Although the native token has not yet had a TGE, Scroll has already gone bankrupt in the airdrop Farmer community due to the previous "digital begging" and the recent "open airdrop" incidents.
For any L2 project, the relationship with airdrop Farmers is quite complex. They have areas of collusion, such as cooperating to meet the requirements of VCs and CEXs, cooperating to open up and establish early demand for block space, and constructing initial LP liquidity, but they also have stages of mutual harm, such as during airdrops, the project needs to make trade-offs between the team, VCs, CEXs, and airdrop Farmers, and the airdrop Farmers are often the sacrificed ones.
This is mainly because the L2 War has actually ended, and leading OP universal Rollup projects such as Arbitrum, Base, and Optimism have fully leveraged their first-mover advantages and operational capabilities, dividing up the incremental market share of Ethereum parallel expansion.
The ZK universal Rollup that has always been touting "technically better", facing the remaining scarce ecological resources, is unable to build an application ecosystem with real active users on a meaningful scale.
The typical life cycle of a ZK universal Rollup project is as follows:
L2 token airdrop, airdrop Farmer enters ➡️ generates beautiful L1<>L2 block space Gas price difference income ➡️ unlimited PUA activities to expand Gas price difference income ➡️ Cancun upgrade DA fee drops by 2 orders of magnitude, Gas price difference income plummets ➡️ the free-riding mode ends, and they have to do a TGE airdrop ➡️ airdrop Farmers dump the tokens, withdraw DEX LP, withdraw TVL and exit, the L2 chain ecology data collapses ➡️ the L2 project enters the stage of living by selling coins
ZkSync is like this, Taiko is like this, and Scroll is also like this.
But Scroll, which takes "Ethereum orthodoxy" and "good personal relationship with V神" as the foundation of its existence, may not care at all about the "noise" from the market and the emotional feedback from the airdrop Farmer community, and they are still doing their own thing.
So let's try to maintain a rational and calm mindset, and observe through on-chain dynamics how Scroll is doing things.
1⃣According to the L2beat website's record of L2 milestones, in order to maintain the PUA economics, and extract as much gas fees as possible from the airdrop farmers, the Scroll team, which has always boasted of Ethereum equivalence, will delay the deployment of the Cancun upgrade on its L2 until April 29th. In contrast, other mainstream L2s such as Arbitrum, Zksync, Starknet, and Optimism deployed the Cancun upgrade within two days.
As shown in the image, in March and April of this year, Scroll's on-chain profits easily surpassed Arbitrum's. In March, it earned $3.63 million, and in April, it earned $3.21 million.
2⃣Unlike other L2 TVLs that are mainly in ETH, WETH, WBTC, and stablecoins, Scroll's current $1.26B TVL is dominated by reStaking assets. Among them, Stone has $306 million, solvBTC has $129 million, weETH has $117 million, pufETH has $122 million, and rsETH has $74 million.
Facing the fierce external competitive environment, Scroll, due to the serious lack of real active users in its ecosystem (with a recent daily average Tx of only 200,000 to 400,000), has to leverage its BD capabilities and cooperate with the LRT project to attract reStaking assets through a Lego-stacking mechanism to expand its TVL.
As shown in the image, the inflow of Stone, the largest component of Scroll's TVL, is highly discrete, indicating that it is related to specific events or activities, rather than normal user behavior.
It is worth noting that compared to bare assets like ETH, WETH, WBTC, and stablecoins, reStaking assets are much weaker in terms of liquidity, security, and value derivation capabilities, and in a sense are "dead assets" that serve more to prop up the TVL facade.
3⃣Scroll is proud of its zk rollup security and ZKEVM full equivalence on the technical side. But Scroll's mainnet is still in Stage 0, and the upgrade exit window mechanism, escape hatch mechanism, and Rollup crash recovery mechanism have not yet been deployed.
Since the token has not yet had a TGE, Scroll has not yet built a DAO governance mechanism, and the contract upgrade authority is currently controlled by a centralized multi-signature address. It is expected that after the token TGE, it will be transferred to the newly established ecological DAO organization.
The good news is that Scroll's zk Proof validity proof system has been deployed on the mainnet. This enhances the system security of Scroll Rollup, but also requires Scroll to pay a high Proof verification cost, with the highest verification fee paid to the L1 (Ethereum mainnet) reaching $2.43 million in March.
To this end, Scroll carried out the Curie upgrade in July, successfully reducing the Proof verification cost by greatly compressing the state data. At the same time, Scroll is also actively exploring the zk co-processor network to further reduce the cost of ZKP generation and verification.
In summary, Scroll's poor operational status can be described in two words: "born at the wrong time" and "the harder you try, the more unfortunate". Although the Scroll team has managed to maintain through strategies such as delaying the deployment of the Cancun upgrade and using the Lego-stacking mechanism to siphon reStaking assets, and ultimately met Binance's listing criteria, delivering a result to VCs and the community, which is commendable from a primary market perspective.
But from the perspective of the secondary market, Scroll, which lacks a real ecosystem and a new narrative, has already turned from a magic scroll into a disposable toilet paper at the moment of its TGE.
That's all.
