ETC, LDO surge, what other Ethereum fork concept projects are there?

Written by: FYJ & 0x711 & czgsws, BlockBeats

Discussions about Ethereum forks are getting more and more heated. As the merger date approaches, more than 800T of miners’ computing power has attracted the attention of the entire network. Many people have begun to plan to fork Ethereum, and it is expected that the second community fork in Ethereum’s history will most likely occur.

The secondary market is also hyping the concept of Ethereum forks. In the early morning, the Fed's dovish remarks led to a surge in crypto assets. Among them, LDO and ETC, the two leading ETH2.0 and fork concept projects, led the market. It is not difficult to see the market's preference for the ETH fork concept. BlockBeats sorted out the fork concept-related projects, NFA, which are mainly divided into ETH2.0 and ETH forks.

ETH 2.0 Concept

LDO (Lido) and RPL (Rocket Pool)

Lido, the leader in Ethereum liquidity staking, currently holds 90.4% of the market share with more than 4 million ETH staking. Its protocol design is concise and clear. By depositing ETH, you can get stETH at a 1:1 ratio. As an equity derivative asset, the latter has good liquidity on Curve.

Rocket Pool is a liquidity staking protocol focused on Ethereum. Compared to Lido's full-chain expansion strategy, Rocket Pool only does Ethereum. The main difference between the two is that Lido's underlying validators are selected by Lido DAO, and anyone who deposits 16 ETH (half of the 32 ETH requirement stipulated by the Ethereum protocol) can become a node operator of Rocket Pool. Accordingly, a certain amount of RPL must be pledged to ensure the normal operation of the node.

In terms of mechanism design, the utility of LDO only has a governance role, and its practical value is difficult to quantify; while RPL, as a threshold for participating in the network, should have more market demand. However, Lido was launched in November 2020, 11 months earlier than Rocket Pool. The only way to defeat martial arts in the world is to be fast. We do not try to ask whose design is better in theory. In this week's rebound, the market has given the answer to who is stronger and who is weaker.

ssv.network

SSV itself is an infrastructure that serves validators, but SSV does not do asset management, that is, SSV does not absorb users' ETH for combination. Unlike real staking service providers such as Lido. SSV mainly serves two types of users. One is long-term holding, who need to ensure the safety of funds (not entrusting assets to third parties), but do not want to do it themselves. The other is the value capture of SSV, a group of ETH staking service providers led by Lido, Rocketpool, and Binance. SSV helps staking operators reduce operation and maintenance pressure, reduce equipment server expenses and management costs, reduce security risks, and saves time and effort.

ssv.network completed a $10 million financing in February this year, with participation from Coinbase, Lukka, OKX and Digital Currency Group (DCG).

Obol

Obol Technologies, which raised $6.15 million in October 2021, was founded by the former global product strategy director of ConsenSys, with participation from ConsenSys and Coinbase, and has a luxurious background. Obol promotes a concept called "distributed verification node cluster": a single staking node may fail, so the staking is clustered and dispersed to make user assets safer.

Currently, the token has not been issued and the product has not been launched. The official website roadmap shows that the product prototype will be launched in Q2. In addition, Lido has donated $100,000 to Obol to support its research. It can be seen that the highlight of the project is technology, but the effectiveness still needs to be tested after the product is launched.

StakeWise

StakeWise (SWISE) is a liquidity staking protocol based on the Ethereum mainnet and Gnosis Chain. In March 2021, StakeWise completed a $2 million financing led by Greenfield One, with participation from Collider Ventures, Gumi Cryptos, Lionschain Capital, etc. In March 2022, StakeWise received strategic investment from blockchain infrastructure service providers Blockdaemon and boldstart Ventures to jointly provide KYC-based liquidity staking solutions for financial institutions and large technology companies.

The protocol features a dual-token model that allows users to reinvest staking rewards (rETH2) into staking tokens (sETH2), thereby achieving compound returns.

Swell Network

Swell Network is a permissionless, non-custodial ETH staking protocol built for stakers, node operators, and the Ethereum ecosystem. On June 16 this year, Swell announced a partnership with SSV, and will prioritize the integration of ssv.network's advances in distributed validator technology, which will help better manage risks and improve validator performance. Currently, its Goerli testnet version has been launched, with a TVL of 286 ETH and an annual interest rate of 4.2%.

Swell Network completed a $3.75 million seed round of financing in March this year. The round was led by Framework Ventures, with participation from IOSG Ventures, Apollo Capital, and Maven 11. Angel investors included Mark Cuban, Synthetix co-founders Kain Warwick and Jordan Momtazi, Balancer founders Fernando Martinelli, Ryan Sean Adams, Bankless co-founder David Hoffman, Ren Protocol co-founder Loong Wang, and Mask Network founder Suji Yan.

Connect to the concept of ETH POW computing power (graphics card mining)

In addition to the ETH2.0 POS sector, the ownership of miners’ computing power is also a key point of market speculation. For example, ETC is now considered by the market to be the leader of forks, after all, there is only one fork project. And if we look at it from the perspective of graphics card computing power switching, many POW projects can connect to ETH’s computing power, but not all of them can be connected. BlockBeats only selected graphics card mining projects with relatively large market capitalization and relatively mainstream as representatives.

ETC

In a way, ETC (Ethereum Classic) is the "brother" of Ethereum. After the hacker attack on THE DAO in 2016, the Ethereum community faced a survival dilemma. There was a huge disagreement in the community on whether the community should fork and roll back to recover the losses. Some people agreed to fork, which gave birth to the current Ethereum, while others refused, and their persistence gave birth to ETC.

As of today, the computing power of the ETC network is only 23.55TH/s, which is about one-fortieth of the current computing power of the Ethereum network (881.59TH/s). It is hard to imagine what would happen if ETC took over most of the computing power of Ethereum.

XMR

Monero (XMR) is an open-source cryptocurrency created in April 2014, focusing on privacy, decentralization, and scalability. The concept of anti-ASIC has been included in the development concept of Monero since its inception. Monero's current algorithm is RandomX, and CPU, GPU, RSIC (such as Apple M1) can be used for mining. The mining efficiency of CPU and RSIC is relatively high, while GPU is relatively inefficient due to high video memory latency.

The current circulation of XMR is 18,153,413 pieces, and the total network computing power is 2441.4 Mh/s. Since falling to the low of the year at $96.43 on June 19 this year, it has rebounded by 69.750% (the highest price was $163.69 on July 28).

RVN

RVN, Ravencoin, was once a well-known mining coin with high hopes due to its fair distribution mechanism (no IC0, no pre-mining, no master node). The project code fully borrows from the Bitcoin code, so some Bitcoin shadows can be seen from it, such as: the total upper limit of Token is 21 billion. In addition, Ravencoin adopts the ASIC-resistant KAWPOW algorithm, hoping to reduce the centralization of mining output.

The current Ravencoin network computing power is 2.336TH/s.