In recent days, ETH can no longer be described as congestion, it has to be “very congested”!
Some time ago, the popularity of Uniswap, which was extremely popular, dropped slightly. It is not that no one is playing it. The main reason is that the gas fee is too high. Buying a coin just costs 50 or 60 yuan if the GAS fee is converted into RMB, and it costs one time to sell. Approve (the first transaction of tokens needs to be confirmed) spends once, and sells it again. After three times, the fee is 200. If you are impatient or afraid that the price will change too quickly, you will have to spend another two to three hundred. . GAS burns a few hundred, and it is not worthwhile for you to buy coins without spending a few thousand.
Not to mention liquidity mining. Some time ago, YAM, recent pasta, grapes, Approve, Deposit, Harvest, Withdraw, a single currency has to call the contract at least 4 times, if several coins are mined at the same time , You have to call a contract ten or twenty times. Gas burns hundreds of dollars easily. Maybe the coins that are dug out will not burn as much gas as the income. Therefore, without a capital amount of tens of thousands of hundreds of thousands of dollars, it is better not to participate in this kind of mining behavior.
This phenomenon has caused renewed attention to Layer 2 in the circle. After all, Layer 2 is almost the only solution before the completion of ETH2.0. There are other high-speed chains. However, under the premise that most high-quality assets and ecology are all gathered in Ethereum, Layer 2 has become the only solution at present. In addition to Reddit’s recent hot community credits blockchain expansion contest, many Layer 2 projects have submitted solutions, so that the investment in the Layer 2 track in the second half of the year has become indispensable for everyone’s position ratio. a part of.
Last month’s “Blockchain’s biggest problem at present is the lack of users. This kind of new development can support at least 10 million new users? “Introduced several mainstream technologies of Layer 2 from a technical point of view. This article introduces the fundamentals and recent status of several current mainstream Layer 2 projects from the perspective of each project.
Raiden Network
This should be the earliest Layer 2 project on Ethereum. Bitcoin has Lightning Network and Ethereum has Raiden Network.
The Raiden Network uses a technical framework similar to that of the Lightning Network. The payment channel is used to place transactions off-chain, and finally on-chain for settlement.
Then the situation of this project is similar to that of the Lightning Network. It has always been in a state of sullenness. Although the mainstream trading platforms such as Binance have been launched early, the transaction volume has not been large, the development has been relatively slow, and the publicity work has not been positive. Many 19 years later The newcomers in the circle have never heard of it. Until recently, after Layer 2 became popular, the currency price also performed well, and it re-entered people’s attention.
When Raiden first released the project, it was questioned by the industry. The reason is simple. The Lightning Network on Bitcoin did not issue coins separately. As the Raiden network on Ethereum, the same channel technology is used. Why do you want to issue coins? To make matters worse, V God also personally Diss this project.
However, with the maturity of a series of mechanisms and technologies such as on-chain governance, PoS, etc., everyone has gradually accepted that a project is issued coins to achieve more complex functions and governance, and no one will take this as a matter. Raiden also survived tenaciously. At the end of 18 years, he launched the first version of Red Eyes on the mainnet. Two months ago, he launched the second version of Alderaan on the mainnet. Many new functions were implemented, including monitoring services, path discovery services, and intermediaries. Wait. Last year, a Raiden Trust ecological subsidy program was also launched to encourage research, improvement, and ecological gadgets based on Raiden. The whole project is the same as the project itself.
All in all, as a pure channel technology Layer 2, it is difficult to stand out from a lot of Layer 2 projects in the environment where the channel may become the standard protocol stack of Ethereum in the future. In addition, channel technology basically does not allow it to be arbitrary off-chain. Perform smart contract transactions, so it is difficult to support DeFi, DApp and games. It can only follow the ups and downs of Layer 2 itself. The number of channels on Raiden last month only had dozens of accounts and dozens of channels. To put it bluntly That is: no one uses it.
But to spit out the poisonous milk of God V here, Raiden also has a Layer 2 project called Liquidity Network at the same time as a channel. It is technically similar to Raiden, except that Raiden’s channel is one-to-one, and LQD is a more optimized one-to-N. At that time, V God Diss Raiden, turned his head and liked LQD. And now Raiden is still alive and well, LQD is a big place, the market value fell less than 1 million, and even this wave of Layer 2 did not attract any attention. The article can only appear as a supporting role at the end of introducing Radien. …
Celer Network
The blockbuster Layer 2 project in 2018 was called the “aircraft carrier” level at the time, and Binance 1EO was first launched. I never thought that the currency price or popularity after it went online was all the way to Waterloo. For a long time, the APP used in the test was an on-chain gomoku APP, so it was also dubbed “Gomoku” by insiders.
Celer, like Radien, also took advantage of this wave of Layer 2 heat to become hot again.
Compared to Raiden, Celer is clearly a project that is more capable of doing things and catching hot spots in the circle.
Technically speaking, Celer’s generalized state channel itself is more complicated than the Lightning Network and the Raiden Network. There is also a role of guardian in the network. Secondly, Celer also joined the sidechain technology of hybrid PoS-Rollup this year, intending to sidechain. , Grasp the channel with both hands, both hands must be hard.
In terms of the market, Celer cooperated with the Web3 Foundation to port the state channel to Polkadot’s development environment, so Celer is now considered a half-polkadot ecological project.
