How does the Ethereum Layer 2 ecology stand in line?
Editor's Note: This article comes fromChain News ChainNews (ID: chainnewscom)Editor's Note: This article comes from
Chain News ChainNews (ID: chainnewscom)
Chain News ChainNews (ID: chainnewscom)
, Author: Pan Zhixiong, Lianwen Research Director, published with authorization.
Don't say that we didn't remind readers: now is the critical moment for the Ethereum Layer 2 ecology to stand up. The expansion of Ethereum is imminent, and there are so many expansion plans, how investors, developers and users should choose is a big problem.
At the same time, these Ethereum Layer 2 expansion solution development teams also hope that their technology can be adopted by developers. How to attract those application protocols and DApps on Ethereum that actually have users and let them become their own partners is obviously the key for the Layer 2 expansion solution development team to seize the city in the ecology and occupy a favorable competitive position for the future. In this regard, most people are still waiting and watching.
If you are not yet clear about the background and advantages of the Rollup solution, or the current competitive situation of each camp, I hope this ecological map compiled by Lianwen can help you understand the latest developments in this field.
It should be noted that this map is likely to change dramatically in the coming weeks. At that time, the comparison between the old and new camps will help you understand the changes and development pulse of this hot field more clearly.
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From Plasma to Rollup, Eight Teams That Can't Be Ignored
As early as three years ago, the Ethereum community realized the importance of scalability and introduced concepts such as the first-generation expansion solution Plasma or state channels. However, since the rapid growth of decentralized financial (DeFi) applications and users, the community Only then did I truly realize and feel that the bottleneck of throughput is restricting the development of the DeFi ecosystem.
More and more DeFi projects and wallets are beginning to think about which Ethereum expansion solution to choose, which can reduce the transaction cost on the chain for users while taking into account the composability and security of DeFi.
In the past two years, Rollup has gradually evolved two types of solutions, one is Optimistic Rollup evolved from Plasma's "fraud proof", and the other is realized with the blessing of zero-knowledge proof technology ZK Rollup.
In these two types of schemes, different teams have introduced different implementation methods. For example, Offchain Labs' scheme is more complicated than the "fraud proof" mechanism in other Optimistic Rollups, so they call their scheme Arbitrum Rollup. For example, the zero-knowledge proof scientist team StarkWare's solution is similar to ZK Rollup or Plasma, and is a comprehensive solution, which they call Volition and Validium.
Up to now, there are more than a dozen teams that have launched Rollup expansion solutions, the most important of which are these 8:
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Among so many solutions, how should DeFi projects and wallet developers in the Ethereum ecosystem choose their own Layer 2 network? According to the opinions of many developers, in addition to the topic of whether Layer 2 will reduce security that everyone will discuss, the following three important factors are usually discussed.
ecological development
Mainnet launch time
Although most of the expansion plans have been launched on the test network, and some projects have launched some functions on the main network, but when the full-featured version of the main network will be launched may be the most important reference factor. Because at the current stage, capacity expansion is an urgent matter, and the fastest online solution may get more attention and dividends.
ecological development
Therefore, many projects will consider observing which Layer 2 network the head project of the DeFi protocol chooses, and then make a corresponding choice. After all, the head project will bring more users and keep assets in this network.
Development Difficulty
For some Layer 2 networks, in order to reduce the cost of developers migrating applications to Layer 2 as much as possible, they will be compatible with Ethereum's smart contract development model to the greatest extent. However, there are still many expansion solutions that need to introduce a new programming language due to their own technical difficulties, which will increase the time cost for developers.
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Ecological panorama
In order to help developers better track the current ecological development of Layer 2, Lianwen has summarized the main investment institutions of these eight teams, as well as some public and undisclosed applications, wallets or infrastructure in the ecology.
The general solution will focus on providing a set of full-featured or Turing-complete smart contract development capabilities similar to the Ethereum main chain, and each team can choose to develop their own applications on this platform.
Dedicated solutions currently focus on one or some specific functions, such as transfer or transaction, so other applications cannot develop their own applications in the network for the time being. However, according to the follow-up plans of these companies, full-featured smart contract support is still under development, but it should be later. For example, Fuel Labs said that it may not be until the end of 2021.
From the perspective of the number and quality of ecological applications of general solutions, Matter Labs, Optimism, and Offchain Labs may be the three most concerned teams at present. StarkWare also has many applications, but they are all related to transactions.
Top Contestant: Matter Labs
Matter Labs’ transfer-only zkSync scaling technology is already live on the mainnet, but the mainnet launch date for the general-purpose solution and the resulting new programming language Zinc may not be so soon. Because the ZK Rollup technology is realized through zero-knowledge proof, it is difficult to develop a set of general scheme technology.
But the advantage is that ZK Rollup uses zero-knowledge to prove that the cryptography technology of zk-SNARKs ensures security, so the security can be almost equivalent to the Ethereum main chain.
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Top Contestant: Optimism
In order to support Ethereum's smart contracts, Optimism has launched the Optimistic Virtual Machine (OVM), an execution environment that is fully functional and fully compatible with the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM). OVM is a copy embedded in EVM, allowing developers to use the same developer tool set and smart contract language as EVM when using Optimistic Rollup.
With OVM, the migration cost of application developers will be much lower, and they can directly write Solidity smart contracts, so this may be the most important core technology of Optimism.
However, because Optimistic Rollup is used, that is, the "fraud proof" inherited from Plasma, the default "optimistic" (Optimistic) believes that the node will publish the latest and accurate data to the main chain, so in terms of security, it will Slightly lower than mainnet. Although the risk of loss of principal is low, it may cost time (longer exit period).
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Ed Felten, co-founder and chief scientist of Offchain Labs, a professor of computer science at Princeton University and White House chief technology officer and senior adviser during the Obama administration, has previously stated that Offchain Labs will focus on private chains, enterprise solutions and gaming. , but the current product will build a two-layer network for Ethereum.
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