Original author: Lao Bai

The beloved official account 'Orange Book' recently published an article titled 'Crypto Impotence'.

"A terrible boredom is spreading in the Crypto world, like the Black Death, no one knows where it started, but unconsciously, you find that this disease is everywhere."

Think about it, in the recent circle, the technical hot spots are really not worth writing about, the only hot topics are concentrated in Pepe, Trump, Jenner and other memes, the last hot spot that is more technical may be the "Pandora" of the duality of the coins?

The primary market is also affected, but fortunately innovation is still happening, although we still haven't seen anything truly 0 to 1, but things from 1 to 10 in each track are Still Happening.

The previous research report mainly focused on the new ideas of various layers under the Modular narrative of ETH. This time, let's take a look at BTC, Solana, and Restaking, and see what the '1 to 10' are in these three tracks.

一.BTC

If BRC 20 or Ordi was a surprise of "scrambling", Runes was a welcome ceremony for Cex to Dex to Infra to "everything is ready, only the east (up) wind (line)", but in response to the old saying "the heat must die", at least in the short term.long long term point of view, Runes, Atomical, RGB&RGB++ and other protocol are still expected to inject new vitality into BTC's asset issuance, and the upgrade of BRC 20 two months ago is also clearly working towards a more functional and flexible route, not to mention, the native stablecoin based on BRC 20 is now easy to long.

In addition to the UTXO Stack I wrote about before, the most important thing to talk about in the BTC ecosystem in the past two months should be the three projects launched by Unisat: Fractal -@fractal_bitcoin, Arch Network - @ArchNtwrk, and Quarry - @QuarryBTC.

Fractal - has a very 'peculiar' design concept, essentially you can think of it as a 100% Fork of BTC, but the block time has been reduced to 30 seconds

You may wonder - what is this, just a BTC testnet? Litecoin, BCH, BSV, and others have their own characteristics, while this is just a 99% mirror chain. What is the significance? How is security ensured?

There are actually many meanings

1. Fractal is a serious POW, SHA 256 just like BTC, with market cap, incentives, much more stable than BTC testnet (understood by those who have used BTC testnet), and much faster (30 seconds per block)

2. Joint mining with 1/3 of BTC mainnet (mainnet miners can mine one Fractal block every 90 seconds), theoretically achieving 80-90% level of BTC mainnet security.

3. Because it is fully compatible with BTC, all kinds of XXRC 20 assets and infrastructure on BTC can be seamlessly migrated over without any code changes needed.

4. It will implement "controversial" Operation Code proposals such as OP_CAT and ZK native verification OPCode faster than BTC Mainnet

5. Because 4, in the future, contracts based on inscriptions can be implemented through scripts

6. Others may find it strange if they do it, but when Unisat does it, it feels just right.

Arch - Compared to various types of "aesthetic fatigue" BTC EVM L2/sidechains, Arch brings programmability to BTC through an indexer + a decentralized Prover ZKVM, similar to a 1.5 layer - transactions are triggered through L1 and executed in various asset conversion logics in Arch's ZKVM, ultimately generating ZK proof and broadcasting the results back to BTC mainnet.

It feels similar to RGB++, both triggered by BTC mainnet transactions. The difference is that RGB++ uses homogeneous binding based on CKB Cell, while Arch relies on indexer + ZKVM to achieve it.

Quarry - Turned the joint mining based on BTC into an Infra form, equivalent to making a trap for miners or a computing power version of 'OP Stack' + 'Eigen Layer'

Simply put, you can quickly launch a POW chain through their Quarry, which can be merged mined with BTC miners to ensure its own security through the hashrate of BTC miners. The token rewards are given to participating miners, similar to EigenLayer's AVS rewards. Compared to EigenLayer or Babylon, which aim to secure the POS of BTC and ETH holders, Quarry aims to secure the hash power of miners. In a market where POS is prevalent, it is worth observing how much market share POW Appchain can capture.

二. Solana

The most interesting thing about Solana recently should be the concept of 'modularity'.

As is well known, ETH here follows the concept of modularity, while Solana has always been the representative of the single-chain camp.

And in the past few months, we have indeed discussed several modular projects on Solana.

For example, MagicBlock - @magicblock, Sonic - @SonicSVM, Solforge, Mantis - @mantis, and so on.

Magicblock is based on an Ephemeral Rollup - a concept that emphasizes 'use it and delete it, burn after reading'. This concept was first proposed by AltLayer 22 around 23 years ago, but it is no longer the main selling point of Alt Layer. As a project that focuses on the Solana full-chain game engine, MagicBlock's Ephemeral Rollup is expected to be part of their solution.