Celer launched its mainnet last year. In May of this year, the mainnet was upgraded, and the number of nodes started to increase on a large scale. This month, it launched the State Guardian Network (SGN) Beta testnet.
Like Raiden, Celer’s main technology status channel is no longer a new or optimal solution in the current blockchain expansion plan. I believe Celer will focus more on POS Rollup in the next few months. In terms of side chain technology, it remains to be seen how effective the time comes.
Matic
People in the circle called Horseshoe. At that time, Binance 1EO made its debut, and it skyrocketed dozens of times. It was called a demon coin.
Horseshoe uses a significantly more advanced expansion technology, namely Plasma side chain technology. In this field, it is the only seedling with OMG (loom used to be, but basically died). Using Plasma can enable Matic to host DApp, which is more potentially valuable for projects such as DeFi. At present, NFT and Layer 2 of the game ecosystem on ETH, Matic basically has a monopoly through various cooperation.
In addition to the dozens of times of skyrocketing last year, Matic has attracted countless eyeballs, and various cooperation with other projects is also non-stop. The Automated Market Maker (AMM) agreement is planned to launch the first testnet in September.
Among the 22 expansion plans collected by Reddit, from the current Reddit forum users using points to like the post indicators-Solana (397 points), OMG Network (356 points), Matic (246 points), Minter Network (226 points) ), StarkWave (150 points). Matic ranks third, a good place. Of course, this is a poll on rediit at best, and the final choice has little to do with this poll.
There is a friend who works on enterprise blockchain. Because of the need for a solution, their team Fork all the Layer 2 projects on the market, and then ran, only two of them were really usable and the experience was OK. One Matic, one OMG.
OMG
In 2017, the famous “Nenmo Coin”, one coin and one tender came from OMG, the first project of V God “Platform” (the second is KNC).
After the currency price and fame soared, OMG fell into a long-term downturn. It was criticized by V God for slow development progress, which made people think that the project was going to be cool.
Then it is what everyone knows – on coinbase, followed by the release of the mainnet beta, the market capitalization is not allowed to become the leader of Layer 2, and together with Matic, they have carried the banner of Plasma.
Later-Reddit’s Ethereum expansion proposal, OMG became the most popular Ethereum project (the first Solana is a separate public chain).
Two days ago, Tether officially issued USDT on OMG! This is incredible! You must know that before USDT was issued on the public chain, BTC, ETH, EOS, TRX. OMG became the only Ethereum Layer 2 project to enjoy USDT issuance.
OMG’s performance in 2020 is really O! M! G! (Oh MY God!) (At the time of posting, the price has risen by 100%, pay attention to risks)
LRC
The only purely domestic project (Celer is regarded as a Chinese project in Silicon Valley), has been in full swing in 17 years, has been praised by all walks of life, and has been praised as domestic 0x.
Later, after the bear market in 2018, it was also in a slump, until 2020, it will rise like a rocket like OMG.
I can’t remember how many times V God called Loopring on his Twitter. It basically means that before ETH2.0, the best expansion solution for Layer 2 is Rollup, and Loopring’s Dex is currently the only one. Landed scale application of Zk-rollup.
Loopring’s performance has not disappointed. TPS2000+ DEX can be said to be the only one in the industry (the other is Deversifi).
Within a few months, in DEX, the number of transactions ranked among the top three, and the amount of locked positions ranked among the top five. Of course, the number of users is a flaw. In 2020, DEX will be the world of AMM. DEX with order books such as LRC or IDex is very unpopular.
However, in addition to the V-God’s call for orders, there are two more things to look forward to.
One is the smart wallet. Loopring Pay launched Loopring Pay 2 months ago (transfer ETH or ERC20, it will arrive in seconds, and it’s free!) The service is packaged into a fast transfer function, which is provided to Loopring trading platform users for free. However, The real ultimate move is behind. The Loopring Smart Wallet, which will be released soon, is the real use of Loorping Pay. At that time, Loopring will not only be a DEX transaction protocol, but also a high-speed payment protocol. And smart wallets, as the traffic portal, must also be the next block chain’s battleground.
The second is AMM. As I said just now, the standard configuration of DEX is now AMM. Just look at how popular Uniswap is. The old style of order book is basically no one cares about. However, the current AMM is mainly concentrated in Layer 1, which is slow and expensive. If it can be combined with the low cost and high speed of Layer 2, then there will really be no CEX anymore… In the fourth quarter of 2020, Loopring 3.6 The version upgrade will launch AMM based on Layer 2.
Summary
In fact, the biggest problem with Layer 2 is that they are not interoperable. In other words, the past and the present have always been in a state of loose sand. If you want to assist and accelerate the DAPP application on ETH, or DeFi on a large scale, you must There is a core technology and core project that dominates, accomplishing the feat of Qin destroying the six nations. Otherwise, it will always be such a separatist regime, no one can eat the big meat, and ETH has been “slow”.
This is the fundamentals and recent developments of the most mainstream Layer 2 projects. Of course, there are other projects that are also worthy of attention, such as (Stake) Xdai, which has recently been praised by V God, and POA is a veteran side chain. It is inextricably related to Xdai. As a new star in the side chain industry, Skale is likely to cause a lot of waves in a few months. There is also a star in the Layer 2 world, Matter Labs’ Zk-Sync, which currently has no currency issued but said Sooner or later, governance tokens will be issued…These are all Layer 2 projects that you can learn about.