Original author: Luccy, BlockBeats

Original editor: Jack, BlockBeats

From Fellowship to Stack to RaaS, the competition between L2 has entered the gaming field this time.

Yesterday, Optimism co-founder and chief scientist Ben Jones proposed that Treasure join Optimism Superchain and build a Treasure Chain based on OP Stack. Immediately afterwards, Omar, head of BD of zkSync developer Matter Labs, published a proposal in the TreasureDAO community today, hoping that Treasure Chain will use ZK Stack as Layer 2.

It is reported that in the Treasure ecosystem, the most interesting game is a game called Lighthouse. It is currently a diamond partner of TreasureDAO. In the future, there is a high probability that the Lighthouse game can be funded by TreasureDAO’s harvester of 600 w MAGIC Tokens. , the harvester funding is used to pay players for gold gains.

Related Reading:Take the lighthouse game as an entry point to observe TreasureDAO》

As early as November 25 last year, TreasureDAO co-founder Karel Vuong had made it clear that TreasureDAO was building a game chain and planned to use MAGIC as a Gas token, possibly based on the Arbitrum chain or the Cosmos chain. Subsequently, TreasureDAO team member Sambino revealed in the Discord community that Treasure Chain Litepaper will be released in a week. However, after Optimism stepped in to compete for Treasure Chain, Karel Vuong announced that the release of Treasure Chain Litepaper was postponed to February 5.

Interestingly, in this Treasure battle, Arbitrum was the first to intervene.

Long before Optimism proposed it, Treasure had been listed as a member of its L3 track. In addition, in the early days, TreasureDAO and Arbitrum both promoted the Lighthouse game many times and held many AMA activities. As a relatively large-scale community, TreasureDAO has a certain mass base. TreasureDAO occupies the leading position of games in the Arbitrum ecosystem and has a certain say in the entire Arbitrum ecosystem.

L2 competition has entered a white-hot stage during last year’s bear market

The battle for L2 refers to the battle to build critical infrastructure and gather an initial critical mass of protocols and users. Not just Treasure, due to the many star projects, the fierce competition on the L2 track has become a well-known fact in the entire encryption industry.

In addition to OP Stack and ZK Stack launched by Optimism and zkSync, competition between the OP Rollup camp and ZK Rollup camp in the RaaS field also includes Orbit launched by Arbitrum and Appchain launched by Starknet. In the field of zkEVM, the tense relationship between the two domestic light projects Scroll and Taiko has also become an open secret in the industry.

Stack Battle

In the L2 competition, when zkSync is mentioned, Optimism comes to mind. In June last year, zkSync quickly launched ZK Stack after OP Stack, which also aroused heated discussions in the community.

OP Stack, which has the first-mover advantage, not only cooperated with coinbase to create the super chain structure and the second-layer solution Base, but also won the favor of BNB Chain, a leading public chain, and launched a new expansion solution opBNB for BNB Chain.

In addition, many application development teams also choose to develop their own application chains based on OP Stack. For example, the game digital economy platform Cocos-BCX cooperated with NodeReal to jointly develop the first Rollup Layer 2 on BNB Chain centered on Web3 games based on OP Stack; a16z Crypto launched Optimism Stack rollup client Mag; on June 22, NFT trading market Zora launches ZORA NETWORK, a Layer 2 network based on OP Stack.

Related Reading:Can the OP Stack competing product launched by zkSync win the battle for L2 expansion?》

Compared with OP Stack, which has a first-mover advantage and has attracted multiple development teams, ZK Stack has more technical advantages, but just like its performance in this expansion war, zkSync always seems to lack a little innovation.

In early August last year, Polygon Zero, Polygon’s official zero-knowledge proof team, published an article titledProtecting the Open Source SpiritIn the article, zkSync was publicly criticized, claiming that it had copied Polygons open source code without permission and published misleading remarks, which immediately aroused widespread concern in the industry.

Subsequently, zkSync imitated Consensys and launched the Fellowship plan. Different from the previous remarkable technical advantages, this imitation is relatively rough. Compared with the well-prepared Consensys, the entire plan only has a list of topics and an article introduction.

