The war to reconstruct on-chain transactions: The underlying layer is changing, who is really at fault?

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If you are still concerned about "which coin will rise," you may have already missed this round's deepest narrative.

Written by: 0xResearcher

From chain integration to chain rewriting, DeFi is starting to tinker with the underlying infrastructure again.

During the 2021 DeFi Summer, everyone was issuing tokens, mining, and making minor innovations; in 2023, DeFi is reconstructing again. But this time, it's not about module integration or gameplay innovation, but about "reversely" rolling up from the bottom layer.

You'll find that more and more projects are not building the wheels of the previous generation, but questioning:

"Is this wheel designed incorrectly?"

Thus, chain trading has begun to show two paths:

  • Either do everything yourself, build the chain, write the matching, and handle wallet interactions

  • Or only write the bottom-layer components, modularize everything, and let others combine them into a system

Today, we'll discuss this ongoing bottom-layer reconstruction battle. Not analyzing projects, but looking at what problems these projects are solving and why we should care about this trend.

Problem One: Why can't chain trading be done well?

Chain trading, starting with the AMM (Uniswap) revolution, once broke through market-making barriers but also shattered efficiency.

If you want depth, you lose efficiency; if you want efficiency, matching has to return to centralization.

In recent years, chain trading has tried to upgrade from AMM to "chain-based CEX," resulting in either L2 (cheap gas but no users) or creating a chain (built a chain but no one adopts), ultimately discovering that the problem is not TPS, but:

  • Matching and settlement are not decoupled

  • Liquidity is fragmented between chains and DEXs

  • Cross-chain trading experience is poor, with cumbersome wallet interactions

So, the current direction is not "a better DEX," but directly rebuilding the trading system's foundation.

Hyperliquid: The chain trading system might not need to be layered

Hyperliquid's approach is: No L1/L2 separation, no matching/settlement separation, simply create a native high-performance chain and directly write matching and trading modules into the chain logic.

Benefits include:

  • Matching processed on-chain, trades verifiable

  • No need for Sequencer, no external settlement nodes

  • All assets and liquidity aggregated in a unified account system

Simply put:

"Not hanging a DEX on the chain, but making the chain itself the exchange."

This approach is somewhat like Solana, but without VM, directly native and customized for trading. The cost is high coupling and poor scalability, but the experience is truly smooth.

Orderly is more like a multi-chain form of Hyperliquid, taking the "rural surrounding urban" approach - not one chain dominating, but using modularization and multi-chain layout to enable more chains and projects to use "native exchange" level performance and liquidity.

[Translation continues in the same manner for the rest of the text]

If you are still concerned about "which coin will rise," you may have already missed the deepest narrative of this round.

The protagonist of this round is not the coin, but the structure itself.

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Disclaimer: The content above is only the author's opinion which does not represent any position of Followin, and is not intended as, and shall not be understood or construed as, investment advice from Followin.
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