Produced | Odaily (ID: o-daily)

Produced | Odaily (ID: o-daily)

The narrative of the public chain is changing, and the industry reshuffle is also in progress.

With the increasing expansion of the Ethereum DeFi ecosystem, high chain operation costs and slow confirmation speeds have become obvious obstacles to further market expansion. Based on this background, the new generation of public chains have turned to new narratives, from "Ethereum Killer" to "Being Friends with Ethereum", and through cross-chain technology to open up inter-chain interoperability, to provide a solution for the congested Ethereum. Fang bailed out.

Along with the new story, the new generation of public chains such as BSC, Avalanche Protocol, Solana, and NEAR made a lot of noise, and also set off a wave of "public chain surge" in the secondary market. In contrast, the performance of the older generation of Ethereum competitors is slightly quiet. With the departure of BM, EOS is in a quagmire, and TRON seems to have lost its grandson "marketing genius" for a long time Over a long period of time, its market attention has dropped significantly compared to when the Just series just started.

But Brother Sun is Brother Sun after all. From the "Parachain Auction" incident, to the "Midnight Jihad" farce, and to the recently announced "Five Coin Joint Mining", TRON has once again become the focus of the market. While people were laughing and scolding, a piece of less-obtrusive news caught our attention—the total circulation of TRC-20 USDT has exceeded the $14 billion mark. In terms of scale, TRC-20 USDT and ERC-20 USDT have formed a rivalry. Looking closely at the number of daily transfers between the two, the former even leads by a large margin.

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After the waves are turbulent, has TRON fallen behind?

Judging from the performance of the secondary market, although TRX has raised its head after Sun Ge became active again, it obviously did not catch up with the recent round of "public chain surge". Some voices believe that this is because TRON has fallen behind. But another explanation seems to be more reasonable - TRON's development stage determines that it is destined to have nothing to do with the outbreak of this wave of new-generation public chains.

The cross-chain bridge work that the new generation of public chains is vigorously promoting can be understood to some extent as using its own network as the Layer 2 of Ethereum. Although all new-generation public chains have absolute advantages over Ethereum in terms of performance, because these public chains started late and their own ecological scale is small, it is too difficult to build a decentralized application system independent of Ethereum from scratch. It is too difficult, so we have to choose to "rely on" Ethereum to undertake the latter's value overflow.

On the other hand, despite the constant controversy, the first-mover advantage determines that its ecological scale is already large enough compared to latecomers, and it has also built an application system that is completely independent of Ethereum, so it is unnecessary from a development perspective.” Yisheng" is based on Ethereum. The proof of this judgment is that few people know that Tron has actually opened up the one-click migration with Ethereum, but judging from the community announcements in the past few months, more publicity focuses on the Just series. on its own DeFi system.

As of February 23, some data provided by Tronscan can intuitively show the current ecological scale of the TRON network:

• The circulation of TRC20-USDT on the TRON network has exceeded 14.3 billion pieces;
  

• The total number of TRON network accounts has exceeded 22 million;

• The cumulative transaction records of the TRON network have exceeded 1.5 billion;

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Fundamentals that have been overlooked

One thing that many people may not realize is that since the outbreak of DeFi, the external public chain that has undertaken the most value overflow of the Ethereum network is Tron. The reasons can be roughly divided into the following three points:

First of all, the new generation of public chains are not ready for development work. Even Polkadot, which has the most momentum, most projects in the ecosystem still need to wait for the official launch of the parachain slot auction, although the Rococo V1 test has recently started , but judging from the progress, it is still slightly slower than the original expectations of the community, and objectively also gave Sun Ge a chance to "touch porcelain".

Secondly, the Husband Chain with a more complete infrastructure has already started its layout before the outbreak of this round of DeFi. Dramatically, EOS, another representative of the Husband Chain, encountered setbacks at the beginning of the story. EMD’s escape incident exposed that non-multi-signature EOS contract accounts can transfer funds in the contract, which directly affects users’ understanding of EOS-based DeFi. trustworthiness. At that point in time, TRON started a frenzied reproduction of the Ethereum DeFi ecosystem almost without opponents.

Finally, TRON has inherent advantages in undertaking the value overflow of Ethereum. From a development perspective, the TRON Virtual Machine (TVM) is compatible with the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) environment, so developers can use Solidity and other languages ​​to develop, debug, and compile smart contracts in the Remix environment instead of learning new Programming language; From the perspective of user experience, TRON also has the most similar operating experience to Ethereum.

At present, TRON’s DeFi ecosystem has formed a closed loop, and the Just series of products alone have covered major tracks such as stablecoins, lending, DEX, oracles, and cross-chain assets.