Related Reading:Consensys and zkSync have launched Fellowship plans one after another. Is the L2 competition entering the hand-to-hand stage?》

Four companies compete for ApeChain

In March 2022, ApeCoin, the native token of the BAYC NFT ecosystem, was launched. At the same time, the decentralized autonomous organization ApeCoin DAO, which was specifically used to operate token-related matters, was also created. Subsequently, the development and maintenance rights of its L2 network ApeChain were acquired by many L2 Scramble.

Polygon was the first L2 to propose the development and maintenance of ApeChain. On October 11 last year, Polygon Labs co-founder Sandeep Nailwal proposed that ApeCoin DAO use Polygon Chain Development Kit (CDK) to develop and maintain its L2 network ApeChain. A month later, Optimism stepped in, with its co-founder and chief scientist Ben Jones proposing that ApeCoin DAO develop and maintain its L2 network ApeChain on Optimism Superchain.

Immediately afterwards, Nina Rong, director of ecosystem development at the Arbitrum Foundation, also proposed, ApeChain is developed using Arbitrum technology, and its growth will be led by Horizen Labs. This proposal was also labeled High Importance by Messari. Horizen Labs mentioned in the proposal has helped the ApeCoin DAO community launch a number of major initiatives, including ApeCoin, Otherside and ApeStake within the Ape ecosystem.

Related Reading:Will APE become a Gas token? ApeChain’s latest proposal attracts attention》

After seeing the efforts of Polygon, Optimism, and Arbitrum, zkSync joined the fray. On December 16, zkSync proposed in the ApeCoin DAO community to “build ApeChain using the fastest and cheapest ZK technology in production.”

Finally, WebSlinger, the administrator of the ApeCoin DAO, announced the creation of a Request for Proposal (RFP) process, and everyone who wants to build ApeChain for the DAO can participate. When the community feedback period ends on January 31, one or two rounds of voting will be held based on the number of submitted ApeChain AIPs to decide who will build the ApeChain of the ApeCoin DAO. According to the request for proposals, the first vote is scheduled to take place from February 1 to February 7.

New and old L2 show their talents, RaaS enters halfway

Airdrop was originally a strategy used by Uniswap to deal with the vampire attack of SushiSwap. In the end, it became the biggest shortcut for ordinary people in the encryption field to obtain wealth effects, and this also provided a new way of thinking for L2 competition in disguise.

Blast turns on the head rolling mode

Previously, Blur founder Pacman’s new L2 project Blast has gained a lot of attention through social fission and airdrop expectations.

Before Blast, the L2 project focused more on technology involution, but this phenomenon was defeated by Blast. Mission PUA, airdrop bait, to Vitalik style inward roll, etc., Blasts blend completely spreads Layer 2s shameless bottoms.

Blast claims that the existing base interest rate for Layer 2 is 0%. By default, the value of users assets will depreciate over time, while on Blast, users balances will automatically compound interest and earn additional Blast rewards. When users deposit funds into Blast, Blast will then use the corresponding ETH locked on the Layer 1 network for native pledge of the network, and automatically return the obtained ETH pledge income to users on Blast. In addition, Blast also supports passive interest generation of stablecoins.

For users, in addition to the passive income earned from staking, Blast also introduces a points system similar to the gameplay of Blur.

On January 17, when Blast users exceeded 100,000 and TVL exceeded 1.3 billion US dollars, Blast announced that its test network has been officially launched, and at the same time launched the Blast BIG BANG activity for developers to attract Dapps to settle in. Blast stated that the winning DApps will be promoted to Blast users after the mainnet goes online at the end of February. With this, the winning team can use Blast airdrops to incentivize the development of their DApps on the Blast mainnet, and gain core advantages such as liquidity guidance from the very beginning.

In the Blast airdrop, 50% will be allocated to 110,000 users, and 50% will be allocated to Blast developers (including BIG BANG winners and mainnet DApps). According to Blast documentation, part of the Blast developer airdrop is reserved for competition winners and part is reserved for mainnet DApps. The exact distribution ratio has not been announced, but the vast majority of airdrops will be reserved for mainnet DApps (i.e. more than 90%). However, Blast also emphasized that users will not receive anything for participating in the testnet.

