It only took less than 10 days from its release to breaking through the US$600 million TVL. Blast became a dark horse and once again made the Layer 2 track popular again.

Since the development of blockchain technology, the value of the Layer 2 track has become the consensus of the industry. It will play a very important role in the development of the industry in the next 2-3 years, and has become a necessary track for the layout of various leading institutions.

Well, in addition to the veteran players Arbitrum and Optimism who are firmly at the forefront of the Layer 2 track,How are the new Layer 2 players such as Base, Blast, opBNB, Linea, and Scroll currently developing? Baihua will explore the current development overview of these five Layer 2 “new forces” from multiple angles.

01 Project Introduction

Let’s first understand the technologies used in these five projects, the goals to be achieved, and the advantages of each project:

• Base
  Base is Layer 2 built on OP Stack launched by CoinBase, aiming to provide developers with an ideal blockchain development environment.
  It is tightly integrated with Ethereum, relies on its security, and benefits from CoinBase’s support and optimization practices to ensure that users can freely and securely switch to Base between CoinBase, Ethereum L1, and other interoperable blockchains,It also plans to become a decentralized, permissionless Layer 2 chain to promote the development of the encryption field.
  Advantage:
  Similar to opBNB, Base relies on CoinBase’s user and resource support to build decentralized applications, have access to CoinBase’s products and tools, and seamlessly integrate with CoinBase’s other products.It uses OP Stack technology to connect with other projects using the same technology stack, thereby promoting the development of the Base ecosystem.
• Blast
  On November 21st, Blur founder Pacman released Blast, a Layer 2 project based on OP Stack. Users who deposit Ethereum into Blast can obtain staking benefits and additional points, which are used to prepare for subsequent token distribution.The main problems it wants to solve are the high gas fees of Ethereum and the problem of Blur Bid capital accumulation.

Advantage:
Backed by Blur and Paradigm, it has only been online for one week, and its TVL has exceeded 620 million US dollars. Its popularity and money-attracting level far exceed the performance of most Layer 2s., there are even KOLs on , it is natural for large players to “call for orders” and spread from person to person, resulting in a rapid increase in Blast-related reports and TVL.
It can be said that from Blur to Friend Tech to Blast, Paradigm has clearly fulfilled the expectations of Airdrop.

• opBNB
  With the expansion of the BNB ecosystem, the BNB Chain has also begun to become congested. For some highly active applications, the BNB Chain may be overloaded, and the related concept of opBNB was proposed.BA has spent a lot of energy on games, and the performance improvement of the second layer is conducive to the development of games and other applications on it.
  opBNB is the second-layer expansion solution of BNB Chain, to help increase transaction speed and reduce fees. Based on OP Stack technology, it expands the functions of BNB Chain and provides a better user experience.
  Advantage:
  opBNB is a solution built on the BA and BSC ecosystem. BAs its backer, A has a huge user base and project resources. At the same time, BSC, as a complete decentralized ecosystem, has accumulated a large number of users and transaction volume.
  opBNB is compatible with BSC, making it easy to migrate applications and users on BSC to opBNB. As long as BA copies the second floor like he did with Ethereum DeFi in the last round, it will be fine. He has the resources and background, and as long as he doesn’t commit suicide, there should be a wealth effect. After all, there is such a large amount of traffic. Of course, the premise is that the second floor is valuable.
• Line
  Linea is a Layer 2 solution launched by ConsenSys, the parent company of Little Fox, aiming to improve the scalability and efficiency of the Ethereum network.. It utilizes zkEVM technology and uses zero-knowledge proof to allow developers to easily build scalable dApps or migrate existing dApps to Linea. Linea’s goal is to provide users with a faster, lower-cost transaction experience and promote the development of the Ethereum ecosystem.

Advantage:
Linea has attracted everyone’s attention because it is supported by ConsenSys.As the parent company of MetaMask, ConsenSys also occupies a natural advantage in terms of traffic.From the fact that Linea team members currently belong to ConsenSys, we can see the close relationship between the two.
Linea can be seamlessly integrated with ConsenSys products such as Infura, MetaMask and Truffle.Developers can leverage MetaMask to attract users and launch and scale dapps faster using the API provided by Infura. Developers can also use Truffle or other development environments to build, test, debug and deploy Solidity smart contracts. In addition, ConsenSys also provides a bridge that enables developers to safely transfer tokens within the network and supports a friendly experience for MetaMask users, forming a closed business loop.

• Scroll
  Scroll is the EVM equivalent of zkRollup and is designed to scale the Ethereum network.Scroll’s goal is to provide lower costs, faster speeds, and unlimited scalability while maintaining security and decentralization. It is a community-focused open source project that strives to provide scalability, low cost, and secure ease of use to make Ethereum easily accessible to ordinary users.

Advantage:
scroll is a project cooperating with the Ethereum Foundation. It is supported by the Ethereum Foundation, but compared to other companies, this support is weaker.. The team members are Chinese and are not weak in technology. On the other hand, Scroll’s valuation is US$1.8 billion, with a total financing amount of about US$83 million. Investors include top institutions such as Polychain Capital and Sequoia China.

