The soaring speed of Blast's 200 million + TVL in 2 days has really made the entire Layer 2 market, which has been in the doldrums for several months, tremble and feel like a "vampire is coming". Mission PUA, airdrop bait, to Vitalik style involution, etc., Blast's interference has completely let go of Layer 2's shameless bottom. My point of view: @Blast_L2 's raid on Layer 2 may not be its success, but it must be a great blessing for the Layer 2 industry .
Why do you say that? It is not difficult to understand when we reflect on the current situation of the Layer 2 industry from a macro level.
1) According to L2beat statistics, there are over 60+ Layer 2 projects of all kinds, involving OP-rollup, ZK-rollup, Validium, Plasma and other categories, but most of these projects are still in the technical Architecture and Narrative stages. Debates surrounding the debate between OP-rollup and ZK-rollup started round after round. In the end, technically, ZK-rollup won, and then a large number of ZK-rollup solutions emerged, each with its own characteristics.
Starknet took the lead in realizing the open source and decentralization of Prover components, and the limit TPS has exceeded 890,000+. Scoll and Taiko are popular for being more equivalent to EVM. zkSync is praised for its hidden ERC4337 account abstraction experience, and it may recently set off another trend. New narrative zk+Plasma, and more.
The VCs are very busy, and the hair-raising parties are always on the way to spring plowing. The Layer 2 market is experiencing unprecedented technological narrative prosperity. However, is this the end game for Layer 2 expansion?
2) Leaving aside technical factors and talking about ecology, Arbitrum and Optimism, OP-rollup’s peerless twins, have overwhelming ecological advantages and are far ahead. Arbitrum leads the pack with more than 600+ ecological protocols and a TVL of more than 7B. However, zkSync, which is regarded as the final rollup, only has a TVL of 500M after more than half a year of development.
Moreover, Arbitrum has not seen much significant data growth since the token was launched. The meme season led by PEPE did not happen in layer 2, and Bitcoin just wants to start over and recreate the glory of layer 2.
The entire Ethereum layer 2 ecology has always been stuck at a high level.
The core reason is rarely discussed. I think Layer 2 has not found its own application stimulation with strong native tendencies. The troika of pure financial applications and DeFi (DEX, lending, Derivatives) cannot drive the growth of the Layer 2 ecosystem at all.
As its name suggests, Layer2 should attract long-tail Mass Adoption users who are sensitive to gas fees and user experience UX thresholds. If they are just trying to relocate Minner, Farmer, scientists, institutions and other financial giants mainnet is already stable.
Sorry, they care more about "security" than performance improvements. The much-criticized Sequencer centralized security issue of Layer 2 has also been quietly rationalized at some point. On the other hand, ZK-rollup, which is more popular in technology, only increases the threshold for developers on ZK circuits, and there are no big killer applications that require ZK.
With such an ecological fundamentals and no stimulation from large capital inflows outside the bull market, Layer 2 is destined to be in an embarrassing predicament with a grand technical narrative but poor ecological implementation.
The market is silently waiting for the arrival of the Cancun upgrade, hoping that there will be an obvious breakthrough after Cancun. Maybe, but unfortunately, Cancun EIP-4844 only made some optimizations in the gas fee, and it cannot directly drive the ecological transition.
3) Let’s look at the Stack strategy that the four kings are proud of. From a long-term narrative perspective, Layer 2 modularizes core Sequencer, Prover and other components, and uses these shared components to strengthen Layer 2 and Layer 3 multi-chains. This strategy cannot be wrong. , but there is always a feeling of being too hasty.
Take zkSync as an example. Its own ecological development was slow, so it launched the zk-Stack strategy. Suddenly zkSync became a part of the ecological application. What a wise move, leaving everything to the developer community. The subtext is just zk-stack. The development is slow, but zkSync is already a good model chain. After all, it has a group of loyal pay gas users... (omit the sentence %&**&*% here).
Optimism relies on Op-Stack to build a strong reason to build a centralized Sequencer. After all, it makes sense to share the Sequencer and use the governance ideas of the committee to build a Superchain to make up for the lack of decentralization.
Therefore, the Stack strategy is actually a clever strategy that avoids the shortcomings of Layer 2's current technology and ecology, and is an abstract forward-looking strategy. Now look at various Stack strategies, in addition to adding some more grand narratives, and integrating scarce development in the industry In addition to user resources, C-end users will not see any benefits in the short term.
above.
Returning to the topic, in my opinion, it is not an exaggeration to say that Blast entering Layer 2 is purely disruptive.
In the short term, it will take away the scarce liquidity that other Layer 2s regard as treasures. In the long term, it will cause a Layer 2 in urgent need of Build to prematurely respect an inaction method of lying down and earning. It is no exaggeration to say that it completely violates the Layer 2 expansion ecology. Original intention.
Blast has been poisoned by the economics of paradigm's web3 Tokenomics. Seeing how lifeless the Layer 2 ecology is now, it tried to give a strong dose of medicine to stimulate it.
From the perspective of building Layer 2, this starting point is wrong. No matter how high the TVL is and how large the number of users is, it will only be internal friction in the existing market. Its individual success does not mean much, but from the perspective of an industry disruptor, it must be applauded. .
What can be expected is that Blast's disruption may have two direct impacts:
1) There is a wave of token issuance in Layer 2. Imagine if Blast took away most of the liquidity in the market. What other options would other ZK-rollup Layer 2 players have left aside from issuing tokens to stimulate traffic? , even if they are not in a hurry, the VCs who have invested heavily behind the scenes will push hard;
2) Layer 2 reshuffle. Needless to say, there are already too many Layer 2 products in the market. After being ripped off, the Layer 2 industry is bound to accelerate the reshuffle of the fittest. In particular, bringing some quick or patchwork Layer 2 products back to their original form will open up a whole new situation for the Layer 2 market.
In short, Blast may not necessarily bring Compound-like governance token DeFi Summer to Layer 2, but it will at least accelerate the Layer 2 industry to the eve of Summer.
