In the current overheated environment of AI, let’s take a closer look at the changes that have occurred in the infrastructure layer, especially in the public chain infrastructure, in recent months. Some new things are worth mentioning.
(Previous summary:
Forbes names XRP, ADA, LTC, and other top 20 public chains as “crypto zombies,” with little use other than speculation.)
(Supplementary background:
What can be expected from Ethereum’s upcoming upgrade “Pectra”? Staking mechanism, wallet user experience..)
Table of Contents:
1. ETH, or the further deconstruction of single-chain
Execution layer
1) From the perspective of how transactions are parallelized – there is nothing new under the sun, just a difference between a priori and a posteriori.
2) From the level of emphasis on parallel EVM – can also be divided into two schools
DA layer
1) Near DA
2) BTC&CKB
3) New DA
Settlement layer
Summary
Recently, in the primary market, the hottest track is undoubtedly AI, followed by BTC. 80% of the projects discussed every day are concentrated in these two tracks. At one point, I could discuss 5-6 AI projects in a day.
It can be foreseen that the AI bubble will reach its peak in the next year or two. With the launch of hundreds of new AI projects, the market value of the AI track will reach its peak. When the bubble bursts and everything collapses, true unicorns that find the intersection between AI and Crypto will emerge, pushing this track and the entire industry forward.
Therefore, in the current overheated environment of AI, let’s take a closer look at the changes that have occurred in the infrastructure layer, especially in the public chain infrastructure, in recent months. Some new things are worth mentioning.
When Celestia first proposed the concept of modularity and the concept of the DA layer, the market actually took a lot of time to digest and understand. Now, this concept has penetrated deeply into people’s minds, and various RaaS infrastructures have flooded the stage, with the number of infrastructures exceeding the number of applications and users. (RaaS: Rollup-as-a-Service, refers to providing ready-made Rollup products and services to help application developers quickly launch Rollup)
The execution layer, DA layer, and settlement layer have made some technological progress in the past few months, and each layer has spawned new technical solutions. Even the concept of the settlement layer is no longer exclusive to ETH. Let’s briefly discuss representative technologies from each layer.
The most popular concept in the execution layer is undoubtedly parallel EVM, represented by Monad, Sei, MegaETH, and other projects such as FTM and Canto have also begun planning to upgrade in this direction. However, just as not all ZK projects protect privacy, projects labeled as parallel EVM actually have different technical routes and final goals.
Taking a diagram from Sei as an intuitive demonstration, it is clear that in an optimistic situation, the performance improvement from sequential processing to parallel processing is significant.
Parallel EVM can actually be divided into several different technical routes:
Pre-verification, represented by Solana and Sui, requires transactions to explicitly declare which parts of the chain state they modified, so that conflicts can be detected before block packaging (such as accessing the same AMM pool). If there is a conflict, these conflicting transactions will be discarded.
Post-verification, also known as optimistic parallelism, represented by Aptos BlockSTM, assumes that there are no conflicts and includes transactions, and then performs verification. If conflicts are found, the transaction is declared invalid, and the results are reorganized and re-executed. This process is repeated until all transactions in the block are executed. Sei, Monad, MegaETH, and Canto have used similar solutions.
In the primary market, we have also seen parallel solutions for situations where conflicts may arise (such as accessing the same AMM pool), but it seems that the engineering complexity may be relatively high, and it is uncertain whether it is commercially viable. It is still under evaluation.
One is Monad and Sei, which take concurrent processing as the main scalability approach, with concurrency as the main narrative. For example, in addition to optimistic parallel processing, Monad also has MonadDB, which is specifically developed for it, and asynchronous I/O specifically designed to complement parallel processing.
The other is the approach taken by Fantom, Solana, and MegaETH, where parallelism is one of the scaling solutions, but it is only one of them. Parallelism is an auxiliary narrative, and performance improvement relies more on other technical solutions.
For example, Fantom’s Sonic upgrade focuses on FVM virtual machine + optimized Lachesis consensus mechanism. Solana’s next stage focuses on the modular architecture of the Firedancer new client, optimized network communication mechanisms, signature verification, etc.
MegaETH aims to achieve a Realtime Blockchain. First, it is based on the efficient client Paradigm developed by Reth, which optimizes the state synchronization mechanism of all nodes (synchronizing only state differences rather than all data), the hardware design of the Sequencer (using a large amount of high-performance RAM with storage capabilities for state access to avoid slow disk I/O), and improvements to the Merkle Trie data structure. It comprehensively improves and enhances software, hardware, data structures, disk I/O, network communication, transaction ordering, and parallel processing, pushing the performance ceiling of EVM to the limit and approaching “Realtime Blockchain.”
The DA layer has not undergone significant technological iterations, so the level of excitement in this track is far less than that in the execution layer. There are only a few main players.
ETH’s CallData upgrade has become Blob, and the costs of various Layer2 have dropped significantly. Now ETH is a “not so expensive” DA.
