certain event.
As one of the oldest established public chains, Gnosis Chain has been running its mainnet for nearly 8 years. Choosing to pivot to an Ethereum L2 at this specific moment requires a great deal of resolve.
For most PoS chains acting as L1s, their security is far inferior to Ethereum. And in the long run, subsidizing validators through token inflation also directly harms the interests of non-stakers—this is essentially the common problem with nearly all PoS L1s.
Rather than dealing with this, it’s better to simply transition to Ethereum L2, hand the security to Ethereum validators, and directly inherit Ethereum’s security.
The new round of Ethereum L2 summer narratives won’t end at Robinhood Chain.
Negative public sentiment around Neutrl has been brewing for more than a dozen hours. Its stablecoin NUSD shows absolutely no signs of depegging—what is going on?
NUSD’s only liquidity pool is deployed on Curve. Last night, it urgently withdrew $35M in liquidity, and currently there is only $3.5M left in the NUSD-USDC LP pool.
But this dogdev left a backdoor for the pool. After withdrawing a large amount of liquidity, it added the LP pool’s address to a blacklist (denylist), which directly caused the deposit, withdrawal, and swap functions to all stop working.
If nobody can buy or sell, then it naturally won’t depeg.
This animal project team is a real bunch of animals.
A well-known A-leading POR reserves verification service provider urgently took down @Neutrl’s over-allocated reserves disclosure last night.
No one on the A team did any prior risk warning or post-incident risk review. They have a stance that seems like they can’t even be bothered to distance themselves from responsibility.
According to rumors from multiple sources, A’s POR reserves disclosure dashboard can be accessed for just a few thousand U per month.
As of now, there are 19 partner entities listed on that dashboard, and all of them show 100%+ over-allocated reserves.
Just this one line of business alone can bring in tens of thousands of US dollars in monthly revenue for A’s reserves verification service provider.
Yet another stablecoin project @Neutrl suspected of running away with funds.
Neutrl’s official X post says there’s an issue with the protocol reserves; all protocol functions, including minting and redemptions, have currently been paused.
Its third-party reserve verification provider, Accountable, has not yet provided an explanation, and the website has not taken down the public disclosure for Neutrl protocol reserves.
As of now, Defillama data shows that the market cap of the Neutral stablecoin, NUSD, is $53.3 million.
The X comments section has been closed, and Discord has simply deleted the chat channel. Another lesson learned from an Indian founder’s project.
Yet another stablecoin project @Neutrl suspected of running away with funds.
Neutrl’s official X post says there’s an issue with the protocol reserves; all protocol functions, including minting and redemptions, have currently been paused.
Its third-party reserve verification provider, Accountable, has not yet provided an explanation, and the website has not taken down the public disclosure for Neutrl protocol reserves.
As of now, Defillama data shows that the market cap of the Neutral stablecoin, NUSD, is $53.3 million.
The X comments section has been closed, and Discord has simply deleted the chat channel. Another lesson learned from an Indian founder’s project.
Yet another stablecoin project @Neutrl suspected of running away with funds.
Neutrl’s official X post says there’s an issue with the protocol reserves; all protocol functions, including minting and redemptions, have currently been paused.
Its third-party reserve verification provider, Accountable, has not yet provided an explanation, and the website has not taken down the public disclosure for Neutrl protocol reserves.
As of now, Defillama data shows that the market cap of the Neutral stablecoin, NUSD, is $53.3 million.
The X comments section has been closed, and Discord has simply deleted the chat channel. Another lesson learned from an Indian founder’s project.
Base’s attitude toward creator air drops has shifted from hints to explicit statements. Some guesses about Base creator air drops:
1/ Imitating the Monad model. The commonality is that it places extreme emphasis on anti-bot (anti-sybil) measures and real contributions.
Copying the “Monad Cards + the nomination” setup as-is is unrealistic, but the weight of the air drop will very likely tilt toward influential X KOLs in another form.
2/ Outsourcing to Kaito, as Kaito Katalyst’s flagship collaboration project.
Previously, Base and Kaito were tightly linked (Base App launched on Kaito’s mini-app; Base as one of Kaito Studio’s first partner launches, etc.). And Kaito has relatively seasoned experience with social media influence air drops (yap-to-earn). Plus, as a Coinbase-incubated project, Base has a high regulatory sensitivity. If something goes wrong, the cost is higher. Outsourcing to a more experienced team is less likely to cause issues; even if something does go wrong, it’s also easier to shift blame.
No matter which approach is used, X is definitely a social platform that can’t be bypassed when it comes to tightly binding Base creator air drops.
I don’t know whether it’s already too late to start posting about Base now, but I think doing this could yield a much higher probability of receiving an air drop than simply doing on-chain interactions right now.
The launch of the Robinhood Chain will become an important variable in driving Base’s token issuance.
As early as 1 year ago, I mentioned: given @base’s ability to “print money,” the probability of token issuance in the short term is low—the day when printing becomes difficult is the day Base issues tokens.
This timing has been pulled forward because RH Chain has stirred things up. Since the RH Chain mainnet went live, Base’s “printing” ability has dropped significantly, and it has now fallen to a historic low.
In other words, as a machine for Coinbase to earn money by stockpiling BTC/“big bets,” Base can contribute fewer and fewer funds. Once the remaining value has been gradually extracted, issuing tokens becomes the top priority.
The launch of the Robinhood Chain will become an important variable in driving Base’s token issuance.
