Among the six new public chains bet by top institutions, which one is more hardcore?

The pace of the crypto world is fast, and today’s leaders can be replaced at any time. The only constant is change, but at the same time, new opportunities will emerge in each new cycle. After Solana’s 100-fold explosion in the public chain field, there was no strong competitor until the emergence of 6 new public chains. Only by understanding opportunities can we better seize them.

Most of the projects that exploded 10 times or even 100 times in the last bull market were public chains. These explosive public chains were often born in the last bear market, so in every bull and bear market, there will be some potential public chains that stand out.

Let’s first take stock of the current status of public chains on the market:

Currently, Ethereum is still the only dominant player. Although Ethereum has merged and upgraded, and seems to be moving in a better direction, from an industry perspective, it is unhealthy for an industry to be dominated by one company. Only with competition can the industry be better developed. However, since Solana emerged as a strong rival of Ethereum, there has not been a second strong rival until now, until the six new public chains began to appear in everyone's vision. The above is the current market competition landscape and status quo.

What are the highlights of these new public chains? Bichak will analyze them in detail from three aspects: founding team, investment institutions, and technical principles. Some of these public chains have quickly become popular players by relying on a new programming language, Move. Let's start with those with technical advantages. Speaking of technical advantages, we need to extend the knowledge related to Move.

About Move

In 2019, Facebook joined hands with many institutions inside and outside the circle to create the sensational blockchain project Libra. All the major listed companies and top institutions participated at the time and joined Zuckerberg's team to build the Libra chain. Later, Libra was renamed Diem. It was originally intended to be a big success, but it was eventually stillborn due to the pressure of government supervision.

Although only half of the project has been completed, its biggest contribution to the industry is the Move language, which is a smart contract created by Facebook. Its programming language is different from all the languages ​​currently on the market. As an independent language, Libra has left behind not only the Move language, but also a large group of early Libra project developers. These top blockchain talents have inherited Libra's will and have branched out to form the following new public chains.

Aptos

Aptos is the leader among all new public chains using the Move language because of its top team and top institutional financing, which are all plus points.

The founding team of Aptos are all members of Diem, early developers and researchers of Libra, with strong technical background. Chief Technology Officer Avery Ching was the technical director of the encryption platform Novi, which is the wallet project on Libra. The two major applications on the Libra chain are the stablecoin project Diem and Novi.

Aptos' vision is to focus on improving the security and scalability of the first layer of the network and build an infrastructure network that can serve billions of people. It separates the consensus protocol from transaction execution, which not only improves processing efficiency but also disperses the risk of attacks. This is a major technological innovation.

The ultimate effect achieved by Aptos is 10W TPS. If it can process 100,000 transactions per second, it will be a very strong competitive force in the public chain market. Currently, Aptos has launched the mainnet and governance token APT, and we look forward to its subsequent development.

Sui

Sui uses the Move language like Aptos, and its founding team still comes from the Libra team.

The difference is that the founding team of Sui's public chain comes from the stablecoin project Diem, which can be simply understood as a company divided into two factions. Evan Cheng, CEO of Sui's team Mysten Labs, is a Chinese-American engineer who has served as director of blockchain engineering at Facebook from 2018 to September this year.

Sui's financing situation is also very strong. In November 2021, Mysten Labs raised US$36 million in a Series A financing round led by A16Z. In September 2022, Sui's development team Mysten Labs completed a US$300 million Series B financing round led by FTX Ventures.

Technically, Sui upgraded the Move language and launched the Sui Move version. The new version not only inherits the security and flexibility of Move, but also improves the storage mechanism and address type mechanism. Therefore, it is an upgraded new technology. This new technology improves network performance and reduces the time required for transaction confirmation. This is faster than simply using the 1.0 version of Move. Sui claims that no matter how complex the transaction is, it will not take more than 3 seconds to complete.

Linera

Linera also uses the Move language, and the founding team still comes from Libra. Linera focuses on development and promotion, and is suitable for a new execution mode of linear expansion. Linear expansion can double the capacity of the system by doubling the number of machines, thereby winning by quantity.

Compared with the previous two projects, Leader started the latest and is still in its early stages. Its vision is to create a low-latency blockchain network that can be easily expanded like Web2 applications.

Mathieu Baudet, the founder of Linera, helped Zuckerberg create Diem and is also the chief researcher and engineer of Novi. He combines the strengths of Aptos and Sui and can be said to be an all-round founder.

