Original author: James, BlockTempo
Since the pioneering Layer 2 networks such as Arbitrum and Optimism began building on Ethereum to support faster and cheaper transaction experiences a few years ago, Layer 2 networks have emerged like mushrooms after the rain. According to L2 Beat data, there are currently 73 running Layer 2s, 20 Layer 3s, and 81 upcoming projects and 12 archived projects.
However, Andre Cronje, the director of the Fantom Foundation who is known as the "father of DeFi", and Andre Cronje, the CTO of Sonic Labs, tweeted today, aiming their guns at Layer 2, stating that Layer 2 as an application chain is illogical for developers, and listed multiple reasons:
Almost no basic infrastructure (stablecoins, oracles, institutional custody, etc.) upon deployment
No foundation or lab to provide assistance
Centralized architecture is vulnerable to attacks
Fragmented liquidity and forced through cross-chain bridges
Lack of user and developer communities
Spending time on solving the above issues rather than focusing on applications and users
Eliminating network effects
Transaction confirmation times are still relatively long (some vendors are unwilling to cooperate)
Developing alone (no collaborative teams)
Andre Cronje also stated that application chains have severely underestimated the cost of infrastructure and compliance (including browsers, hosting, trading platforms, oracles, bridges, toolkits, integrated development environments, deposits and withdrawals, native issuance and integration, regulation, compliance), and that just in 2024, application chains will have spent $14 million in expenses, a large portion of which are recurring costs.
Regarding Andre Cronje's statements, developers have been discussing them extensively. Some developers expressed agreement, saying "100% agree, it's meaningless to build products on application chains without the support and assistance of a foundation" and "Given such high overhead, I'm curious why there are even more L2s coming out, they need a lot of transactions to make money".
However, there are also developers with different opinions. One developer said that although the ubiquitous L2 basic infrastructure is limited, the stronger composability between L2 (and even L1) completely eliminates the need for local stablecoins, oracles and institutional custody, and few people understand the framework shift.
This developer also disagreed with many of Andre Cronje's points, emphasizing that L2 application chains are of course decentralized and secure, and admitted that the infrastructure cost of application chains may be higher than standalone applications, but believes that as service demand competition intensifies, the cost of much of the infrastructure will tend towards zero.
Andre Cronje Pushes Sonic
In Andre Cronje's view, Layer 1 should focus on using technology to enhance its scalability, rather than constantly creating Layer 2 problems. He has recently been leading the design and development of the Layer 1 blockchain Sonic (formerly Fantom) network, and the Fantom Foundation first disclosed last October that it would launch Sonic, aiming to improve scalability and performance.
In early September this year, the Sonic testnet was officially launched, and on September 25th, Andre Cronje announced that the Sonic mainnet will be officially launched in December this year, inviting developers to build applications on its ecosystem, and also stated that Sonic has introduced a credit scoring mechanism, with the potential to become the first public chain to unlock the $11.3 trillion unsecured loan market.
At the time, Andre Cronje had heavily promoted the performance of his own Sonic network, including that up to 90% of the transaction fees would be returned to the developers, the transaction per second (TPS) would exceed 10,000, the transaction finality (TTF) would be around 1 second, and it would support native stablecoins. In terms of bridging with Ethereum, he is committed to developing new native bridging technology for the Sonic Gateway to greatly improve the security and convenience of transferring assets from other chains.
