The Present State of L2s, Edition #2

Layer 2 M

Apr 16, 2023

Good Morning Saints,

Hope you’re having a wonderful weekend.

If you’re reading this, you’re always one of the chosen Saints and you’re special.

Here’s what we’re covering today:

Fuel SwaySwap is live on Beta 3 Testnet and 30+ quality projects building on Fuel.
Optimism Bedrock upgrade coming to Mainnet and Optimism Governance (Season 4)
Gemholic Project Update and Newest Dapps on zkSync Era
Polygon zkEVM Audit Update
Scroll ZKP Ecosystem account
Taiko’s current Best projects
The DeFI Saint Recap

The present state of L2s

Fuel aims to be the fastest modular blockchain and It aims to do that by focusing on the execution layer of the blockchain which is responsible for providing an environment for applications to live on and execute all transactions.

As an L2, It leaves the other layers of the blockchain to Ethereum while just handling its execution for easier throughput.

Fuel recently announced its Beta-3 testnet is live and also its Dapp Swayswap is live on the testnet.

To get hands-on with Fuel’s magic network, Here’s a good way to start by:

Installing Fuel Wallet, Fuel is not Fully EVM but is said to be the EVM 2.0 as its FuelVM implements learnings from EVM, Bitcoin, WASM, Solana and Cosmos. It also has its programming language Sway Language. I don’t take Fuel to act like zkEVM types as it won’t provide the same experience to DEVs as it’s like building on Ethereum.
https://wallet.fuel.network/docs/install/
The Swayswap Dapp
https://fuellabs.github.io/swayswap/

Fuel is still on Testnet and getting ready for Mainnet soon, Here you’ll find a list of protocols building on Fuel and you can interact with them at Fuel Ecosystem Projects

Optimism Bedrock is coming to Mainnet, The recent proposal was voted has been passed as this marks a significant milestone towards the bedrock-enabled superchain future.

The Optimism bedrock is an upgrade for Optimism which aims to make it the cheapest, fastest and most advanced rollup chain.

So what does this mean for Optimism?

Optimism is currently ranked the 2nd largest L2 after Arbitrum and I expect to see this upgrade be a huge boost to the Optimism chain following its Superchain launch, just like Arbitrum Nitro to Arbitrum which made it cheaper and faster with increased transaction throughput.

Optimism Season 4 Governance is coming faster than you think, Their season 4 governance aims to be the most ambitious season which will focus on its mission and will represent a big step towards the entire collective’s future.

You can read more on this here.

zkSync zkSync zkSync, The CT’s favourite L2 chain now

After Arbitrum Airdrop, every degen is looking for the next $ARB and $ZKS looks like it’ll be bigger than Arbitrum as they closed $458M in funding from VCs.

Its TVL has been increasing sporadically since the mainnet launch and since then, $200M has been bridged into the chain.

Following these activities, a recent project “Gemholic Ecosystem” lost 921 $ETH in a token sale as a result of an error in the smart contract.

zkSync made an open statement regarding this which they resolved and now using it as a means to educate the masses about its zkEVM type.

https://twitter.com/zksync/status/1644139364270878720?s=20

Also, as the ecosystem continues to grow, Here is the list of the Newest Dapps to use on zkSync.

Polygon zkEVM which is the first type 2 zkEVM was recently audited again by Spearbit.

We’ve seen how important these audits are in the DeFI industry as security should be guaranteed first before anything else.

The audit was not just on the smart contract but on the prover + cryptography and the ROM.

You can read the full audit report here

Scroll ZKP ecosystem account is live, Scroll ZKP is a type 2 zkEVM, just like the polygon zkEVM but still on the Alpha testnet. with the new ecosystem account, you can track all the projects building on Scroll, This is useful for users who want to keep track of all projects building on Scroll and also for all Curatoors who want to keep track of these projects.

you can follow the account here.

Taiko lists out some of the best projects which are building on their zkEVM as they shared their product vision.

Taiko is a type 1 zkEVM which is purely Ethereum Equivalent, Taiko’s vision for their zkEVM is to make it for DEVs to build on Taiko as they would on Ethereum without any modifications.

The only drawback here is the prover speed which is not faster than the other zkEVM types.

Here you can see the list of these projects

The DeFI Saint Recap

Shapella Upgrade is now complete, That’s really a thing of beauty.

As of today, here’s the current phase of the beacon chain activity with Active validators and Staked ETH.

LIDO is still topping the LSD category with the largest market share after the upgrade, We’re yet to see the LSD wars.

Aside LIDO, I’m keeping my eyes on Stader Ethereum which is currently ranked 11th, but won’t be there for so long,

why??

Stader’s ETHx has the lowest capital requirement to run a node which is 4 $ETH Bond requirement + 0.4 $ETH worth in $SD.
Its multi-pool architecture which makes it flexible and more pools to be added on the advancement of the ETH ecosystem.
Being the first to adopt the Distributed validator technology in partnership with ssv network to help improve fault tolerance by reducing slashing and penalty risks.