In addition to Meta members, Linera's founding team also includes some from Zcash, bringing together a group of very experienced engineers. Linera's financing situation is also very impressive. In June 2022, Linera completed a US$6 million seed round of financing led by A16Z. Although the amount is not large, it has been recognized by A16Z like Aptos and Sui, and is also a public chain with great potential.

Linera's technical principles focus on the Fast Pay and Zef protocols that founder Mathieu Baudet once participated in developing, which can minimize interactions between validators and speed up transactions.

Aleo

The highlight of Aleo is the development of a new language - LEO. Aleo is built using the self-created LEO language.

Aleo started to build a team after its establishment in 2019. The founding team of Aleo includes Howard Wu, Micheal Beller, Collin Chin, and Raymond Chu, among whom there are two Chinese. Other members are from large companies, such as Google, Amazon, Facebook, etc. At the same time, they have joined many universities, such as the Ivy League in the United States, which is an unattainable academic hall. Top cryptographers, engineers, and designers have all joined the Aleo team.

Let's take a look at the financing situation. Aleo completed a US$28 million Series A financing in April 2021, with A16Z still participating in the investment. In February 2022, Aleo completed another US$200 million Series B financing led by SoftBank and Kora Management, with A16Z continuing to follow up.

Aleo's core technologies lie in Zexe and Leo. Zexe is an improvement on Ethereum's Layer2 technology ZK Sync. The main function of this technology is to encrypt simple token transfers and transactions. In fact, it is a privacy technology. Another point is that as long as the program runs on Aleo using the LEO language, you can use the encryption function and your transfers will be anonymous.

Iron Fish

You can translate Iron Fish into Chinese as Iron Fish. Iron Fish is a term used by the US military during World War II to encrypt transmissions in submarines. It is obvious that what Iron Fish wants to do is to build a private public chain to solve the problem of anonymity and privacy.

Allen, the founder of Iron Fish, is a female entrepreneur born in the 1990s. She graduated from Virginia Tech and worked for Microsoft and Airbnb. She is also a graduate of a large company. Iron Fish's engineering team is mainly composed of developers who previously jumped from Microsoft and Uber. Although they are not professional blockchain talents, they all have one thing in common, which is that they are very familiar with B-side needs, which is also Iron Fish's trump card. In the absence of technical advantages, Iron Fish relies on applications.

In November 2021, A16Z announced that it led the US$27.6 million Series A financing round in Iron Fish.

Privacy in blockchain is mainly divided into two parts, one is identity privacy, the other is transaction privacy. The new protocol or technology developed by Iron Fish can hide all this information and make a truly private public chain. It hides transaction information, mining information, wallet information, etc. Except for the private key owner, no second party can see it. It can be said to be absolute privacy. However, there are many problems with Iron Fish's test network, such as blockchain congestion and the problem of browser decoupling from on-chain information. I hope all these problems can be solved before the main network goes online.

Anoma

Most of the Anoma team members have research and development experience in leading projects in the industry such as Cosmos, Polkadot, Tezos and Chainalysis, and the entire team has certain support in terms of professional and academic background.

In April 2021, Anoma completed its first round of financing of US$6.75 million, led by Polychain Capital. In November of the same year, Anoma raised another US$26 million, with Polychain Capital continuing to lead the investment.

Technically, Anoma focuses on two core technologies: barter and privacy. It hopes to build a privacy payment system that serves everyone, thereby returning financial sovereignty to individuals. For example, if I want to buy BTC, I can use NFT to buy it directly.

Regarding privacy, Anoma has designed a unified shielded pool shared by all assets. The shielded pool uses a series of technical means such as zero-knowledge proof to ensure that funds are transferred while being hidden to prevent others from tracing data.

In May 2022, Anoma announced the launch of a customized layer protocol, Namada, which is a component on the Anoma mainnet. This component is designed to enable shielded transfers of any type of assets, which is an achievement that Anoma has already achieved.

Risks and opportunities coexist. The higher the market expectations, the more popular the venture capital institutions are. The potential bubbles and risks of the project will also increase to a certain extent. Projects such as Terra have repeatedly reflected this problem. If the adoption rate of Layer2 continues to rise sharply, will these new public chains encounter the situation of "being born at the wrong time"? Are they just a new round of forced narratives and capital games by venture capital institutions? These questions may be answered in the next round of market cycles.