Sonic's flagship is the Gaming Appchain on Solana, which has recently just announced its financing. The architecture used is a set of HyperGrid Framework, which allows games to easily launch an SVM Appchain. Sonic, as the first L2 application, can be understood as XAI on Arb?

Solforge is a somewhat general-purpose Appchain Stack, intended to position itself as an SVM version of OP Stack or Arbitrum Orbit

Mantis is an Intent Settlement Layer SVM Rollup, not limited to serving the Solana ecosystem, and OrderBook Flow related to EVM can also settle on Mantis, after all, Solver inherently comes with some chain abstraction properties.

There are several interesting points worth observing here.

1. Although Solana is known for its high-performance single-chip, it is said that after a game became popular in the first half of the year, the transactions of this game accounted for more than 20% of the entire chain. This is still the case when the daily active users are only in the four or five digits. I dare not imagine the burden if the daily active users increase or if several similar game chains appear. This may also be an important catalyst for the Solana ecosystem to start thinking about 'modularization'.

2. Toly I seem to have shifted from opposing modularity last year to a neutral attitude towards this direction this year. A lot of clues can be seen from his Twi this year.

3. Many members of the Solana Foundation lean towards supporting modularity, and many developers also believe that modularity is essential for Solana.

4. Multicoin's Kyle has always been a proponent of Solana and single-chain, and he himself is said to still oppose this concept.

The infrastructure of Solana should be an interesting observation in the next 6-12 months. In addition to the rise of modular narrative, the simplified version of FireDancer before the end of the year and the complete version next year will bring improvements to Solana's TPS and stability, which is also worth looking forward to.

III. Restaking

Restaking should be the hottest track in the past six months, without a doubt.

However, it was found that many people do not have a clear understanding of the differences between the two leading projects, Babylon and EigenLayer, and even some of the project teams that have discussed it are confused about this, so it is worth discussing separately.

Simply put, Eigen can set relatively complex Slashing mechanisms because it inherently has the ability of smart contracts. For example, the first prototype AVS EigenDA came about this way. If you want to do something similar to 'BabylonDA' using Babylon, it's not feasible because the script support of the original BTC chain cannot handle such complexity.

However, Babylon's black technology EOTS (Extractable One-Time Signature) and BTC timestamp protocol, which Eigen does not have, are also the confidence for Babylon to do unique Restaking in the BTC ecosystem, focusing on "native BTC Restaking", which Eigen cannot achieve.

Of course, the functionality that native BTC Restaking can achieve is limited, basically covering two points. First, it helps POS chains prevent Long Range Attacks through the BTC timestamp protocol. Second, it helps POS chains achieve or cold-start their POS security consensus. In short, you can come to me for the launch of the chain, but please go next door to Eigen if you want to develop DAPPs.

If you insist on using Babylon to create an AVS and implement something similar to EigenDA or Oracle, can you do it? The answer is 'yes', but you need an 'extension package'. For example, Chakra - @ChakraChain or SatLayer - @satlayer, 'trapping a baby' on top of Babylon, using the smart contracts built into these two projects to implement more complex Slashing mechanisms, you can develop a AVS based on this, such as the DA, storage, and Oracle DAPP genres.

In abstract terms, just in terms of functionality: Babylon+Chakra/SatLayer = Eigenlayer

On the Babylon side, in addition to projects like the above two that are committed to making Babylon as 'complex' as Eigen, there are also ecological positions like Solv Protocol, Lorenzo, etc., which are benchmarked against EtherFi and Renzo in the LRT ecosystem. On the Eigen side, because it is inherently 'complex enough', the Stack or 'extension packages' have been stacked to a higher level, such as Ethos - @EthosStake doing the AVS Coordination/Interoperability Layer, Aethos - @aethosnetwork doing the AVS Programmable Policy Layer, and so on. I feel that as the Stack on the Eigen side becomes more and more abundant, the infrastructure becomes more and more complete, Eigen may also become more and more like an AWS, where various dots + drag-and-drop can ultimately achieve the 'security level + infrastructure suite' you want to buy. It is completely up to you whether you want to start a chain or create a storage or an Oracle-like DAPP on top of this.

P.S Recently, I chatted with a FA, and he said that he has talked to at least fifty or sixty VCs recently. Some are looking at Infra, some are looking at games, and some are looking at Bitcoin. There is only one track that all VCs are looking at, and one that doesn't pump! Can you guess which one it is?

The answer is: Ton......

However, the difficulty of investing in Ton is much higher than that of ETH or Solana... Just imagine how many VCs would decide to go all-in if Notcoin came with a Deck or Demo half a year ago.

If I have the chance to write about Ton in the next research report, I will do it again.