Alt-Layer1 technology cannot kill Ethereum: there are solutions to the inherent defects

Written by: Haotian, Twitter: @tmel0211

If it is "open, inclusive, credible, and combined", such Ethereum will not be able to realize the value of the blockchain in the end. It is hard for me to believe that a new chain will.

Recently, Solana has led Layer 1 public chains such as Avalanche and NEAR to kill everyone, and the market has heard the voice of killing Ethereum. Indeed, ETH Killer was the trump card held by most public chains in the last bull market.

However, at a time when EVM dominates the world and Layer 2 has not yet exploded, narratives such as MEME and DePin alone are not enough to shake the market position of ETH. This is just a short carnival of Alt-Layer1 before the upgrade in Cancun. Why?

Technological "leap" does not inspire new narratives

1. The narrative that major public chains are competing to kill Ethereum has been fully verified by a bull-bear cycle and "failed." On the surface, this is due to the strong market consensus of Ethereum, the innovative power of the developer community, and the magic of unlimited combinations of DeFi and NFT financial applications.

In fact, because the Crypto market is still limited by technology, market, compliance and other factors, Mass Adoption has not been widely popularized. These new public chains have brought The technological "leap" has not become a starting point to stimulate new narratives and expand new market increments. It is still just eating the overflow dividends of Ethereum.

Solana, Avalanche, Aptos and other public chains want to completely improve the technical level from the development language, code complexity, operating mechanism and other underlying frameworks, and provide better solutions for the application market. infra. For example, Solana’s high concurrency processing performance and user experience UX advantages, in terms of technology alone, are indeed more suitable for the future incremental Crypto market.

However, the basic operating logic of the market has not really changed yet.

Hot money with a preference for risk, a market audience hungry for wealth codes, constantly refreshing diverse gameplay, always-existing information gaps, occasional overflows of sudden wealth Stories, etc., these perfectly constitute the basic elements of a cyclical bull market.

This makes Ethereum, whose technology is "innately limited", rely on various EIPs, ERC standard protocols, etc. to patch up, and it is enough to derive The creation of a huge application market will also allow other competing public chains to frequently emerge based on spillover effects alone.

But everyone is reaping the dividends of the Ethereum DeFi market, and it is not yet the time when Alt-layer1 can easily replace and surpass Ethereum.

Ethereum's "congenital defect" already has a solution

2. Ethereum's "innate defects" have already explored a complete set of mature solutions, such as: the expansion problem, which has evolved into various solutions such as Rollup, Plasma, and Validium; another example: the limitation of EOA addresses, which can also be solved by relying on ERC4337 Account Abstraction After upgrading, it even evolved into an account abstract track;

In addition, Layer2 has also become a narrative track, OP-Rollup and ZK-Rollup. Continuing tug-of-war, etc.; in the future, there will be Cancun’s upgraded Blob space and more distant Sharding sharding, underlying SNARKization, etc. to provide subsequent development support;

Even the potential limitation of DA capabilities due to the upper limit of block capacity has also extended to Eigenlayer and other restaking-based solutions to optimize DA, and then through modular combination of third-party DA solutions such as Celestia, as well as optional alternatives to the VM execution layer, etc. .

The development, expansion, and extension environment of the entire Ethereum is mature and prosperous enough. It is the developer power behind it that makes Big Ethereum stand firm. cornerstone.

Although the implementation results of Ethereum’s continuous stacking of Lego ecology in the past few years are indeed not as good as expected, it can survive frequent hacker attacks. Completing the key upgrade from PoW to PoS can gather developer resources on the main line centered on Ethereum EVM, and evolve a more ambitious Layer 2 narrative section. The follow-up potential of Ethereum cannot be underestimated.

I vaguely remember that at the end of 2018, EOS was known as a new paradigm public chain and set off a wave of spinach game frenzy. However, everyone has seen the fact that the prosperity was short-lived. After everything was over, the slow but steady Ethereum finally had the last laugh.

Real value discovery must be captured slowly.

The second half of Layer2 will be driven by high-frequency trading and applications

3. The build speed of Layer2 is indeed slow in the bear market, especially without a round of market gifts of Layer2 Summer, which makes everyone involved in the construction of Layer2 ecosystem feel a little bit unwilling.

However, the slow speed of Layer 2 Build is similar to the overflow of the Ethereum DeFi narrative to major new public chains to establish new mountains. The second half of Ethereum Layer 2 will be driven by some high-frequency transactions and applications. Relying solely on the spillover effects and path dependence of Ethereum's financial gameplay will not have any advantage in head-to-head confrontation with Alt-Layer 1.

On the one hand, OP-Rollups such as Arbitrum and Optimism have the ecological advantage of Layer 2 first and expanded their market territory under the Stack strategy. However, these strategic expansion After all, it is a B-side layout. OP-Rollup needs to solve the criticized centralization problem and drive the growth of the C-side market.

On the other hand, ZK-Rollup such as zkSync and Starknet have more Advanced technical advantages, but ZK is also a technology focused on the future, and existing users cannot Fully demonstrate the power of ZK. Only when the user scale expands can Gas be so low that it becomes negligible and the experience becomes smoother. This is the final form of ZK layer2.

In addition, the power at the waist and tail of the Layer 2 market is taking action. For example, Metis is trying to use Hyper (OP+ZK) Rollup technology to make PoS decentralized Sequencer and revolutionize Token's incentive method (governance -> practicality) and so on. In addition, shared sequencer solutions such as Espresso and Astria are also expanding the potential of the Layer 2 market in the form of Rollup as a Service.

Don’t think that OP+ZK has finished telling the story of Layer 2. In my opinion, the Layer 2 War has really begun, and the real involution of Layer 2 The market may only open up after the Cancun upgrade. When the Cancun upgrade time is finalized, isn’t Layer 2’s rise against the trend an emotional release of Layer 2’s current aggrieved situation?

When the narrative scenario of the future application chain opens and the situation of Mass Adoption is opened, the funds, users and DApp applications that the Layer 2 track can accumulate will definitely be higher than other Alt -layer1 is more stable.

4. Of course, speaking out for the Ethereum ecosystem at this moment does not deny Solana’s market potential. It is undeniable that the starting point of Solana's technological innovation is indeed higher than the existing blockchain architecture. Its storage and computing separation characteristics and high concurrent transaction processing characteristics make it user-friendly and easier to build an ecosystem.

Take DePin as an example, physical infrastructure + Token token incentives. This is a narrative that has been repeated in the vortex of failure in the past, such as Filecoin Arweave, etc. . Whether it will really work out on Solana, I don’t know, but DePin happens on Solana and I have a little more confidence in DePin. After all, the technical starting point of high concurrency is naturally aligned with web2, which is different from the ecological logic that relies on module combination.

Solana's current rise is, on the one hand, the empty opportunity brought by the short-term silence of Ethereum Layer 2, and on the other hand, there are already a number of active people on Solana. The result of developing strength. But what needs to be corrected is that Solana’s goal is not to kill Ethereum. It is actually looking for Ethereum’s “blank” points to wait for opportunities to break through. If it makes achievements and has ecological equivalents that match Ethereum, at most it will be It's just a comparison, how can we replace it?

Ethereum will inevitably be impacted by some Alt-Layer1 chains with new technical starting points, but they are not Ethereum "killers". I prefer to call it a disruptive innovator of Web3.

Ethereum has achieved success in DeFi financial applications and a huge combinatorial ecosystem, but the new journey of Layer 2 and Layer 3 is still on the way.