Comparison of several major Layer2 projects
Author: Five Fireball Leader
Produced by: Vernacular Blockchain (ID: hellobtc)
Cover: Photo by Shubham's Web3 on Unsplash
With the recent release of Orbit by Arbitrum and the release of the Alpha Era Mainnet by Zk-Sync, the second-tier battle is about to spread again.
In the past 6 months, the second layer can be said to have completely defeated Alt Layer 1. Whether it is Solana, FTM, or Near, BSC, etc., its popularity and performance of star projects can be said to be far behind by Arbitrum and Optimism , Aptos and Sui of the Move series have just started, and the future is not yet clear. Let’s put it aside for the time being. The real competitors of Arbitrum and Optimism will most likely be several opponents of the ZK series.
So this article simply sorts out the advantages and disadvantages of several major Layer2s.
Optimism
- Advantages: "relative" orthodoxy + first-mover advantage of OP Stack.
Optimisim has a slightly orthodox feel for several reasons:
-The founder has a very good relationship with Vitalik, and is a close brother to Uniswap founder Harden
-They are the first team to propose the concept of Optimistic Rollup
-Defi, the star of Uniswap and SNX at the time, both chose to cooperate with Opotimsim first
-Coinbase is also cooperating with Optimism to use Opstack as the Base chain
In short, Optimisim gives people a feeling of the "eldest son" in ETH L2, and Arbitrum has a bit of "concubine" that is visual sense, although this concubine is better than the eldest son.
The first-mover advantage of Optimisim Stack is also obvious. For example, the recent popular RAAS (Rollup as a Service) track can be said to be brought up by Optimisim Stack. RAAS projects such as Caldera directly cloned Optimisim Stack, and Coinbase followed suit. Optimisim Stack cooperation, as well as Optimisim Craft, a powerful publicity tool... Optimisim Stack occupies the RAAS track while occupying the big narrative of modularization. With the vision of the super chain, it is basically full of narrative and painting. up.
- Disadvantages: TVL is not as good as ARB, star projects are not as good as Arbitrum, ecological project innovation is not as good as Arbitrum, technology is not as good as Arbitrum, basically everything is not as good as Arbitrum at present, and fraud proofs are not yet online...
The disadvantages are basically on the bright side. Whether you look at TVL or star projects, or ecological project innovations, or core technologies such as fraud proofs, or the frequency of submitting data to L1... In short, as the eldest son, everything is rejected The outgrown Arbitrum follows the rhythm of rubbing on the ground.
TVL and star projects: 900 million, star projects...original, to be honest, I can't pick one, you might say Velodrome, which is ranked number one! To be honest, this is a clone + magic modification of Solidy (3, 3), and after the Optimisim Token subsidy ends, I am curious whether his (3, 3) flywheel can continue to spin.
The only commendable projects in Optimisim are SNX and Perp. After all, UNI and AAVE are all involved in the deployment of the whole chain. Only SNX and Perp are the only favorites for Optimisim.
Arbiturm
- Advantages: The strongest TVL, the most original projects, the current L2 experience is the best, Stylus+Orbit may continue to be strong in the future.
The strength of Arbitrum is on the bright side. The fraud proof has been launched early. After Odyssey got stuck and was scolded, a major upgrade came. After the upgrade of One to Nitro, the user experience has been improved qualitatively, and an Anytrsut technology has been used to make it Nova, the progress is so fast!
Seeing that Optimisim Stack dominates the RAAS field, Arbitrum immediately developed Stylus+Orbit. In addition to L3, it also supports Rust, C++ and other languages to write contracts. Optimisim has taken the modular route, and we are pro-Web2 The route, Optimisim Stack VS Stylus+Orbit will be watched again in the next two years, and they are all good things.
- Disadvantages: Legitimacy is slightly inferior to Optimism, and the Arbitrum AirDrop reveals that the current L2 performance is still unfeasible.
Legitimacy was mentioned on Opitmisic just now, so I won’t repeat it. Arbitrum is actually the first Opitmisic Rollup to go live on the Mainnet , but Optimism was the first to be proposed, but I always feel that I lost a bit of legitimacy. However, there are many cases where a concubine surpasses the eldest son, so it is actually not a big deal.
But some time ago, the AirDrop of Arbitrum was really a lot of moths. The RPC nodes were almost wiped out. Although the network was also blocked, it was actually not hung up. But users don't know and don't care about this. They think your network is down when they can't use it. Everyone doesn't care about the difference between RPC nodes and network nodes. Therefore, the current L2 still has a long way to go on the road to undertake large-scale applications and massive users.
TVL and star projects: 2.2 billion, star projects... too many, GMX and its 20+ derivative projects, Magic, RNDT, Excalibur... Arbitrum has the feeling of DeFi Summer on ETH in 2020.
