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 layer2 has not yet exploded, narratives such as MEME and DePin alone are not enough to shake ETH’s market position. This is just a short carnival of Alt-Layer1 before the Cancun upgrade. Why?
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 stems from 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 factors such as technology, market, and compliance, Mass Adoption has not been widely popularized. The technological "leap" brought about by these new public chains has not become a catalyst for new innovations. Narrative, the starting point for expanding new market growth, is still just eating the overflow dividends of Ethereum.
Public chains such as Solana, Avalanche, and Aptos want to completely improve their technical level from the development language, code complexity, operating mechanism and other underlying frameworks to provide better infra for the application market. 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.
Risk-loving hot money, a market audience hungry for wealth codes, constantly refreshing diverse gameplay, ever-present information gaps, occasional overflow stories of getting rich, etc., these perfectly constitute the basics of a cyclical bull market. elements.
This makes Ethereum, whose technology is "innately limited", rely on various EIPs, ERC standard protocols, etc. to patch things up, which is enough to derive a huge application market, and also allow other competing products to open up. Chains can emerge frequently just by relying on spillover effects.
But everyone is reaping the dividends of the Ethereum DeFi market, and it has not yet reached the time when Alt-layer1 can easily replace and surpass Ethereum.
2. Ethereum’s “congenital defects” have explored a complete set of mature solutions, such as: expansion problems, which have evolved into various solutions such as Rollup, Plasma, and Validium; another example: EOA address limitations, ERC4337 Account Abstraction has also been upgraded, and even evolved into an account abstraction track;
In addition, layer2 has also become a narrative track, with OP-Rollup and ZK-Rollup engaged in a continuous 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 follow-up development support;
Even if there is a potential limitation of DA capabilities in the upper limit of block capacity, It has been extended to optimize DA based on restaking solutions such as Eigenlayer, and then modularly combines third-party DA solutions such as Celestia, as well as optional alternatives to the VM execution layer, etc.
The entire Ethereum development, expansion, and extension environment is mature and prosperous enough. The power of developers behind it is the cornerstone for Big Ether to stand firm.
Although the results of Ethereum’s continuous Lego-building ecology in the past few years are indeed not as good as expected, it can complete the key upgrade from POW to POS under frequent hacker attacks, and can also use developer resources Gathering on the main line centered on Ethereum EVM and evolving into a more ambitious layer 2 narrative section, the follow-up potential of Ethereum cannot be underestimated.
Believing in Ethereum is a sign of respect for Ethereum’s solid consensus over the years and respect for the Builder, a large developer group behind it.
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 results. After the short-term prosperity dissipated, it ended up being slow but steady. Ethereum had the last laugh.
Real value discovery must be captured slowly.
3. Layer2’s build speed is indeed slow in the bear market, especially without a round of layer2 Summer market gifts, which makes everyone involved in the construction of the layer2 ecosystem feel a little bit unwilling.
However, the slow speed of layer 2 build is similar to the overflow of Ethereum’s DeFi narrative to major new public chains to establish new ones. 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 have expanded their market territory under the Stack strategy. However, these strategic expansions belong to the B-side layout, and OP-Rollup needs Solve the criticized centralization problem and drive the growth of the C-end market.
On the other hand, ZK-Rollup such as zkSync and Starknet have more Advanced technical advantages, but ZK is also a future-oriented technology, and the existing user level 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 layer 2.
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 change the incentive method of Token (governance-> Practical )etc. In addition, shared sequencer solutions such as Espresso and Astria are also extending 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 just begun. The real involution of the layer 2 market may only begin after the Cancun upgrade. When the Cancun upgrade time is finalized, isn't layer2's group rally rising against the trend an emotional release of layer2'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 layer2 track can accumulate will definitely be more stable than other Alt-layer1.
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 succeed on Solana, I don’t know, but if DePin happens on Solana, I will have 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.
The current rise of Solana is, on the one hand, the empty opportunity brought by the short-term silence of Ethereum layer 2, and on the other hand, it is the result of a group of development forces already active on Solana. 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, it will only be comparable to Ethereum at best. How to replace it?
Ethereum will inevitably be impacted by some Alt-layer1 chains with new technical starting points, but none of them are Ethereum "killers". I prefer to call them web3 disruptive innovators.
Ethereum has achieved success in DeFi financial applications and a huge combinatorial ecosystem, but the new journey of layer2 and layer3 is still on the way.
If Ethereum is "open, inclusive, trustworthy, and combined", it 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.
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