Author |

Editor | Hao Fangzhou

Produced | Odaily (ID: o-daily)

Author |

Editor | Hao Fangzhou

Produced | Odaily (ID: o-daily)

The Crypto world is no stranger to cyclical cycles. Since the birth of Bitcoin, this industry has experienced many rounds of bull-bear alternation, and it can always find new vitality between ups and downs and chaos. The "rise and fall" of the project continues to evolve and grow.

In the last round of bull market, we have witnessed the explosion of the Layer1 track. Against the background of the continuous spillover of the ecological value of Ethereum, from BSC to Solana, to Avalanche, Fantom, Near, Harmony and even Terra, the major Layer1s have achieved vigorous development, the infrastructure has gradually matured, and various applications have flourished. The rapid growth of online data also ushered in the rediscovery of value at the market level.

Times have changed, and after several months of downward baptism, most of the above-mentioned Layer1 projects have given up more than half of their gains, although it is not ruled out that these projects will continue their previous strong performance in the new round of upward cycle (objectively speaking, these Layer1 still have quite strong competitiveness), but combined with the historical experience that "highlight projects in each round of bull market are often born in the previous round of bear market", at this moment, perhaps we should focus more on those projects that started late and were in the development stage. Early new Layer1s.

There has always been a saying in the industry that "a bear market looks at the first level, and a bull market looks at the second level". Combined with the dynamics of the primary market, the new generation of Layer 1 has become the new focus of institutions. Star projects such as Aptos and Sui have been completed or will soon Completed hundreds of millions of dollars in financing.

In order to help everyone more clearly capture the latest development trend of the Layer1 track, Odaily has selected 10 representative projects from the emerging Layer1 projects that have gradually entered the public eye in the past six months and have not yet issued coins. Below, we These Layer1 projects will be briefly introduced in sequence from the basic situation, core highlights, financing endorsement, latest progress and other dimensions.

It needs to be explained in advance that the projects that will appear below are all selected based on factors such as financing, founding team background, and market popularity. However, since projects are generally at an early stage, there is no guarantee that the project will eventually go smoothly as expected development, and successfully opened the market, so it does not constitute investment advice.

Aptos: Or the most powerful new generation Layer1

In 2019, Facebook, together with dozens of institutions inside and outside the circle, jointly launched the once famous blockchain project Libra (later renamed Diem, for the convenience of reading, Libra will be used uniformly below). Although due to the pressure of supervision and other aspects, Libra finally fell into a "deadborn", but a group of developers who worked for Libra have inherited some development fruits of the project (such as the Move development language), and replaced it with Another, more decentralized path creates a whole new batch of Layer1 projects.

At present, the Libra background Layer 1 that has been released on social media includes Aptos, Sui, Linera, etc. Among them, Aptos can be said to be half a step ahead in terms of financing, development progress, and completeness of supporting facilities.Aptos was born in February this year. At that time, more than a dozen developers and researchers who had worked in Libra jointly formed Aptos Labs and announced that they would re-develop the network based on some of Libra's original technical foundations. Specifically, Aptos It will still be based on Libra's open source code base, using the Move programming language and MoveVM development environment, and will adopt the iterative Diem-BFT consensus. However, unlike Libra, which focuses on cross-border payments, Aptos' vision will focus on improving the security and scalability of Layer 1, creating an infrastructure network that can target billions of people.In mid-March, Aptos completed a round of strategic financing of US$200 million, led by a16z, and participated by many star institutions such as Tiger Global, Katie Haun, Multicoin Capital, Three Arrows Capital, FTX Ventures, and Coinbase Ventures; in the second half of the same month, Aptos The financing was completed again. Although the specific information of this round has not been fully disclosed, it is certain that the participating institutions include Binance Labs, and Aptos will work closely with Binance in development, code review, infrastructure construction, and hackathons in the future.

Currently, Aptos is conducting the second round of operation verification of the incentive test network, and will airdrop 500 tokens to the group of qualified verifiers who have completed the test (registration has ended). For the specific situation of the test, Odaily has previously written "

I chatted with the nodes participating in the Aptos network test, and found that it is quite difficult to make money

", interested readers can take a look.

As for ordinary users, Aptos can currently be accessed through terminal wallets such as Martian and Fewcha. The recommended interactive projects include domain name service Aptos Name Service, decentralized exchange Liquidswap, NFT market Topaz, etc.

Sui: A new unicorn with a $2 billion valuationhttps://docs.sui.io/learn/sui-move-diffsLast week, people familiar with the matter disclosed that Mysten Labs, a development team jointly formed by several former Libra project engineers, is seeking to raise at least US$200 million in Series B financing at a valuation of US$2 billion. This round of financing will be led by FTX Ventures. Pledge of at least $140 million in funding. Mysten Labs is Sui's development team.

