A mysterious Redditor has made a data-driven prediction that the next main part of growth in the blockchain house will probably be in layer-2 options, totally on Ethereum.
The May 22 submit explains that “We’re at a turning point” the place the trade is transferring away from bridging between L1 blockchains towards L2s that are “right out of the gate, more secure and decentralized than alt-L1s and are built to use sound money on a credibly neutral platform:”
“L2 adoption is happening now, even if it is slow and in bursts. Behind the scenes, L2’s are improving reliability, decreasing fees, and increasing accessibility. L2’s are still building and improving, and that’s fantastic.”
An L2 scaling answer takes benefit of the safety of an L1 chain like Ethereum and alleviates site visitors on it by “rolling up” plenty of transactions right into a single bundle to be settled directly.
Other L1 chains like Solana, which boasts comparatively low cost and quick transactions, have garnered assist from customers turned off by excessive charges.
The common Solana (SOL) transaction prices about $0.0025, whereas Ether (ETH) transactions price about $1.30 at the time of writing. Despite that wild disparity, demand for Ethereum block house has remained overwhelmingly dominant as its $73.89 billion complete worth locked (TVL) outweighs Solana’s $4.24 billion, in line with blockchain tracker DefiLlama. Additionally, Solana has been plagued with reliability points not too long ago.
As of the time of writing, Arbitrum is the largest L2 on Ethereum with $2.65 billion in TVL, in line with L2beat. The whole Ethereum L2 ecosystem has a TVL of $4.77 billion. These numbers could also be set for an explosion if the proper forces conspire to attract customers and capital away from different L1s.
Several main decentralized apps (DApps) are already deployed on L2s. Decentralized alternate (DEX) SushiSwap and yield aggregator Curve are on Arbitrum. Meanwhile, crypto derivatives protocol Synthetix and DEX Uniswap are on Optimism.
Related: MakerDAO deploys on layer-2 community StarkNet to boost features of DAI stablecoin
The incoming Optimism airdrop could mark the starting of a speedy inflow of customers to L2s. This could also be resulting from the similar community results that attracted customers to Ethereum and Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM)-based decentralized finance (DeFi) protocols over the previous two years.
Optimism is an L2 with $474 million in TVL. EVM chains are ones which might be suitable with Ethereum token requirements equivalent to Binance Chain (BNB), Polygon (MATIC) and Fantom (FTM).
Ultimately, if there is a rise in L2 utility, the Ethereum L1 can have a pure enhance in use, which could additional solidify Ethereum as the world’s main sensible contract and decentralized software platform.
