Stronger than Ethereum, what are the 8 major public chains worth looking forward to?

Source: Vernacular Blockchain

After the Ethereum Dencun upgrade was successfully completed on March 13, L2 such as Starknet, Optimism, and Arbitrum have also been integrated in the past two days. ,The sharp reduction in handling fees once again makes the Ethereum and L2 narrative look sexier.

However, at the same time, outside of Ethereum, new public chains that have been struggling to save themselves under the water for a long time have generally ushered in their own Indian Summer moment, and many have emerged. Ecological projects and new variables worthy of attention.

01 New head public chain with outstanding performance

In the past six months, with Solana as the Representing the resurgence of heterogeneous chains, as well as the development bottlenecks faced by Ethereum L2 itself, the industry has once again had a big discussion about Ethereum and L2,especially the new Layer2 that is constantly launched based on the concept of expansion, resulting in liquidity among them Issues such as fragmentation and mutual incompatibility once caused the Ethereum narrative to appear languid.

The continued surge of SOL and AVAX is nothing more than a shot in the arm for "new public chains". Market attention and funds are returning again, prompting new public chains such as Solana to Ecology has its own Indian Summer.

• Solana: a model for post-disaster reconstruction

In 5 months, SOL went from US$20 to a peak of US$200, and its market value returned to tens of billions of US dollars. Solana completely walked out of the shadow of FTX, and also left new public chains such as Avalanche and NEAR far behind, becoming Except for Ethereum, there are almost no existing smart contract public chains.

With the surge of SOL, the Solana ecosystem has also developed one after another. Whether it is DeFi, NFT or the popular DePIN track, many ecological sub-projects worthy of attention have emerged< /strong>, it is thriving in all directions and has become a model for post-disaster reconstruction.

Especially recently, the top new-generation memes such as SILLY, DRAGON, and WIF have begun to clearly show a trend of transferring from Ethereum to Solana, which is enough to illustrate Solana’s on-chain funds and community traffic. It is indeed the only one in the new public chain.

• Avalanche: "RWA + chain game" dual-line narrative takes shape

Avalanche has become the first choice for traditional enterprises to issue encrypted assets on the chain last year by virtue of its cooperation with traditional financial giants such as Fidelity and JPMorgan, thus successfully labeling itself the "RWA public chain", especially when combined with Avalanche has the characteristics of customizable subnets. If more traditional enterprises want to issue RWA assets in the future, they will most likely cooperate directly with Avalanche, which has the first-mover advantage.

In addition, after the RWA narrative was finalized, in March this year, South Korean game publisher Nexon Group announced that its 2D massively multiplayer online role-playing game "MapleStory" would cooperate with Ava Labs. Officially entered the Avalanche network and launched the Web3 version called "MapleStory Universe", which set the stage for further game empowerment of the Avalanche subnet.

Previously, Avalanche also launched Arcad3, which aims to help traditional game developers seamlessly transition to Web3 games. It plans to replicate the support path of RWA and use chain games as the second core growth point.

In general, Avalanche’s two-line narrative about “RWA + chain games” is also vaguely taking shape. In 2024, some new variables and new products that go beyond the conventional competitive direction are likely to be born. , worth looking forward to.

• Sui: On-chain liquidity has improved significantly

< p>The evolving trend of Sui’s popularity in the past six months has perfectly verified the logic of the crypto world that it’s not too late to eat well. Especially Sui’s on-chain liquidity construction in the past six months can be regarded as a good success example:

The three award-winning projects of the Liquidity Staking Hackathon held from August to October last year, Aftermath, Haedal, and Volo, have become the main drivers of TVL growth in the past half year.



Sui's market value trend this year, source: DeFillama

The most intuitive, since October 14, 2023, Sui TVL broke through for the first time 50 million U.S. dollars, and then the tide rose all the way, hitting a record high of more than 600 million U.S. dollars on February 15th.The liquidity situation on the chain improved significantly, and the community popularity and market discussion also greatly exceeded that of another "Move system" Top public chain” Aptos.

02 What other new public chain trends are worthy of attention?

• NEAR: DA+chain abstraction+AI

NEAR has rarely dropped a hot narrative these days.

First of all, in the battle for DA legitimacy, when Ethereum external data availability (DA) solutions such as Celestia are killing everyone,NEAR also begins to launch its own NEAR DA service - Currently Polygon has chosen to switch to NEAR and bluntly stated that it is "8000 times cheaper than Ethereum."



The second is the emerging technology of "chain abstraction" New NarrativeAs a further step in the large-scale adoption of Web3 after account abstraction, the biggest imaginative space of chain abstraction is to separate the blockchain from users, allowing DApps and projects to return to user-centeredness. central paradigm.

To put it bluntly, it is to create a low-threshold Web3 product environment that is easy to get started and has an experience close to traditional Web2 applications, thereby eliminating the obstacles for users outside the circle to seamlessly enter the Web3 world.

After all, from a product perspective, many people may not need to know what Web3 is, and if it wants to become mainstream, Web3 must be easy for ordinary people to use - most people will not know The existence of Web3 is enough. At present, except for projects such as NEAR, the narrative of "chain abstraction" has not attracted widespread attention, so subsequent efforts may not be a new space for imagination.

