Three tracks from a primary perspective: BTC, Solana, and Restaking

Original author: Lao Bai, ABCDELabs Source: X, @Wuhuoqiu

My favorite public account "Orange Book" published an article some time ago, titled "Crypto Impotence"

"A terrible boredom is spreading in the Crypto world, like the Black Death. No one knows where it started, but unknowingly, you find that this disease is everywhere"

Think about it, in the recent circle, there is really nothing worth writing about in terms of technology. The only hot topics are concentrated on Memes such as Pepe, Trump, and Jenner. The last technical hot spot may be the "Pandora" of the duality of image and currency?

The previous research report mainly focused on the new ideas of each layer under the Modular narrative on ETH. In this issue, let's take a look at the "1 to 10" on the three tracks of BTC, Solana, and Restaking.

1. BTC

The Rune that many people are looking forward to did not bring the expected popularity. If BRC20 or Ordi is a "hectic" surprise, Runes is a collective "everything is ready, only the east (upward) wind (line)" welcoming ceremony from Cex to Dex to Infra. However, the old saying "the hottest will die" is true, at least in the short term. In the long run, protocols such as Runes, Atomical, RGB&RGB++ are still expected to inject new vitality into BTC's asset issuance. The upgrade of BRC20 two months ago is also clearly working towards a more flexible functional route. Apart from anything else, the native stablecoin based on BRC20 is now much easier to implement.

The most worth talking about in the BTC ecosystem in the past two months, in addition to the UTXO Stack I wrote about before, should be the three projects launched by Unisat: Fractal - @fractal_bitcoin, Arch Network - @ArchNtwrk, and Quarry - @QuarryBTC

Fractal - has a very "peculiar" design concept. In essence, you can think of it as a 100% Fork of BTC, but the block time is reduced to 30 seconds

You may be thinking - what the hell is this, isn't this just a BTC test network? Litecoin, BCH, BSV, etc. at least have some of their own things, but you are just a 99% mirror chain, what is the point? How can you ensure security?

Actually, it has quite a few meanings

1. Fractal uses the same POW and SHA256 as BTC, has market value and incentives, is much more stable than the BTC testnet (those who have used the BTC testnet know it), and is much faster (one block in 30 seconds)

2. Joint mining with 1/3 of the BTC mainnet (mainnet miners can mine a Fractal block every 90 seconds), theoretically achieving 80-90% of the BTC mainnet security

3. Because it is 100% consistent with BTC, all kinds of XXRC20 assets and infrastructure on BTC can be seamlessly migrated without changing a line of code

4. It will implement "controversial" opcode proposals such as OP_CAT and ZK native verification OPCode faster than the BTC mainnet

5. Because 4, in the future, inscription-based contracts can be implemented through scripts

6. If someone else does this, you will find it strange, but Unisat is the best choice

Arch - Compared with various "aesthetic fatigue" BTC EVM L2/side chains, Arch brings programmability to BTC through an indexer + ZKVM with decentralized Prover, similar to a 1.5 layer - transactions are triggered through L1, and various asset conversion logics are executed in Arch's ZKVM, and finally ZK proofs are generated and the results are broadcast back to the BTC main network

It feels similar to RGB++, both rely on BTC main network transactions to trigger, but the difference is that RGB++ uses isomorphic binding based on CKB Cell, while Arch relies on indexer + ZKVM to achieve

Quarry - The BTC-based joint mining has been made into an Infra form, which is equivalent to making a set of miners or computing power versions of "OP Stack" + "Eigen Layer". In short, you can quickly launch a POW chain through their Quarry, which can be jointly mined with BTC miners and ensure its own security through the hashrate of BTC miners. The token rewards are given to the participating miners, similar to EigenLayer's AVS rewards. Compared with EigenLayer or Babylon, which strive for the POS security of BTC and ETH holders, Quarry strives for the hash power security of miners. However, in the market where POS is popular, it is still worth observing how much market share POW Appchain can take.

2. Solana

The most interesting thing about Solana in recent times should be the concept of "modularity"

As we all know, ETH is taking the concept of modularity, and Solana has always been the representative of the monolithic chain camp

In the past few months, we have indeed talked about several projects that are doing modularization on Solana

such as MagicBlock - @magicblock, Sonic - @SonicSVM, Solforge, Mantis - @mantis, etc.