As early as November last year, Mysten Labs completed a $36 million Series A round of financing led by a16z, with participation from Coinbase Ventures, NFX, Slow Ventures, Scribble Ventures, Samsung NEXT, and Lux ​​Capital.https://twitter.com/tracecrypto1/status/1546498909513650177Similar to Aptos, Sui also inherited Libra's Move development language, but Sui has made certain improvements on the original version (Core Move) (see:

), launched its own version of Sui Move. The new version has optimized the storage mechanism and address type on the basis of inheriting the security and flexibility of Move, thereby improving network performance and reducing transaction confirmation consumption. hour.

Improving performance has always been the core point of Sui. By classifying transaction types, Sui will adopt completely different consensus mechanisms for independent transactions and transactions with affiliation relationships, thereby realizing transaction parallelization. Improve network performance. According to Trace, partner at Figment Capital (see:

), the early data of running the Sui node on the MacBook Pro shows that it can process more than 120,000 Token transactions per second.

At the end of May, Mysten Labs announced Sui’s token economic model and incentive-related content. The total supply of token SUI is 10 billion pieces, a part of which will be circulated when the main network is launched, and the remaining SUI will be unlocked or released in the next few years. distributed in incentives. In terms of use cases, the uses of SUI include participating in PoS pledges, paying Gas fees, supporting the Sui economic system, and participating in on-chain voting, etc.

This week, Sui just released Sui Wallet, a Chrome extension wallet for testing purposes. In addition, Mysten Labs has previously announced that the Sui Incentive Testnet will be launched in August, and interested friends can start preparing.

Linera: another layer1 of Libra Gang backgroundhttps://medium.com/@linera/introducing-linera-bdb809735552）。

After Aptos and Sui, Linera is the third Libra background Layer1 that has publicly announced the completion of financing.

On June 29th, Linera announced the completion of a US$6 million seed round of financing. The leading investor in this round was a16z. Participating institutions included Cygni Capital, Kima Ventures, and Tribe Capital. The funds raised will be used to hire developers and Other staff come together to build the protocol.

Compared with the other two projects, Linera's public appearance is later, and the information that has been disclosed for the time being is also less. The current reference source is only an introductory article originally released by the official (see:

To put it simply, Linera hopes to build a low-latency blockchain that can be easily extended like web2 applications. To this end, Linera focused on the research focus of its founder and CEO Mathieu Baudet when he was in Libra. The FastPay protocol and the Zef protocol superior. With these two protocols, blockchains could theoretically remove mempools entirely and minimize interactions between validators, greatly speeding up simple operations like payments.

It is Linera's vision to popularize this approach and make it practical, allowing most account-based actions to be quickly confirmed within a fraction of a second.

Canto: A New Vision for Stablecoins in the Cosmos Ecosystem

Although still in beta, Canto has already attracted a lot of attention from the market.

From the perspective of positioning, Canto is a Layer1 network built based on the Cosmos SDK, but unlike some other Layer1s, Canto will come with some DeFi functional components, such as the lending market forked from Compound, DEX forked from Solidly, And a brand new stablecoin called NOTE.

From the perspective of composition, these three DeFi components are complementary to each other. The issuance of NOTE does not directly follow the mint mechanism, but needs to be generated through over-collateralization of assets such as ETH, ATOM, and CANTO in the lending market. In the future, NOTE will serve the lending and trading market as the stable currency with the highest application priority on the Canto chain (or even the entire Cosmos ecosystem).

After the UST thunderstorm, the entire Cosmos ecosystem has a large gap in the decentralized stablecoin market, and the emergence of NOTE can also be regarded as filling this gap to a certain extent. It can be seen that the design of NOTE has absorbed the lessons of UST to a certain extent, such as the choice of over-collateralization, and the construction of a more direct support mechanism (mint becomes a loan). If NOTE can successfully copy UST's adoption expansion path, Canto, as Layer1, also hopes to quickly open up the situation along this expansion.

Gear: The most anticipated smart contract chain in the Polkadot ecosystem

The Cosmos ecology has Canto, and the Polkadot ecology also has Layer1 Gear with high expectations.

In December last year, Gear, the Polkadot-based smart contract layer, announced the completion of $12 million in financing. This round of financing was led by Blockchange, with participation from Three Arrows Capital, Lemniscap, Distributed Global, and Polkadot founder Gavin Wood.

Gear is an advanced smart contract chain that supports WebAssembly (WASM). After the parachain slot is successfully captured and connected, developers will be able to deploy their Dapps to Gear in the simplest and most effective way within 5 minutes. Thus entering the Polkadot ecology.