Finally, there is the super narrative of "AI", mainly due to the news that NEAR co-founder llia Polosukhin will appear at the NVIDIA AI Conference-it will be held on 3 On the 20th, he will attend the "Transforming AI" keynote speech and panel discussion during the GTC24 conference. NVIDIA founder Huang Jenxun will also participate in the event, which makes NEAR become the "AI head public chain".

The reason behind it is simple and can be summarized in one sentence: llia Polosukhin is one of the co-authors of the AI ​​research paper "Attention Is All You Need" released in 2017 , and this paper is regarded as the foundation of the Transformer language model. It traces its origins. Nowadays, various GPTs that are emerging one after another originate from this paper.

For this reason, NEAR has recently become the only intersection project of the three popular narratives of "DA + Chain Abstraction + AI", and its secondary market performance is even more impressive.

• APT: Learn Solana on Web3 mobile phones, accelerating on-chain liquidity

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As two related projects that also come from Diem core team members, unlike Sui, whose on-chain liquidity and secondary market performance have been booming in the past six months, Aptos seems to be lagging behind in the competition between the two. .

However, some potential variables of Aptos are particularly worthy of attention recently. First of all, naturally following the successful experience of Solana's first-generation Web3 mobile phone Saga, it launched its own Jambo Web3 mobile phone, planning to enter the market through mobile phone hardware. Africa, Southeast Asia, Latin America and other markets.

The price of $99 does seem more attractive, but whether it can ultimately be reused and achieved mass adoption in the blockchain era remains to be seen.

At the same time, since they are both Move-based public chains, liquidity switching within ecological protocols such as Cetus is more convenient. Therefore, with the large-scale improvement of liquidity on the Sui chain, Aptos will undertake part of the spillover funds. The possibility of rotation is also high, and the recent strength of APT compared to SUI may be a direct signal.

• Arweave: Develop AO and develop new narratives

The most indispensable thing in the crypto world is new narratives, but there are not many narratives that can form a linkage between the market and the track. Recently, Arweave is one, especially the public test network Arweave AO released at the end of February, which once ignited the popularity of AR and storage. Especially the positioning of "new generation Internet computer" probably reminds many friends of Dfinity. grand vision.

In general, with the help of AO, Arweave has gained additional verifiable distributed computing capabilities on the original storage layer, and can directly add the computing layer for calculation, thus permanently Running various tasks on the stored data allows the data to become more valuable. In fact, it can be understood as a "decentralized version of AWS based on SCP."

From this perspective, Arweave has implemented distributed verifiable cloud computing, which is a step further than traditional centralized cloud service providers such as AWS and Alibaba Cloud. It is equivalent to expanding the scope of services that were originally limited to permanent The storage narrative completely opens up the imagination of Arweave’s new decentralized data economy.

• Telegram: Backed by 900 million users, the elephant turns around

As a crypto user and Web3 player, apart from exchange applications, what is your most commonly used App? I believe that most people’s choice is Telegram, and TON, as an established L1 public chain, has recently experienced large gains due to Telegram and multiple expectations.

First of all, the expected spot listing after Binance listed the TON perpetual contract trading pair provided TON with a trading environment with minimal liquidity, stimulating the influx of large amounts of funds into TON and the TON ecosystem.

In addition, last month Telegram officially stated that the advertising platform will be officially open to all advertisers in nearly a hundred new countries. Channel owners in these countries will display ads in their channels from Telegram. Get 50% commission from the revenue, and in order to ensure fast and safe advertising payments and withdrawals, the TON blockchain will be exclusively used.

This has slowly opened up TON’s biggest imagination space - directly realizing social + financial functional scenarios such as encrypted asset transfer, trading, and custody in the Telegram application, superimposed With 900 million Telegram users, the potential is undoubtedly huge.

• Filecoin: FVM ecology has a sudden death

< p>On March 14, 2023, theFilecoin Virtual Machine (FVM) was officially launched on the Filecoin mainnet,by introducing programmable smart contracts and starting the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) to run on FVM.

This also means that developers can deploy smart contracts written in Solidity or Yul and compile them into EVM, making the Filecoin network programmable for the first time.

Starboard data shows that as of March 14, more than 3,000 contracts have been deployed on FVM, with net deposits exceeding 23.2 million FIL. Since 2024, Uniswap and others have begun to be deployed on FVM, and LSD protocols such as Glif and STFIL have also greatly improved the liquidity of the Filecoin ecosystem and the richness of DApp use cases.



03  Summary

In general, public chains have always been the most imaginative long-term narrative in the Web3 world. From the "new public chain" craze of Polkadot, Cosmos, EOS, etc. in 2018, to From the rise of homogeneous chains and L2 networks such as BSC and Arbitrum in 2020, to the surging public chains of Solana, Avalanche and Move series in 2021 and 2022, public chains have never lacked protagonists.

Now, as the prototype of a new bull market cycle is gradually emerging, the public chain track, which was full of hype and fanaticism in the early days, has also begun to move closer to the grand narrative and innovation, and people's understanding of public chains is also constantly changing. , we may be able to see the emergence of more practical and large-scale public chains in 2024, which is worth looking forward to.