Recently, Solana led Layer1 public chains such as Alanche and Near to kill all sides, and the market has heard the sound of killing Ethereum. Indeed, ETH Killer is the trump card narrative held by most public chains in the last round of bull market.
StillAt a time when EVM dominates the rivers and lakes and Layer 2 has not yet exploded, narratives such as MEME and DEPIN alone are not enough to shake the market position of ETH. This is just a short of alt-layer1 before the Cancun upgrade, why?
1) The narrative of major public chains competing to kill Ethereum has been fully verified by a round of bull and bear cycles and "failed". On the surface, this stems from Ethereum's strong market consensus, the innovative power of the developer community, and the magic of unlimited combinations of DeFi and NFT financial applications.
In fact, the crypto market is still limited by technology, market, compliance and other factors, and has not achieved large-scale popularization of mass adoptionThe technological "leap" brought by these new public chains has not become a starting point for stimulating new narratives and expanding the increment of new markets, and they are only eating Ethereum's spillover dividends.
Public chains such as Solana, Alanche, and Aptos want to thoroughly improve the technical level from the underlying frameworks such as development language, complexity, and operation mechanism, so as to provide better infra for the application market. For example, Solana's high concurrent processing performance and user experience UX advantages make the technology more suitable for the incremental crypto market in the future.
It's just that the basic operating logic of the market has not really changed.
Risk-averse investors, market audiences thirsty for wealth passwords, constantly refreshing and diverse gameplay, always existing information gaps, and occasional overflow of the circle of rich stories, etc., these perfectly constitute the basic elements of a cyclical bull market.
This makes Ethereum, which is "congenitally limited" in technology, stunned to rely on various EIP, ERC standard protocols and other seams to make up for it, which is enough to derive a huge application market, and can also allow other competing public chains to emerge frequently only by spillover effects.
But everyone is eating the dividends of the Ethereum DeFi market, and it is not yet time for Alt-Layer 1 to easily replace and surpass Ethereum.
2) Ethereum has explored a whole set of mature solutions for "birth defects".For example, the problem of scaling has evolved into various solutions such as rollup, plasma, and validiumAnother example: EOA address limitations, ERC4337 Account Abstraction has also been upgraded, and even evolved an account abstraction track
In addition, Layer 2 has also become a narrative track, with OP-rollups and ZK-rollups engaged in a continuous tug-of-warIn the future, there will be the upgraded blob space in Cancun, as well as more distant sharding sharding and underlying SNARK to provide follow-up development support
Even the potential DA capacity limitation of the block size cap extends to EIGENLAYER and other restaking-based solutions to optimize DA, and then modularly combine third-party DA solutions such as Celestia, as well as optional alternatives to the VM execution layer, etc.
The development, scaling, and extension environment of the entire Ethereum is mature and prosperous enough. The developer power behind it is the cornerstone of the Great Aether.
Although the results of Ethereum's continuous stacking of Lego building ecology in the past few years have indeed been less than expected, the potential possibilities of Ethereum's follow-up should not be underestimated if it can complete the key upgrade from PoW to POS under frequent hacker attacks, gather developer resources on the main line centered on Ethereum EVM, and evolve into a more ambitious Layer2 narrative plate.
Believing in Ethereum is a reverence for Ethereum's stable consensus for many years, and it is also a respect for the builder of the huge developer group behind it.
I vaguely remember that at the end of 18 years, EOS was known as a new paradigm public chain, and set off a round of spinach game frenzy, but everyone saw the fact that after a short period of prosperity, Ethereum, which was still slow but steady, had the last laugh.
The real value discovery must be captured slowly.
3) The build speed of Layer 2 in the bear market is really slow, especially without a round of market gifts from Layer 2 Summer, which makes everyone involved in the construction of the Layer 2 ecosystem a little unwilling.
However, the slow speed of layer2 build is similar to the fact that the Ethereum DeFi narrative has spilled over to the major cutting-edge public chains. The second half of Ethereum layer 2 is driven by some high-frequency transactions and applications, relying solely on the spillover effect and path dependence of Ethereum's financial gameplay, and alt-layer 1Hard-hittingThere is no advantage in confrontation.
On the one hand, OP-rollups such as Arbitrum and Optimism have the advantages of Layer2 first-mover ecology and expand the market territory under the stack strategy, but these strategic expansions belong to the B-end layout, and OP-rollups need to solve the criticized centralization problem and drive the growth of the C-end market.
On the other hand, ZK-rollups, such as ZKSYNC and StarkNet, have more advanced technical advantages, but ZK is also a future-oriented technology, and the existing user scale cannot fully show the strength of ZK. Only when the number of users expands, the gas can be negligibly low, and the experience will be smoother, which is the final form of ZK Layer 2.
In addition, the waist and tail forces of the Layer 2 market are doing somethingFor example, Metis tries to use Hyper (OP+ZK) rollup technology to do POS decentralized sequencer, change the incentive method of token (governance - > utility) and so on. In addition, shared Sequencer solutions such as Espresso and Astria are also expanding the potential of the Layer 2 market in the form of rollup as a service.
Don't think that OP+ZK has already finished telling the story of Layer 2, in my opinion, Layer 2 War has really begun, and the real involution of Layer 2 market Cancun may only start after the upgrade. When the time for Cancun's upgrade is finalized, isn't it an emotional release for the current aggrieved situation of Layer2?
When the future application chain narrative scene is opened and the situation of mass adoption is opened, the funds, users, and DApp applications that can be precipitated in the Layer 2 track will be more stable than other Alt-Layer 1.
4) Of course, speaking out for the Ethereum ecosystem at this moment is not a denial of Solana's market potential. There's no denying it,Solana's technological innovation starting point is indeed higher than the existing blockchain architecture, whether it is its storage and computing separation characteristics and high concurrent transaction processing characteristics, which make it user-friendly and easier to build an ecosystem.
Take Depin as an example, physical infrastructure + token incentives, which is a narrative that has been repeated in the vortex of failure in the past, such as Filecoin Arwe**e and so on. Whether it will be really successful on Solana, I don't know, but Depin happens on Solana and I have a little more confidence in Depin. After all, the technical starting point of high concurrency is naturally in line with Web2, which is not the same as the ecological logic of merging by module combination.
The current rise of Solana is, on the one hand, the window opportunity brought about by the temporary silence of Ethereum's layer 2, and on the other hand, the result of a group of development forces already active on Solana. But what needs to be corrected is that Solana's goal is not to kill Ethereum, it is actually looking for Ethereum's "blank" point to wait for an opportunity to break through.
Ethereum will inevitably be hit by some alt-layer1 chains with new technical starting points, but none of them are Ethereum "killers", I prefer to call them, Web3 game-breaker innovators.
Ethereum has been successful in DeFi financial applications and a huge composable ecosystem, and a new journey for Layer 2 and Layer 3 is still on the way.
If it is "open, inclusive, credible, and combined", such Ethereum will not be able to achieve the value of the blockchain in the end, and it is hard for me to believe that a new chain will.
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