As early as 1 year ago, I mentioned: given @base’s ability to “print money,” the probability of token issuance in the short term is low—the day when printing becomes difficult is the day Base issues tokens.
This timing has been pulled forward because RH Chain has stirred things up. Since the RH Chain mainnet went live, Base’s “printing” ability has dropped significantly, and it has now fallen to a historic low.
In other words, as a machine for Coinbase to earn money by stockpiling BTC/“big bets,” Base can contribute fewer and fewer funds. Once the remaining value has been gradually extracted, issuing tokens becomes the top priority.
2026.6.3: Spent $80,000 to buy the world.xyz domain Late June 2026: The riddle-entity begins viral suspense marketing 2026.7.1: Officially announced the launch of the prediction market 2026.7.8-9: Phishing-style marketing claiming it would move from Solana to the Robinhood Chain; the next day reveals it was just a joke Early August 2026: Continue suspense-style marketing, sparking a surge of KOLs asking for attention 2026.8.11: The 7-day trading volume leaderboard for the prediction market ranks in the top 10 2026.9.9: token???
@world_xyz has contributed a textbook-level “freebie” marketing playbook to the crypto startup scene.
Blockworks, as a Tier 1 research institution in crypto, has even made a basic common-sense mistake. It’s possible to “disenchant” the so-called research institutions.
It incorrectly categorized @0xPolygon as an Ethereum L2, leading to the conclusion that @RobinhoodApp Chain’s highest single-month cumulative REV in July accounted for 38% of all L2 revenue.
But strictly speaking, Polygon PoS is not an Ethereum L2—it’s a sidechain, with its own validator set and consensus mechanism.
After removing Polygon, RH Chain’s share of revenue is far higher than 38%—it’s as high as 53%.
With one person’s effort, it propped up half of the L2 revenue “empire.”
Encrypted KOL power climbs from solid to pulling-down leaderboard:
Solid: Bull and bear alike never run paid groups + post rarely Top tier: Bull and bear alike never run paid groups + post from time to time Top of the top: Only open paid groups during bear markets NPC: Bull and bear alike open paid groups Once it’s pulled: Bull and bear alike never open paid groups + insist on daily updates
The activation of Ethereum's proactive scaling roadmap, Glamsterdam, in the second half of the year is an important step toward becoming a world computer, and this is extremely difficult to achieve under the PoW mechanism. #Ethereum $ETH
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Until now, there are still plenty of smart people who believe that Ethereum switching to PoS was the biggest blunder. Take a look at his older brother—$ETC .
After the hard fork, ETC, which has continued to use the PoW mechanism, has seen its market cap among the top 20 fall from before and after Ethereum’s The Merge to just 64 today—a drop of over 80%.
$ETH , the perennial #2 for a thousand years, unwavering.
Base says it wants to leave the OP Stack superchain ecosystem on the lips, but the body is still very honest.
According to @Blockworks data, as of now @base is still paying its own sequencer revenue to Optimism.
But over the past month, the share of sequencer revenue Base has been distributing to Optimism has been getting smaller and smaller, and Base’s ability to generate profits is weakening.
Robinhood Chain’s explosive rise has grabbed a good chunk of what belongs to Base.
OP buybacks only looked strong for 3 months; it appears the buybacks have likely stopped.
@Optimism’s buyback proposal for $OP passed in January this year. It started officially in February, using 50% of Superchain revenue each month for OTC buybacks of OP for a duration of 12 months.
According to the official published buyback wallet address and on-chain data, Optimism completed buybacks for a total of 3 months from February to April, accumulating about 9.45 million OP tokens.
After May 1, it has not bought back a single OP token.
It’s still unclear whether this is related to Base’s earlier announcement about leaving the OP Superchain.
OP buybacks only looked strong for 3 months; it appears the buybacks have likely stopped.
@Optimism’s buyback proposal for $OP passed in January this year. It started officially in February, using 50% of Superchain revenue each month for OTC buybacks of OP for a duration of 12 months.
According to the official published buyback wallet address and on-chain data, Optimism completed buybacks for a total of 3 months from February to April, accumulating about 9.45 million OP tokens.
After May 1, it has not bought back a single OP token.
It’s still unclear whether this is related to Base’s earlier announcement about leaving the OP Superchain.
Recently, many well-established crypto protocols have been fond of telling stories about revenue buybacks. Uniswap tells it best, Sui comes next, and Arbitrum has already finished its pitch.
1/ @Uniswap: Uses protocol revenue to burn UNI (with the V4 fee switch activated and included after Robinhood Chain, the burn scale increases significantly);
2/ @SuiNetwork: Uses protocol stablecoin revenue to buy back SUI, but as an ecosystem incentive it does not directly burn (scale isn’t large, but it’s a real buyback);
3/ @arbitrum: Goes all out to promote that it has taken a fair amount of revenue-share income from Robinhood Chain, but never responds whether it would use it for ARB buybacks.
A Strange Phenomenon: Over the past half year, the market value of tokenized stocks has been hitting new highs, rising by several multiples, and the trading volume of equity perpetual contracts has also increased by 7x.
But among crypto projects that run delta-neutral neutral strategies based on this market, you hardly ever see them: whether it’s a market-neutral strategy of buying undervalued stock tokens plus shorting perpetual futures, or an equity lockup strategy plus hedging by shorting Equity Perps.
Why isn’t anyone grabbing such a big slice of the pie? What exactly is going wrong?
The main contradiction in HyperEVM’s meme ecosystem at this stage is the conflict between having too many “scumbag platforms” and having too few rational dreamers.