What new changes in public chain infrastructure such as ETH are worth paying attention to recently?

Author: Lao Bai, Partner of ABCDE Investment Research

Recently, in the primary market, the hottest track is undoubtedly AI, followed by BTC. 80% of the projects discussed every day are concentrated in these two tracks. I can talk about 5 or 6 AI projects a day at most.

It is foreseeable that the AI ​​bubble will reach its peak in the next two years. With the launch of hundreds of new AI projects, the market value of the AI ​​track will reach its peak. When the bubble finally bursts and everything is in chaos, unicorns that truly find the fit between AI and Crypto will be born, pushing this track and the entire industry forward.

So in the current AI overheated environment, calm down and take a look at what changes have taken place in the infrastructure level in recent months, especially in the track of public chain infrastructure?Some of the new things are worth mentioning.  

01 ETH, or the further deconstruction of the monolithic chain

When Celestia first proposed the concept of modularization and the concept of the DA layer, the market actually spent a lot of time to digest and understand it. Now this concept has long been deeply rooted in people's hearts, and various RaaS infrastructures have flooded to such an exaggerated stage of the number of infrastructures> the number of applications> the number of users. (RaaS: the abbreviation of Rollup-as-a-Service, which refers to the provision of ready-made Rollup products and services to help application developers quickly start Rollup)

In the past few months, the execution layer, DA layer, and settlement layer have made some different technical progress, and each layer has derived new technical solutions. Even the concept of the settlement layer is no longer exclusive to ETH. Let's briefly talk about the representative technologies of each layer.

02 Execution Layer

The hottest concept in the execution layer is undoubtedly parallel EVM, represented by Monad, Sei, and MegaETH. Some existing projects such as FTM and Canto are also planning to upgrade in this direction. However, just as not all ZK projects will protect privacy, the projects labeled with parallel EVM actually have different technical routes and ultimate goals.

Take a picture of Sei for an intuitive display. It is obvious that in an optimistic situation, the performance improvement of changing from existing sequential processing to parallel processing is still very obvious.

Parallel EVM can actually be divided into several different technical routes:

1) From the perspective of how transactions are parallelized - there is nothing new under the sun, except the difference between a priori and a posteriori

A priori is represented by Solana and Sui, requiring transactions to clearly state which parts of the chain state they have modified, so that before packaging the block, it is detected in advance whether there is a state conflict (such as access to the same AMM pool), and if so, the conflicting transactions are discarded.

A posteriori is also called optimistic parallelism, represented by Aptos BlockSTM, that is, it is assumed that everyone has no conflict and the transaction is collected first, and then detected after execution.If a conflicting transaction is found, the transaction is declared invalid, the result is refreshed, and it is re-executed, and this step is repeated until all transactions in the block are executed. Sei, Monad, MegaETH, and Canto use similar solutions.

We have also seen parallel solutions for state conflict scenarios (such as accessing the same AMM pool as mentioned above) in the primary market, but it seems that the project will be relatively complex. It is not sure whether it is commercially feasible and is still under evaluation.

2) From the degree of emphasis on parallel EVM - it can also be divided into two schools

One is Monad, represented by Sei, which takes how to trade in parallel as the main idea of ​​expansion, that is, parallelism is the main narrative. For example, in addition to optimistic parallel processing, Monad also has a specially developed MonadDB, and asynchronous I/O is specifically used for parallel processing.

The other is the idea of ​​Fantom, Solana, and MegaETH. Parallelism is one of the expansion solutions, but it is only one of them. Parallelism is an auxiliary narrative, and performance improvement depends more on other technical solutions.

For example, Fantom's Sonic upgrade focuses on the FVM virtual machine + and the optimized Lachesis consensus mechanism. Solana's next stage focuses on the modular architecture of the new Firedancer client, optimized network communication mechanism and signature verification, etc.

MegaETH's goal is to achieve Realtime Blockchain. First, based on the newly developed Reth high-performance client of Paradigm, further optimization and improvement have been made in the state synchronization mechanism of the full node (only synchronizing state differences rather than all data), the hardware design of the Sequencer (a large amount of high-performance RAM with storage function for state access to avoid slow disk I/O), and the data structure improvement of Merkle Trie. It is equivalent to a comprehensive and all-round improvement in software, hardware, data structure, disk IO, network communication, transaction sorting and parallel processing, pushing the performance ceiling of EVM to the limit and approaching "Realtime Blockchain".

 03 DA layer

The DA layer does not have a particularly large technical iteration, so the degree of volume in this track is far less than that of the execution layer. After all, there are only a few major players.

ETH's CallData has been upgraded to Blob, and the fees of each Layer2 have dropped significantly. Now ETH is already a "not so expensive" DA.