Celestia’s greatest contribution is being the first project to propose the concept of the DA layer. It raised the ceiling of the DA track from a 2 billion FDV to 20 billion, opening up possibilities and imagination. Many new Layer2 Appchains naturally choose Celestia as their DA. (FDV means “fully diluted valuation,” which is an valuation indicator calculated by multiplying the token price by the total supply)
Avail has become independent from Polygon and is technically more like an “enhanced version of Celestia.” For example, it uses the Grandpa+BABE consensus mechanism from Polkadot, which theoretically supports more decentralized nodes than Celestia’s Tendermint. It also supports Validity Proof that Celestia does not support. However, the difference in technology is not as important as the ecological development, and Avail still needs to catch up in terms of the ecosystem.
EigenDA also went online with the EigenLayer mainnet a few days ago. EigenLayer, as one of the strongest narratives and the project with the best business cooperation, I personally feel that the adoption rate of EigenDA will not be low. Theoretically, as long as it feels “secure and affordable,” not many projects really care whether you use Validity Proof or Fraud Proof, or whether DAS is supported, etc.
What is worth mentioning are the following three DAs:
Near is a magical public chain. It was originally designed for sharding, and it is still working on it, but it also did the DA in the process. It is cheaper than Celestia and supports fast settlement on Layer2.
Chain Abstraction – Recently, Near launched chain signatures, allowing users to request transaction signatures for any chain through a single NEAR account.
AI – Its founder, Illia, is one of the eight Transformers, and he was patted on the shoulder by Huang Renxun at NVIDIA’s conference. Now they are planning to hire AI engineers, and announcements will be released on their official website next month… the hexagonal warrior, I also threw it into the DA track.
Because BTC’s Layer1 does not support smart contracts and cannot settle directly, dozens of BTC EVM Layer2 projects are basically using BTC as a DA. The difference lies in whether they directly implement ZK Proofs on BTC or only use the hash of ZK Proofs. It seems that they cannot be called “BTC Layer2” without doing so.
Recently, I actually encountered new projects saying, “I won’t install it. I am an ETH Layer2, and the settlement is done on ETH, but I serve the BTC ecosystem!” It’s quite interesting… The only alternative to the scaling solution is RGB++ launched by CKB. In this framework, CKB becomes a DA-like existence, and BTC, due to the UTXO isomorphism binding technology, becomes the settlement layer of RGB++.
Two new DA ideas are worth mentioning, without mentioning the project names. One is combining DA with AI. In addition to being an efficient DA itself, it can also serve as a storage layer for AI large models, training data, and training trajectories. The other is an improved error correction mechanism at the underlying level of DAs like Celestia. It can provide more robust network status in a dynamic network (where several nodes drop randomly each round) that is unstable.
Originally, this layer was almost monopolized by ETH, with Celestia competing in the DA layer, and their own execution layer had numerous Layer2s. The settlement layer was the only one with ETH. However, this situation will soon change. Several new projects have been seen moving towards the direction mentioned at the beginning of the article, and some old projects have also started to pivot in this direction, namely the further deconstruction of ETH through ZK verification/settlement layer (grabbing ETH’s business).
Why did this concept emerge? The reason is that running contracts on the ETH Layer1 to verify ZK Proofs is not necessarily the optimal choice:
Technically, to verify the correctness of ZK Proofs, developers need to write verification contracts based on the ZK project and the chosen ZK Proof System, based on Solidity. This involves relying on many cryptographic algorithms, such as supporting different elliptic curves.
These cryptographic algorithms are usually relatively complex, and the EVM-Solidity architecture is not the best platform for implementing these complex cryptographic algorithms. For some ZK projects, the cost of developing and verifying these verification contracts is equally high. This to some extent hinders the native integration of some ZK ecosystems into the EVM ecosystem. Therefore, ZK-friendly languages like Cario, Noir, Leo, and Lurk can currently only verify on their own Layer1s. At the same time, updating or upgrading these things on ETH is always a “large ship is difficult to turn around” situation.
In terms of cost, although the “protection fee” paid on Layer2 accounts for the majority, verifying ZK contracts also incurs gas fees, and verifying on Ethereum is definitely not a cheap option. Moreover, ETH gas fees occasionally soar, transforming it into a “noble chain,” which also greatly affects verification costs.
As a result, the concept of new ZK verification/settlement layer projects has emerged. These new projects are still relatively early-stage, with Nebra as a representative. Some old projects are also pivoting in this direction, such as Mina and Zen, which have just passed a new proposal.
The overall ideas of most projects in this track are:
Support multiple ZK languages
Support ZK aggregation proofs for higher efficiency and lower cost
Faster final confirmation time
It is very likely that the ZK settlement layer will be linked to decentralized Proof Markets, as there needs to be both technology and computing power. We may see some settlement layer projects collaborating with Proof Market projects, or settlement layer projects with computing power directly creating their own Proof Market, or Proof Market projects with technology taking over the settlement layer. The market will ultimately determine the direction.
Other areas of infrastructure, such as OEV in the Oracle and MEV fields, and ZK lightweight clients in the interoperability field, have been covered in many articles and will not be repeated here. I will share with you when I come across new interesting things next time.