As of February 23, JustStable, a stablecoin issuance protocol that benchmarks against MakerDAO, has generated 124 million USDJ stablecoins;

Justlend, a lending agreement against Aave, currently has a deposit scale of US$520 million and a loan scale of US$29.48 million;

The liquidity of Justswap, a decentralized exchange that benchmarks against Uniswap, has reached 650 million US dollars, and the 24-hour trading volume is close to 85.79 million US dollars.

Cross-chain Tokens against wBTC and other cross-chain anchor coins have currently issued 15,111 BTC, 20,004 ETH, and 257,186 LTC on the TRON network.

In addition to the Just series, there are also some other DeFi projects built by the community in the ecosystem, such as Golden Eggs, GaussFans, and Unifi Protocol, which have recently had good daily activity data.

The most intuitive feeling of using TRON DeFi products is silkiness and freedom. The so-called silky smooth means that the response speed of the contract is quite fast, and a few simple operations are basically confirmed in seconds; free means that the nearly zero handling fee is completely negligible, and users can freely operate according to their own judgment. Players who have not experienced it personally can imagine how they feel when using TRC-20 USDT to transfer funds.

Another thing I have to mention is that although TRON has a clear advantage over Ethereum in terms of actual TPS, it is surprisingly focused on expansion. The Sun Network (DAppChain) project sounds like Sun Ge is advertising himself at first glance, but as Tron’s smart contract sidechain expansion project, what Sun Network hopes to achieve is to provide the main network with unlimited expansion capabilities and provide Subsequent growing on-chain activity provides support.

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The magnified image

From a fundamental point of view, TRON has shown a vibrant public chain ecology. However, perhaps due to Sun Ge’s personal influence, when people talk about TRON, they always ignore its fundamentals and focus on impressions. These impressions are often inseparable from Sun Ge himself and the TRON network. of the controversies.

As mentioned above, TRON-based DeFi has achieved good results, but many veteran DeFi players have said that they have never tried TRON-based DeFi projects. After consulting some users, we found that the community’s biggest doubt about the TRON-based DeFi lies in the uneven quality of the applications, which are full of “earth dog” projects. Trust drops.

In response to this, we contacted Chen, a developer who has participated in the Just series of projects. Chen said that the incident of running away has happened on every public chain, and the reason for the decision is the moral bottom line of the development team itself, so it is not fair to use the incident of running away to criticize the public chain. Since the operation cost on the TRON chain is lower, for those teams with malicious intentions from the beginning, the cost of developing on the TRON network is also lower, but the lower operation cost on the chain is definitely not and It should be the reason for being criticized. The flood of "earth dog" projects is actually a pain in the early stages of DeFi development. Now that TRON also has a whitelist mechanism, it can be seen that the situation is developing positively.

In addition to the low quality of the project, another major doubt in the community about TRON-based projects lies in the "plagiarism problem". In fact, since the birth of TRON, the debate surrounding this point has never ceased.

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New Opportunities and Challenges

Under the industry reshuffle, the competitive landscape of the public chain is showing a new scene.

The explosion of DeFi has helped Ethereum establish a huge ecological scale advantage in 2020, but as the price of ETH breaks through its all-time high, the operating cost on Ethereum’s chain has reached the highest level in history, and an ordinary transaction often requires payment Tens of dollars in gas fees, and even "10,000-dollar gas fees" appeared during the recent major correction, which is not friendly enough for developers and small-scale users who deploy applications, and expansion + fee reduction is imperative.

For the new generation of public chains, the development of infrastructure is a top priority, and it is not realistic to catch up with the scale and network effects of the pioneers in the short term, so it seems to be a good decision to break through the ecological barriers with Ethereum. Time and the final effect still need to wait and see.

The situation with TRON seems to be quite different from other projects. Compared with the new generation projects, TRON’s infrastructure and ecological applications are indeed more complete. The deep quagmire of EOS has made TRON the only challenger in the old chain that can challenge Ethereum. Although it is not clear what the so-called "TRON Parachain Auction" is going to do, the other two key points mentioned by Sun Ge, DeFi and the direction of Sun Network, are already clear enough.

With the gradual transition from Web 2.0 to Web 3.0, the number of users and throughput on the chain in the future is bound to expand exponentially. The mission of the public chain in the new era is to prepare for the explosive growth of activities on the chain and provide more powerful underlying support. From this perspective, what TRON has been doing has never deviated from its purpose of "creating the next generation of global financial and Internet infrastructure".

The public chain competition has just gone through the first half. Looking forward to the future, opportunities and challenges coexist, and it is still unclear who will be the champion in the next era. The window of opportunity for DeFi is gradually closing. No one knows what the next window will be and when it will come. Based on the present, public chains can only win the opportunity to explode when it comes.