Magicblock's main feature is an Ephemeral (temporary) Rollup - The main concept is "delete after use, burn after reading". This concept should have been first proposed by AltLayer22 in 2023, but it is not the main selling point of Alt Layer now. MagicBlock is a project focusing on Solana's full-chain game engine. This Ephemeral Rollup should be part of their solution. Sonic focuses on the Gaming Appchain on Solana. It has just officially announced the completion of financing. It uses a HyperGrid Framework architecture that allows games to easily launch an SVM Appchain. As the first L2 prototype, Sonic can be understood as XAI on Arb?

Solforge is a more general Appchain Stack, which is intended to be positioned as the SVM version of OP Stack or Arbitrum Orbit

Mantis is an SVM Rollup of the Intent settlement layer, which is not limited to serving the Solana ecosystem. OrderBook Flow related to EVM can also be settled in Mantis. After all, Solver is born with partial chain abstraction attributes

Here are a few interesting points worth observing

1. Although Solana focuses on single-chip high performance, it is said that after a game became popular in the first half of the year, the TX of this game accounted for as much as 20% of the entire chain, and this is still the case with only 4 or 5 digit daily active users. I dare not imagine what kind of load will be borne if the daily active users are raised to a higher level or several similar game chains appear. This may also be an important catalyst for the idea of ​​"modularization" of the Solana ecosystem

2. Toly himself went from opposing modularization last year to being neutral in this direction this year, and we can see a lot of clues from his Twi this year

3. Many people in the Solana Foundation tend to support modularization, and many developers also believe that Solana's modularization is imperative

4. Kyle of Multicoin has always been an evangelist for Solana and monolithic chains, and he is said to still oppose this concept

Solana's infrastructure in the next 6-12 months should be an interesting observation. In addition to the warming of the modularization narrative, the launch of the streamlined version of FireDancer before the end of the year and the full version next year will improve Solana's TPS and stability, which is also worth looking forward to

Three. Restaking

Restaking should be the hottest track in the past six months, without a doubt

In short, because Eigen is born with the ability of smart contracts, it can set up relatively complex Slashing mechanisms. For example, the first AVS EigenDA was created in this way. If you want to use Babylon to make something like "BabylonDA", it is impossible because the script of the original BTC chain cannot support such a complex thing.

But at the same time, Babylon's black technology EOTS (extractable one-time signature) and BTC timestamp protocol are also not available in Eigen. This is also the confidence that Babylon can do a unique Restaking in the BTC ecosystem, focusing on a "native BTC Restaking", which is also impossible for Eigen to achieve.

Of course, this native BTC Restaking can achieve limited functions, basically covering two points. One is to help the POS chain pass BTC The timestamp protocol prevents Long Range Attack, and secondly, it helps the POS chain to achieve or cold-start its POS security consensus. In a nutshell, if you want to launch a chain, you can come to me, and if you want to make a DAPP, please turn left and go to Eigen next door.

If you really want to use Babylon to make an AVS, can you implement something like EigenDA or Oracle? The answer is "yes", but you need an "extension package". For example, Chakra - @ChakraChain or SatLayer - @satlayer, "put a layer of baby" on top of Babylon, use the built-in smart contracts of these two projects to implement a more complex Slashing mechanism, and you can develop DAPP genre AVS like DA, storage, oracle, etc. based on this.

To be more abstract, in terms of functionality alone: ​​Babylon+Chakra/SatLayer = Eigenlayer

On the Babylon side, in addition to the above two projects that are committed to making Babylon as "complex" as Eigen, there are also ecological projects such as Solv Protocol, Lorenzo and other LRT niches that target EtherFi and Renzo. On the Eigen side, because it is inherently "complex enough", the Stack or "extension package" has been stacked to a higher level, such as Ethos - @EthosStake is doing AVS's Coordination/Interoperability Layer, Aethos - @aethosnetwork is doing AVS's Programmable Policy (policy editing) Layer, etc. I feel that as the Stack on the Eigen side becomes richer and richer, and the infrastructure becomes more and more complete, Eigen may become more and more like an AWS. In the end, you can achieve the "security level + infrastructure package" you want to buy by clicking and dragging. On top of that, whether you want to start a chain or make a storage or Oracle-like DAPP, it is completely your freedom. P.S. I recently chatted with a FA, and he said that he had talked to at least 50 or 60 VCs recently, some of which were looking at Infra, some were looking at games, and some were looking at Bitcoin. There was only one track that all VCs were looking at, and they were all looking at it! Guess which one it was?

The answer is: Ton...

However, investing in Ton is much more difficult than ETH or Solana... Just think about it, if Notcoin came to VC with Deck or Demo half a year ago, how many VCs would decide to go all in after seeing this thing...

If there is a chance in the next research report, I will write about Ton again