Zk-Sync
- Advantages: The fastest access to the test network, and a good reputation among test users and developers. It belongs to a chain with strong engineering and BD capabilities.
ZK-Sync feels that it is currently the most "orthodox" ZKEVM in Zk- Rollup . Whether it is the number of test users, user feedback, developer ecology, testnet launch date, etc., all support this "impression".
All in all, the only "usable" ZK-EVM at present is Zk-Sync. Apart from other things, this point of progress is a big advantage. There are already ZK-RAAS projects on the market, which are modified using the open source version of Zk-Sync.
- Disadvantage: At present, there are no particularly original projects. Most of them are regular projects such as DeFi and NFT. Some are branches of existing teams on other chains on Zk-Sync. As an Alpha itself, he can also understand it.
TVL and star projects: Tens of millions of TVL, star projects include Syncswap, Mute.io, ZigZag, Argent, etc. It is worth mentioning that there are many new Derivatives projects on Zk-Sync that feel like they will be launched together. For example, Phezzan for Order-book, Increment for AMM , Synfutures for synthetic assets, etc.
Starkware
- Advantages and disadvantages: Starkware is a very "fragmented" project, so I have to rub its advantages and disadvantages together.
This split is mainly reflected in user reviews. If Zk-sync’s reviews from users and developers are both “very good”, Starkware has a good reputation from users (testnet users and wool parties) "Extremely bad" and "Excellent" on the developer's side.
I have seen similar remarks in several WeChat groups: "TPS is terribly slow, it takes a long time to Cross-chain, the fee is very expensive, and the valuation is exaggerated to 8 billion. If you upgrade the Mainnet, you have to upgrade your wallet. If you don't upgrade, you may lose money. No more, the theory is amazing, the engineering rubbish... ".
And I have talked with the 10+ Starkware ecological development team, and the feedback I got is basically the following: "Cairo is amazing! It is much better than Solidity. Starkware is fast and cheap (should refer to the test network), and the developer community atmosphere is very good. Well, the innovations keep coming. There is a sense of the Ethereum community in 2014, this is the next ETH...".
This is the feeling that Starkware brings to people. I don’t know if there is a chance to stitch this “fragmentation” after the mainnet goes live. Furthermore, compared with several other star projects, Starkware has the lowest degree of open source in the ZK system, which is quite a "black box" style. It is also the only ZK- Rollup that uses its own language and does not do ZKEVM, so the entry threshold is higher from the perspective of users and developers.
TVL and star projects: TVL is not easy to count, because Starkware itself also includes two systems, StarkEX and Starknet; star projects may be the most among them, although many of them are not online, but the originality is definitely the most among them.
To give a few examples:
-The most well-known ones are undoubtedly DYDX and Immutable X. However, dydx will leave Cosmos in the second half of the year. I don’t know if there will be DiversiFi or other new Derivatives projects to fill the space.
- Some new items include:
Dex – Jediswap
Metonymy - Zklend
Derivatives– ZKX
ZKEVM – Kakarot
Full chain game - lootrealms, influence, Topology
ZKML+AI – Modulus Labs
The last thing worth mentioning is the name of Starkware's ecological project. It is visible to the naked eye that it is starting to get together with Dragon Ball, such as Kakarot (Monkey King) who is doing ZK-EVM, and a compiler called Shenlong (Shenlong), a Substrate-based Sequencer called Kaioshin (Kaiwangshen), a light client called Beerus (God of Destruction Beerus).
So if you see projects called Vegeta, Buu, Piccolo, and Tianjin Rice here in the future, don't be too surprised...
Polygon EVM + Scroll
The reason why these two are put together is because they actually have a bit of a "difficult brother" feel, and they also have some similarities in terms of strengths and weaknesses.
- Advantages: The best degree of open source, the strongest EVM compatibility.
In terms of the degree of open source, if Starkware is a black box, Zk-sync may be a semi-black box, and Scroll and Polygon EVM are almost open boxes. These two are definitely the two best in terms of open source.
EVM compatibility is also very similar. The 4 different types of ZK-EVM proposed by V God last year are arranged in order of compatibility or equivalence. Zk-sync is type 4, while Scroll and Polygon are both type 3, and in Towards type 2 development.
- Disadvantage: There are no ecological projects for the time being.
Although the Mainnet is not online, you often see various news, such and such projects are built based on Zk-sync or Starkware, and you often see this kind of team in the primary market, but you rarely see it based on Polygon- For the new projects built by the EVM or Scroll team, I have not heard of any proposals or rumors from several leading DeFi projects to open branches here.
Polygon EVM may be able to migrate many projects from the existing Polygon side chain. After all, Matic is a Token. For Scroll, the ecological cold start may be a more difficult road.
I look forward to the team finding a good way to break the game.
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