Viewpoint: Why are there so many L2s appearing in the market?

Author: cygaar, Mocavers Advisor

Compiled by: Felix, PANews

Why are there so many L2s in the market? Do we need another chain? When will all this end?

Here are some reasons that have not been thoroughly discussed, explaining why you will still see more L2s and why this will ultimately have a positive impact on users.

Technical Experiment

For the author, this is the most interesting aspect of L2s, and the real difference between them and L1. You will see that the settlement to Ethereum’s L2 can freely modify its VM, as long as it can prove to L1 that the state transition is valid. Currently, most rollups use EVM and try to maintain the same experience as ETH L1 (but cheaper and faster).

However, it can be seen that the number of Rollups using alternative VMs has increased. These VMs offer different benefits, including the ability to write contracts in other programming languages, provide additional security, privacy, lower costs, or higher throughput. For example, Arbitrum Stylus, Movement, Aztec, and multiple SVM Rollups.

There are also some teams that hope to break through the limits of EVM on high-performance hardware. MegaETH and Paradigm have conducted excellent research to explore solutions for optimizing various aspects of EVM. It is expected that EVM rollup (MegaETH?) will achieve extremely high performance by the end of this year.

Cultural Extension

“Cultural extension” is a term I learned from Vitalik’s blog post. Here is Vitalik’s quote on L2 culture: “L2 allows subcultures with substantial resources to emerge and form a feedback loop that pushes them to learn and adapt in order to have an impact in the real world.”

Every successful blockchain has its own identity/use case. Here are some examples:

The image above translates to: “Polygon has succeeded through partnerships with mainstream companies and an increasingly high-quality ZK ecosystem. Optimism, which owns Base and World Chain, has a strong cultural interest in concepts such as retroactive financing and Token-based governance. Metis focuses on DAOs. Arbitrum has built a brand around high-quality developer tools and technologies. Scroll focuses on “preserving” the essence of Ethereum – trust-minimized, secure, and open source. Taiko emphasizes a seamless user experience, alignment with the community, safety first, and people-centric. In general, every Ethereum L2 has a unique “soul”: combining Ethereum’s culture with its own unique style.”

Just as there is still a lot of room for technological innovation, I believe there is also a lot of room for cultural innovation in L2s. There are few L2s that focus on community building and optimizing the user experience. I look forward to seeing more L2s that focus on incentivizing specific communities and building better processes for users.

What does all this mean?

The end users will be the winners. In the future, we will continue to see L2s achieve lower fees, faster block times, and optimized experiences. In addition, there will be applications built for specific VMs that were previously impossible on the standard EVM. Every imaginable community will build blockchains.

Related reading: Vitalik’s new work: Ethereum needs subcultures, and L2 provides the right soil