In terms of technical features, Gear includes but is not limited to the following features: First, it supports a variety of programming languages, such as Rust, C, C++, etc., which will greatly reduce the cost of developers who are not familiar with the blockchain. The threshold of entry will help bring more talents to the industry; second, when the application runs in the browser, WebAssembly supports the program to run at a code execution speed close to the local level, which will help improve the actual experience of the user; The third point is about the interaction of smart contracts. Gear uses the Actor model for communication. This model is designed to be shardable and parallel, allowing developers to use different languages ​​for asynchronous programming and improving the efficiency of asynchronous transaction processing. , so that various business logic Dapps built on Gear can run at high speed.

Celestia: Make Celo willing to downgrade as a "green leaf" Layer1

Celestia's former name was LazyLedger. Although most readers may not be familiar with these two names, you may have some impressions of the following two things.

One is that when Polygon launched Avail, a general-purpose scalable data availability layer, last year, Mustafa Al-Bassam, co-founder of Celestia, tweeted that Avail's introduction was almost a verbatim copy of the Celestia introduction he wrote in 2019.

Second, in April this year, Celo treasury organization Ocelot issued a document stating that it plans to change the development roadmap of the public chain, transforming its Layer1 architecture into a Layer2 Rollup on top of Celestia, using the Celestia network to achieve shared security and data availability. , without taking on the burden of validators and consensus problems.

Celestia is a very special Layer1. The project positions itself as "the first modular blockchain network". Specifically, Celestia will modularize the technology stack of the blockchain network, and at the same time decouple the consensus layer and the execution layer. As a consensus layer, it will only undertake the work of transaction ordering and data availability verification. The specific transaction execution will be It will be distributed over other executive layer networks (such as Celo) linked to Celestia.

In other words, Celestia does not adopt a single-chain architecture, but a multi-chain architecture of "consensus layer + execution layer", and hopes to achieve scalability, flexibility and interoperability beyond traditional blockchain design.

However, objectively speaking, Celestia has some similarities with Polkadot's "relay chain + parachain" in terms of architecture, and the latter's multi-chain architecture development route does not seem to be so satisfactory for the time being. The fulfillment of expectations remains to be seen.

In February this year, Aleo completed another US$200 million Series B financing, led by SoftBank and Kora Management, followed by a16z, Tiger Global, Samsung Ventures and others.

Strictly speaking, Aleo is not a new project, and its founding team was formed in 2019. After nearly two years to complete the development of the underlying protocol framework, Aleo completed a US$28 million Series A financing in April 2021, led by a16z, Placeholder VC, Galaxy Digital, Variant Fund, Coinbase Ventures, Ethereal Ventures, Polychain Capital, Slow Ventures, Dekrypt Capital, Scalar Capital, Zero Knowledge Validator, and former Coinbase CTO Balaji Srinivasan participated in the investment.

It is worth mentioning that in the first quarter, Aleo reached a cooperation with the blockchain game platform Forte (which raised more than 900 million US dollars last year), and the latter will use Aleo's solution to bring zero-knowledge proof into blockchain games.

In February this year, Aleo completed another US$200 million Series B financing, led by SoftBank and Kora Management, followed by a16z, Tiger Global, Samsung Ventures and others.

Aleo is positioned as a private Layer1 that supports smart contracts. Its technical core lies in the two core sections of Zexe and Leo. The Zexe consensus protocol improves on ZeroCash's original zk-snarks technology, which can not only encrypt simple token transfer transactions, but also Interactive transactions at the application level are possible; Leo, as the programming language of the Aleo ecosystem, can modularize the zk-snarks of the Zexe consensus protocol, so that any Dapp operating on the Aleo platform can use zk-snarks.

It is worth mentioning that in the first quarter, Aleo reached a cooperation with the blockchain game platform Forte (which raised more than 900 million US dollars last year), and the latter will use Aleo's solution to bring zero-knowledge proof into blockchain games.

Previously, Aleo has completed two rounds of testnet testing, and the third round of testing is also under preparation. After the third round of testing is completed, Aleo will also enter the mainnet release stage, at which time its tokens will also be released simultaneously. Aleo has previously disclosed that its tokens will adopt a halved inflation model.

In April last year, Anoma completed its first round of financing of US$6.75 million, led by Polychain Capital, and participated by Electric Capital, Coinbase Ventures, FBG Capital, CMS Holdings, Lemniscap, Cygni Labs, and Walden Bridge Capital.

The two core concepts of Anoma are "barter" and "privacy". The project hopes to build a privacy payment system that serves everyone, so as to truly return financial sovereignty to individuals.