OpBNB, Base, and Linea are all backed by giant companies in the industry, and they have already occupied a certain ecological niche in this industry. The second layer they launched is more to help them stand more stable in this industry and form an ecological closed loop. .Blast has risen rapidly in a short period of time thanks to its unique gameplay. Relatively speaking, scroll is weaker in all aspects.

Through the background introduction of these projects,It can be seen that this industry has long passed the period of working alone, and more is still fighting for resources and background. Technology and funds are relatively unimportant and have become standard. What really works depends on whether it is attractive to users.Next, let’s take a look at the current progress of these projects.

02 current development

We mainly look at the current performance of these projects from the current on-chain data, ecological projects and other aspects.

• Base
  Since its launch in July, Base has attracted more than $5 million in transaction fees, surpassing most other second-tier platforms.Currently, TVL on the chain has about 580 million US dollars locked up. With the official statement that there is no Airdrop, it can be said that the performance is very impressive with such data.

Data performance on Base chain, source: dune.com
As can be seen from the above figure, all aspects of Base’s data have been in a state of continuous growth since the mainnet was launched. In the early days, users were attracted to join through the sharp rise of the meme currency BALD. Although the project failed in the end, the users and the amount of funds were retained.

• Later, the emergence of friend tech, a popular social application, attracted hundreds of thousands of users to Base, completely stabilizing Base’s position.It can be seen how much impact the outbreak of an ecological project has on the entire chain., of course, various official supports from Base also play a decisive role.
• Blast
  In about a week, TVL reached 626 million US dollars, ranking third in Layer 2. Because it just came out, there has been no progress in the ecological aspect. Only a few projects have announced to serve the Blast ecosystem.. Recently, Blast was criticized by peer Polygon for being too centralized due to multi-signature issues. However, users don’t really care. After all, it is endorsed by the founder of Blur and has considerable profits. Even if it is centralized, it is not unacceptable to everyone. After all, My peers are all half-measured.
  However, although TVL seems to be rising very fast, it actually has little to do with retail investors. Points are awarded based on the amount of funds and influence.The current amount of funds can be said to have completely become a stable financial management tool for large households.
• opBNB
  Since mid-September, the opBNB mainnet has been launched. Its development in various aspects has been moderate and the movement is not big. It can be said that it is still in the preparation stage.. The official is attracting some project parties to join its ecology. Some new projects invested by BA Labs and some projects closely related to BA such as PancakeSwap have begun to be deployed in opBNB. The entire ecology is gradually improving. The total locked amount of TVL is about 2.6 million US dollars. .
  The number of daily transactions and daily active users has increased several times in the past few months, reaching around 100,000. Gas fees have continued to decrease through various upgrades. On November 29, the official announced a roadmap, which plans to reduce the average transaction cost on the chain from US$0.005 to about US$0.001 within 6 months, and increase TPS from 4,000 to 10,000.

Source: opbnbscan.com
Data from Token Terminal shows that the number of core developers on the BNB chain has decreased this year, from 70 to 46. Although some time ago, CUBISWAP on opBNB was cut in half in a short period of time, causing some people in the community to criticize the development of opBNB.But after all, the number of users and traffic of BA is there. As long as there are popular ecological projects, there will be no problem at all with the influx of large numbers of users and funds.

• Line
  Since Linea was launched on the mainnet on August 9, the amount of TVL locked has reached nearly 142 million US dollars, and the number of transactions has been 21 million. It can be seen that the chain is still in a very early stage., due to the start of the second phase of the official Voyage event, TVL increased by about 2 times in the short term. After the event ended on the 22nd, TVL fell off a cliff.At present, except for the project team’s previous activity Linea Voyage, which attracted some users to participate for Airdrop, most people are not interested in it.

Source: l2beat
In terms of ecology, projects such as LayerZero and Galxe have been integrated into the Linea ecology. There is also the official official website some time ago, friend tech anti-disk tomo, which has a certain popularity, and there are many other ecological projects, but most of them are replicas of Ethereum. Ecology, there is nothing worth introducing.

• Scroll
  Scroll only launched on the mainnet on October 17. As of now, TVL’s locked position is about 38 million US dollars, the total number of transactions is close to 6 million, and the total number of wallets exceeds 2.3 million.Currently, Scroll expects TVL and various data to grow faster due to Airdrop.

Source: blockscout
In terms of ecology, most of them are replicas of the Ethereum ecology, and there are currently no eye-catching ecological projects.After all, the mainnet has just been online for more than a month, which is too short a time.

It can be seen from the five projects that if you want to revitalize the entire chain,A better breakthrough point is that the project side can support the generation of hot-selling projects, such as friend tech for Base, only by attracting users and funds can the project continue to develop. At present, except for Base, the other ecological performances of these second-level tiers are average, but this is also related to the project’s launch time. Among them, Linea and Scroll are due to the use of The one is ZK technology, which is slower than the other two in all aspects.

03 summary

The above is the introduction and progress of the five Layer 2 “new” projects. Except for Base, the other four are much weaker in all aspects than Arbitrum and Optimism. They can even be said to be in their infancy. As the companies behind each There are projects supported by huge resources.What do you think will be the subsequent development of these projects? Will they become “ghost chains” that no one uses, or will they become big white horses with the support of capital?

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