Author: Distributed Capital; Translation: 0xjs@黄金财经
Ethereum and Rollup Infrastructure
As blobspace cools down and the gas peak associated with blobs subsides, the future of blobspace has emerged and attracted market attention.
While blockspace provides marginal benefits to searchers and builders in the future due to the additional computational overhead associated with future block/gas pricing and subsequent latency competition, blobspace may provide a more reasonable use case for Rollup sorters and full nodes in the future.
At least for now, sorters are less sensitive to latency and can settle multiple L2 blocks in batches to amortize gas costs. Therefore, they can use blobspace futures to hedge their blob gas costs. However, there are also some problems.
Blobspace is still in a very early stage, and as the number of blobs per block increases (up to 256 blobs per block), the market dynamics of blobs may change dramatically.
Furthermore, depending on market conditions, there may be a lack of counterparties willing to short blobspace, as this would also indirectly short ETH. Nonetheless, this is an interesting proposal that deserves further research and exploration.
Another area that has sparked widespread discussion is Ethereum’s treatment of MEV via PBS. Some researchers have expressed frustration with the growing negative effects of MEV on the Eth base layer, such as timing games, builder/relay centralization, and relay dependency.
This begs the question, “Is PBS good or bad?” This discussion generally concludes that PBS is simply a tradeoff Ethereum has made to protect its core protocol from centralized forces, although it still results in a certain degree of staking centralization.
More dApps must understand the underlying transaction processing flow to protect themselves from negative effects. Just as Ethereum has adopted PBS, dApps should also adopt methods to build applications to protect their users from the negative externalities of the underlying MEV.
DeFi
LRTfi and re-staking products have received widespread attention from the community. Although the re-staking field is still in its infancy, the market has shown a continued demand for more yield on ETH.
As an extension of this trend, native yield has also become a popular strategy for new projects to launch protocol liquidity, such as Ethena. As the DeFi field continues to heat up, more forms of yield assets are expected to emerge.
Layer 2
Although Layer 2 solutions are emerging in an endless stream, the Layer 2 landscape has been relatively stable. Whether it is OP Rollups, ZK Rollups or other Layer 2 solutions, users' understanding of the technical roadmap is still relatively vague.
Despite the hype surrounding zk-rollups, the current situation is that Arbitrum has surpassed Solana in terms of daily active users, and zkrollup L2 chains have been disappointing from both an ecosystem and total value locked (TVL) perspective.
Thus, the dominant players in the Layer 2 space appear to be Arbitrum, Optimistic Rollups, and Base. Whether zk-rollup-based solutions can catch up remains uncertain, depending on how the team manages ecosystem operations and future token issuance.
An interesting observation is the emergence of zklink , which positions itself as a general-purpose Layer 3 solution. In a short period of time, zklink's TVL has approached $1 billion, which seems to justify the existence of liquidity fragmentation caused by multiple Layer 2 solutions.
Users are seeking a chain that can aggregate decentralized liquidity while ensuring the security inherited from Ethereum and the high performance of Layer 2. Combined with zk's security technology, zklink seems to offer a very compelling solution.
AI & DePin
Competition in the AI & DePin market has intensified over the past quarter. In the field of AI, the most easily implemented sub-field in Web3 is decentralized computing power, and the most representative project is IO.net, which is about to go online.
In addition to IO.net, similar projects have also recently received financing. IO.net is relatively simple technically and lacks encryption or OP proof solutions for result verification. The lower technical complexity allows for the fastest startup time.
In the DePin field, the second largest public chain IoTeX completed a $50 million financing, while the newly launched DePin public chain Peaq raised $20 million through Coinlist.
However, the quality of DePin ecological projects carried by IoTeX and Peaq as public chains is relatively average compared to Solana. The current market is in a stage where the underlying infrastructure is relatively mature, but the upper-level high-quality assets and applications are scarce.
Applications
Recently, many applications have chosen to develop their own application chains, mainly because the infrastructure sector usually has a higher valuation than the application. This strategy is understandable and has economic benefits for the project.
But it should be emphasized that the success of a project depends on the project itself, not the type. Without substantive content and a solid user base, application chains risk becoming ghost chains or islands.
Historically, applications have grown significantly in the middle of a bull market, with greater potential than infrastructure. Patience and continued construction are critical for application teams. Applications are the consumer front end and are critical for user onboarding during a bull market. Eventually, attention will return to applications
ZK
Thanks to the open source nature of cryptographic research, the pace of innovation in ZK has accelerated significantly. The release of Plonky3 and the development of Binius have prompted more projects to experiment and iterate on the existing ZK infrastructure.
Succinct has introduced SP1, a RiscV zkVM built on RiscZero, injecting new life into the market. RiscZero has increased its marketing and ecosystem efforts. Expect exciting developments and feature announcements from both projects, which could lead to the formation of a zkVM market.
Joy
Aaron
Hui Xin
Brian
Alex