The so-called "barter" means that Anoma hopes to create a network that allows any asset to be used as a means of exchange or payment, so that individuals can choose to use asset classes in transactions. It is worth mentioning that any asset here refers to any exchangeable goods, services, or anything that can be digitally represented with intrinsic value, including assets created on Anoma, other assets transferred to Anoma through interoperability agreements Chain assets, and legal tender in the form of stable coins, etc.

In November of the same year, Anoma raised another US$26 million in financing, and Polychain Capital continued to lead the investment, with participation from Fifth Era, Maven Capital, Zola Capital, Electric Capital, CMCC, etc.

The two core concepts of Anoma are "barter" and "privacy". The project hopes to build a privacy payment system that serves everyone, so as to truly return financial sovereignty to individuals.

The so-called "barter" means that Anoma hopes to create a network that allows any asset to be used as a means of exchange or payment, so that individuals can choose to use asset classes in transactions. It is worth mentioning that any asset here refers to any exchangeable goods, services, or anything that can be digitally represented with intrinsic value, including assets created on Anoma, other assets transferred to Anoma through interoperability agreements Chain assets, and legal tender in the form of stable coins, etc.

"Privacy" is better understood. In Anoma, in order to protect user privacy and prevent others from collecting data retrospectively, the sender, receiver, amount and asset denomination will be encrypted, and zero-knowledge proof will be used to ensure the transfer of funds. In addition, assets on the Anoma network will have a unified shielding pool shared between all assets when they are transferred, rather than shielding each asset individually. In this way, the more participants, the more assets, and the more frequent the transfer, which greatly increases the concealment of asset transfer data.

Iron Fish: Aiming to be the privacy layer for the Web3 world

Iron Fish is positioned as a Layer 1 privacy network. The project adopts the PoW consensus, and will use zk-SNARKs and Sapling protocols to provide the highest level of privacy protection for every transaction on the chain. The biggest highlight of Iron Fish is that the network hopes to protect privacy without compromising the accessibility of transactions on the chain. For this reason, Iron Fish is equipped with an additional "readable key" (view key) for each address on the chain. ), the address holder can grant other people read-only permission through this key.

Currently, Iron Fish is still in the second round of incentive testnet stage, and this round of incentive testing will continue until the nodes are stable and fully functional, and all preparations for the mainnet launch are done.

According to the plan, Iron Fish will open up cross-chain bridges with other mainstream blockchains in the future to provide privacy protection for other mainstream assets, so as to gradually realize its ultimate vision - becoming a privacy shield for the entire Web3 world.

Currently, Iron Fish is still in the second round of incentive testnet stage, and this round of incentive testing will continue until the nodes are stable and fully functional, and all preparations for the mainnet launch are done.

In mid-April (at that time, Jump hadn't been tossed to death by Terra), Keone Hon, head of research at Jump Trading, announced his resignation and founded Monad. Execution efficiency to unlock the potential of the EVM ecosystem. According to Keone, it is expected that the performance of Monad can reach more than 1000 times that of Ethereum, and it can carry more complex types of applications, thereby achieving wider adoption.

According to the plan, Iron Fish will open up cross-chain bridges with other mainstream blockchains in the future to provide privacy protection for other mainstream assets, so as to gradually realize its ultimate vision - becoming a privacy shield for the entire Web3 world.

Monad: The scaling ideal of Jump's predecessor "brain"https://monad-labs.notion.site/EVM-scalability-the-case-for-radically-higher-throughput-53b5188b9b034701ba0565a468691b6aIn mid-April (at that time, Jump hadn't been tossed to death by Terra), Keone Hon, head of research at Jump Trading, announced his resignation and founded Monad. Execution efficiency to unlock the potential of the EVM ecosystem. According to Keone, it is expected that the performance of Monad can reach more than 1000 times that of Ethereum, and it can carry more complex types of applications, thereby achieving wider adoption.

In Monad's view, thanks to Ethereum's sufficient user education, EVM has almost become a "standard" choice like Javascript in the web2 world. However, there are certain problems in the current expansion path of Ethereum. Both fragmentation and rollup will cause the blockchain to be divided into independent execution environments, thereby destroying the composability of the chain, so it is necessary to build a higher-performance underlying network.

In the current Monad public information (see:

), although Monad emphasizes that Layer1 needs to come up with higher TPS to meet the innovative needs of applications, but it does not clearly mention how Monad will achieve a qualitative leap in TPS. However, we can see from the few sentences on the official website that Monad will most likely focus on low-latency programming, compiler optimization, and multi-threaded computing.

New era, new challenges

In each cycle, a number of projects with distinctive characteristics of the times will emerge. Looking at the above-mentioned projects, we can see that while the new generation of Layer 1 continues to pursue the biggest proposition of "scalability", they are also actively responding to other propositions such as "privacy", "combinability", and "application richness". .