As can be seen from the Blast BIG BANG competition theme categories, Blast officials are optimistic about perpetual contract DEX, spot DEX, lending protocols, NFT / games, SocialFi, GambleFi, infrastructure. In addition, it also covers special ways to utilize Blast’s native income or Gas revenue sharing project.

The veteran L2 continues to make moves

Arbitrum received a good review from Vitalik late last year, This is real progress in decentralization, and I hope to see ten Rollups entering the first phase next year and achieving a certain degree of sequencer decentralization. Hours after the comment was posted Afterwards, ARB prices increased by 22%.

What brought a bull market to L2 was undoubtedly Arbitrums generous donation. On July 7, 2023, the Arbitrum community passed two proposals, AIP-1.1 and AIP-1.2. Among them, proposal AIP-1.1 proposes that the remaining 700 million ARB of the foundation be placed in a smart contract-controlled lock and be unlocked within four years. Proposal AIP-1.2 aims to modify several governance documents of the Arbitrum ecosystem, including lowering the threshold for the number of ARB Tokens required to publish improvement proposals on the chain from 5 million to 1 million.

Compared with airdrop incentives, in this L2 competition, Arbitrum chose to focus more time and energy on improving its technology stack and decentralized governance. After Arbitrum Orbit announced its mainnet launch, its L3 project XAI performed brilliantly, and in anticipation of Cancun, ARB continued to break new highs. It can be said that Arbitrum has earned enough attention in this small bull market.

Orbit is part of Arbitrums expansion plans, which will see its technology stack leveraged by other projects built on top of it. Currently, there are more than 50 Arbitrum Orbit chains under development, and one of Arbitrums founders speculates that there will be approximately more than 150 Orbit chains by the end of this year.

One of the differences between Arbitrum Orbit and other L2 competitors is flexible block time, that is, Orbit flexibly produces blocks according to demand. The Orbit chain can produce up to 4 blocks per second if a large number of transactions come in, but if the chain continues without transactions, there will be no blocks. When building on Orbit, projects can decide whether to build L2 or L3 on Orbit, and whether to choose Arbitrum One or Nova.

On April 27, Ethereum expansion solution AltLayer’s RaaS solutionAlready supportedL3 blockchain Arbitrum Orbit; September 5, RaaS company CalderaAnnounceLaunching its first Arbitrum Orbit chain; on October 26, Celestia became the first modular Data Availability (DA) network integrated into Arbitrum Orbit and the entire Nitro stack. It is foreseeable that Orbit will transform Arbitrum into a settlement layer similar to Ethereum, adding more value to its core chain and enhancing the long-term scalability of the entire Arbitrum ecosystem.

Related Reading:Arbitrum Orbit mainnet goes online, is the Layer 2 RaaS war starting again?》

It can be felt in another wave of RaaS wars triggered by Arbitrum Orbit that modular development has further increased the pressure on the established L2. Looking at the DA level, it is fair to assume that DA is like the bandwidth layer of Web3, a cheap DA layer that will transform cryptocurrencies from slow and expensive to fast, cheap and rich without sacrificing decentralization in the process .

Cheap DA will inevitably drive a Cambrian explosion of new custom rollup chains, making deployment increasingly easier through rollup-as-a-service providers such as Caldera, AltLayer and Conduit. However, as L2 and L3 ecosystems emerge, they become fragmented by default. Getting users to use new platforms is already difficult—it gets even worse if interoperability, liquidity, and network effects are limited. A unified DA layer as the foundation of each network will make the flow of funds simpler and attract a wider user base.

As for the DA battle, Avail, EigenDA and Celestia are the protagonists in the DA ecosystem - each serving the same space and just taking a slightly different approach to infrastructure stack, execution and go-to-market, as seen here 《Read this article to understand the “DA Competition” that determines the future of Ethereum: Who will be the final winner among Celestia, EigenDA and Avail?》。