Celestia's greater role is that after its launch, as the first project to propose the concept of the DA layer, it has raised the DA track from the ceiling of 2 billion FDV to 20 billion, and since then, the pattern and imagination have been opened up.Celestia is naturally the first choice of DA for many new Layer2 Appchains. (FDV means "fully diluted valuation", which is a valuation indicator derived from the token price * total volume)

Avail has separated from Polygon. Technically speaking, it is more like an "enhanced version of Celestia". For example, it uses the Grandpa+BABE consensus mechanism of Polkadot. Compared with Celestia's Tendermint, it can theoretically support more nodes for decentralization. It also supports Validity Proof, which Celestia does not support, etc.Of course, the technical differences are far less important than the ecology. Avail still needs to catch up at the ecological level.

EigenDA was also launched with the EigenLayer mainnet two days ago. As one of the strongest narratives and the most commercial cooperation projects in this round, I personally feel that the adoption rate of EigenDA will not be low. In theory, as long as it "feels safe and cheap", not many projects really care whether you use Validity Proof or Fraud Proof, whether DAS supports it, etc.

It is worth mentioning the following three DAs:

1) Near DA
Near is a magical public chain. It was originally designed for sharding and is still doing it now, but it also developed DA while doing sharding. It is cheaper than Celestia and supports fast settlement of Layer2;

Chain abstraction - Recently Near launched chain signatures, allowing users to request signatures for transactions on any chain through a single NEAR account;

AI - Its founder illia is one of the eight Transformers, and the person who was tapped on the shoulder by Huang Renxun at the NVIDIA conference is now planning to hire AI engineers, and the official website will release relevant announcements next month... Hexagonal warriors, I also threw it into the DA track.

2) BTC &CKB

Because BTC's Layer1 does not support smart contracts and cannot be directly settled, dozens of BTC EVM Layer2s are now basically using BTC as DA. The only difference is whether to throw ZK Proof directly onto BTC or throw the Hash of ZK Proof onto it, as if they cannot call themselves "BTC Layer2" if they don't do this.

Recently, I actually encountered a new project saying "I don't pretend anymore, I am ETH Layer2, DA settlement is all on ETH, but I serve the BTC ecosystem!" It's quite funny...The only alternative expansion plan is RGB++ launched by CKB. In this framework, CKB has become a DA-like existence, and BTC has become the settlement layer of RGB++ because of the black technology of UTXO isomorphic binding.

3) New DA

I will talk about two new DA ideas I have seen, and I won't mention the project names. One is to combine DA with AI. In addition to being a high-performance DA, it can also serve as a storage layer for AI large models, training data and training trajectories; The other is to improve the error correction code mechanism of the underlying DA such as Celestia, which can provide a more robust network status in an unstable state such as a dynamic network (several nodes are randomly disconnected in each round).

04 Settlement layer

Originally, this layer was almost exclusive to ETH. DA has Celestia to compete with and has a number of Layer2s to execute itself. Only for settlement, other chains such as Solana and Aptos do not have Layer2 yet. BTC's Layer2 does not use and cannot use BTC as settlement. Currently, the only settlement layer you can think of is ETH.

However, this situation will change soon. We have seen several new projects heading in the direction mentioned at the beginning of the article, and some old projects have also begun to transform in this direction, that is, the ZK verification/settlement layer further deconstructs ETH (stealing ETH's business).

Why is there such a concept? The reason is that running contracts on ETH Layer1 to verify ZK Proof is not the best choice in theory:

Technically, in order to verify the correctness of ZK Proof,developers need to write verification contracts based on Solidity according to the ZK project and the ZK Proof System they choose. Among them, it is necessary to rely on a lot of cryptographic algorithms, such as the need to support different elliptic curves. These cryptographic algorithms are usually relatively complex, and the EVM-Solidity architecture is not the best platform for implementing these complex cryptographic algorithms. For some ZK projects, the cost of writing and verifying these verification contracts is also very high. This has hindered some ZK ecosystems from joining the EVM ecosystem to some extent, so ZK-friendly languages ​​such as Cario, Noir, Leo, and Lurk can only be verified on their own Layer1. At the same time, it is always difficult to turn around when updating or upgrading these things on ETH.

In terms of cost,although the "protection fee" DA paid by Layer2 accounts for the majority, ZK's contract verification also requires Gas fees, and verification on Ethereum is definitely not a cheap option. In addition, ETH Gas fees soar from time to time and turn into a "noble chain", and the verification cost will also be greatly affected.

So there are new ZK verification/settlement layer concept projects,which are still relatively early, represented by Nebra. Old projects also have Pivots in this direction, such as Mina, and Zen, which has just passed the new proposal.

The overall idea of ​​most projects in this track is basically:
- Support multiple ZK languages

- Support ZK aggregate proof, more efficient and cheaper

- Faster final confirmation time

ZK settlement layer and decentralized Proof Market are likely to be tied together at present, after all, you need computing power in addition to technology. Maybe we will see some settlement layer projects cooperate with Proof Market projects, or the settlement layer with computing power will directly build a Proof Market, or the Proof Market with technology will go out and build a settlement layer to take over. The market will have the final say on how to go.

05 Summary

Other areas of infrastructure, such as OEV in the Oracle and MEV fields, and ZK light clients in the interoperability field, should have been written in many articles on the Internet, so I will not repeat them here. Next time I see something new and interesting, I will share it with you.