One article to understand the ecological panorama of Ethereum’s 8 major expansion plans: How should the Layer 2 ecosystem stand?

The information we have obtained is that the world's top blockchain investment institutions with the most abundant financial resources are hunting for the core Ethereum Layer 2 expansion solution development teams , hoping to invest heavily in them. Among them, the relatively mature Rollup solution development teams are the most coveted prey for these investment institutions. Many negotiations are underway, and investment institutions are willing to invest heavily to bring these teams under their command. The situation will soon become clear.

At the same time, these Ethereum Layer 2 expansion solution development teams also hope that their technologies can be adopted by developers . How to attract Ethereum application protocols and DApps that actually have users and make them their partners is obviously the key for Layer 2 expansion solution development teams to seize territory in the ecosystem and gain a favorable competitive position in the future. In this regard, most people are still waiting and watching.

If you are still not very clear about the background and advantages of the Rollup solution, and don’t know the current competitive situation of the various camps, I hope that this ecological map compiled by ChainNews can help you understand the latest developments in this field.

It should be noted that this map is likely to change dramatically in the coming weeks. By then, the comparison between the old and new camps will help you more clearly understand the changes and development pulse of this hot area.

From Plasma to Rollup, eight teams you can’t ignore

As early as three years ago, the Ethereum community realized the importance of scalability and launched the first-generation expansion solutions such as Plasma or state channels . However, since the rapid growth of decentralized finance (DeFi) applications and users, the community has truly realized and felt that the bottleneck of throughput is restricting the development of the DeFi ecosystem .

More and more DeFi projects and wallets are beginning to consider which Ethereum expansion solution to use to reduce on-chain transaction costs for users while also taking into account the composability and security of DeFi.

In addition, Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin has also begun to call on the community to use the " Rollup " solution as a leading force to promote the expansion of Ethereum Layer 2. Rollup may even affect the technical roadmap of Ethereum 2.0. However, it has been more than two years since Rollup was proposed.

In the past two years, Rollup has gradually evolved into two major solutions. One is the Optimistic Rollup evolved from Plasma's "fraud proof", and the other is the ZK Rollup that is realized with the support of zero-knowledge proof technology.

In these two categories of solutions, different teams have launched different implementations. For example, Offchain Labs ' solution is more complicated than the "fraud proof" mechanism in other Optimistic Rollups, so they call their solution Arbitrum Rollup . For example, the solution of the zero-knowledge proof scientist team StarkWare is similar to ZK Rollup or Plasma, which is a comprehensive solution they call Volition and Validium.

So far, there are more than a dozen teams that have launched Rollup-type expansion solutions, the most important of which are the following eight :

How to choose an expansion plan?

Among so many options, how should DeFi projects and wallet developers in the Ethereum ecosystem choose the Layer 2 network that suits them? According to the opinions of many developers, in addition to the topic of whether Layer 2 will reduce security , the following three important factors are usually discussed.

Mainnet launch time

Although most expansion plans have been launched on the testnet, and some projects have launched some functions on the mainnet, the most important reference factor is when the full-featured version of the mainnet will be launched. Because at the current stage, expansion is an urgent matter, and the plan that is launched the fastest may receive more attention and dividends.

Ecological Development

An important advantage of the DeFi ecosystem is composability, where applications can interact with each other without permission. However, after the project migrates to Layer 2, only projects in the same Layer 2 network can be combined at a lower cost, and the overall value of the network may increase exponentially as the number of applications increases.

Therefore, many projects will consider observing which Layer 2 network the leading projects of the DeFi protocol choose, and then make corresponding choices. After all, the leading projects will bring more users and keep their assets in this network.

Development Difficulty

For some Layer 2 networks, in order to minimize the cost of developers migrating applications to Layer 2, they will be compatible with Ethereum's smart contract development model to the greatest extent possible. However, there are still many expansion plans that require the introduction of new programming languages ​​due to their own technical difficulties, which will increase the time cost for developers.

Ecological Panorama

In order to help developers better track the current development of the Layer 2 ecosystem, Lianwen has summarized the main investment institutions of these 8 teams , as well as some public and undisclosed applications, wallets or infrastructure in the ecosystem.

From the perspective of specific solutions, they can be divided into two categories: general solutions and special solutions .

The general solution will focus on providing a full set of full-featured or Turing-complete smart contract development capabilities similar to the Ethereum main chain, and each team can choose to develop their own applications on this platform.

Dedicated solutions currently focus on one or some specific functions , such as transfers or transactions, so other applications cannot develop their own applications in the network for the time being. However, according to the subsequent plans of these companies, full-featured smart contract support is still under development, but it should be later. For example, Fuel Labs said it may not be until the end of 2021.

Judging from the number and quality of ecological applications of general solutions, Matter Labs , Optimism and Offchain Labs may be the three most popular teams at present. StarkWare also has a lot of applications, but they are all related to transactions.

Hot Player: Matter Labs

Matter Labs’ zkSync scaling technology, which only supports transfers, has already been launched on the mainnet, but the general solution and the new programming language Zinc created as a result may not be launched on the mainnet so soon. Because ZK Rollup technology is implemented through zero-knowledge proof , it is technically difficult to develop a general solution.

But the advantage is that ZK Rollup uses zero-knowledge proof zk-SNARKs cryptographic technology to ensure security, so the security can be almost equivalent to the Ethereum main chain.

Hot Player: Optimism

Optimism may be one of the earliest solutions to reach the mainnet , and it has also attracted leading projects such as Synthetix and Uniswap and Coinbase Wallet as entry points.

To support Ethereum’s smart contracts, Optimism has launched the Optimistic Virtual Machine (OVM ), a full-featured execution environment that is fully compatible with the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM ). OVM is a copy embedded in the EVM, allowing developers to use the same developer toolset and smart contract language as EVM when using Optimistic Rollup.

With OVM, the migration cost for application developers will be much lower, and they can directly write Solidity smart contracts, so this may be the most important core technology of Optimism.

However, because it uses Optimistic Rollup, which is the " fraud proof " inherited from Plasma, it defaults to " optimistically " believe that the node will publish the latest and accurate data to the main chain, so in terms of security, it will be slightly lower than the main network. Although the risk of losing the principal is very low, it may cost time (longer exit period) .

Hot Player: Offchain Labs

Ed Felten, co-founder and chief scientist of Offchain Labs, previously said that Offchain Labs will focus on private chains , enterprise solutions and gaming, but the current product will build a second-layer network for Ethereum.

Offchain Labs' Arbitrum Rollup solution may also be the first solution to be launched on the mainnet. In terms of other advantages, it is similar to Optimism and it is relatively easy to support smart contracts.

In addition, the Arbitrum solution provides a whole set of more complex "fraud proof" mechanisms, which improves system security through multiple rounds of interactions , and the exit period setting will also be more friendly to increase user experience.