What is the path for Layer 2 to gradually go into oblivion?

In the Layer 2 war, we often mention four names including Arbitrum, Optimism, ZkSync and StarkNet, but Metis Andromeda, Boba Network or Loopring are gradually losing out.

So what is the way for L2s to regain their position? Everyone, let’s find out in the article below!

The Difference Between ZASO Versus MBL

Zaso stands for ZkSync, Arbitrum, StarkNet and Optimism.

MBL stands for Metis, Boba Network or Loopring.

Let’s review together some outstanding parameters on Layer 2 blockchains such as TVL, number of wallet addresses, user usage level,…

Looking through all the parameters one can see the superiority of ZASO over MBL. The parameters above show us a few things:

• Parameters such as Total Addresses Established, Twitter Followers, Activity Index, TVL and TVL Bridge all show that current users are focusing mainly on ZASO. Besides, the fact that ZASO platforms have not yet launched tokens has caused users to rush to do airdrops/retroactives on these platforms, so the number of actives is even higher than if all MBL had deployed tokens.
• Raise fund parameters also show that VCs also rate ZASO higher than MBL.
• Regarding network upgrades, in 2022, ZASO platforms will also have more updates than MBL, such as Arbitrum with Nitro & Nova, Optimism with BedRock & Op Stack, ZkSync with zkEVM and StarkNet with standard. got mainet.

I think that in order for MBL to return to the track, there need to be a few more criteria:

• Continue to upgrade and improve the network to have extremely competitive transaction speeds and transaction costs compared to competitors.
• Continuously organize hackathons or grants to attract developers in the market to your ecosystem.
• Select an area to spearhead development.
• Develop new “products” that competitors do not yet have to spearhead your efforts.

And now we will take a look at how MBL has been and will be built in the near future and then make comments on whether MBL will regain its position and even surpass ZASO.

Boba Network With Promising Roadmap In 2023

Deploy the veToken model

Token Use Case is considered one of the painful problems of Layer 2 when the use cases for these tokens are almost nothing and Boba Network has made the first moves to build use cases for the BOBA token. .

Users can lock BOBA for a selected period of time to receive veBOBA to create positive activities for token holders, in addition, veBOBA holders have the right to vote for important updates to the Boba Network.

Hopefully the veToken update will bring positive signals to the price of the BOBA token and the Boba Network community will become more active.

Deploying Boba Network V3 upgrade

Optimism’s Bedrock-based technical upgrades to the Boba Network with the highest upgrade being Anchorage will make Boba’s network faster and transaction costs cheaper than similar competitors. branch.

At the present time, although it does not have as much traffic as Arbitrum or Optimism, the transaction fee on Boba is about 3 times larger than the above two networks. This causes an increasing number of users to leave the platform. And reality also shows that Boba Network is the least efficient network of all the L2s above.

Multichain development

In 2023, Boba Network will focus on two directions: Multichain Scailing and Hybrid Compute (technology to help bring information from Web2 to Web3).

Boba Network will expand its network to other Layer 1s and in the near future to Moonbeam and Fantom. However, there is no further information about the next Layer 1. It can be said that this is a completely new direction compared to the remaining Layer 2s on the market.

However, it is impossible to evaluate whether multichain development is effective or not, but from my perspective it is relatively difficult. Because L2 should be born when the L1 network is sufficiently decentralized and has scalability problems, but Moonbeam and Fantom have not achieved the above conditions. According to the project, Boba is quite interested in working on centralized networks for the GameFi and NFT markets.

Besides Multichain Scailing, Boba Network focuses on developing and researching new technologies such as:

• Hybrid OR x ZK: Is the expansion solution Boba wants to build to fully integrate the essence of Optimistic Rollup and Zk Rollup.
• EVM Parallel Transactions: Update improves transaction speed and transaction costs on Boba Network.
• Rollup Account Abstraction: After updating, the user’s account will be unified into only 1 type instead of 2 types as before: Personal Account and Smartcontract Account
• Delay Code Upgrades: Increase time to evaluate upgrades to avoid irreparable errors.

All of this technology will be open source so projects can use and apply.

General assessment

It can be said that Boba Network is facing two weaknesses that cause the project to fall short in the Layer 2 race. The update helps improve transaction speed and transaction costs on Boba Network.

• Delay in upgrading technology. As soon as Arbitrum had problems with Odyssey, they immediately upgraded from One to Nitro with faster transaction speeds and cheaper transaction fees. Optimism also made a similar move with the Bedrock update. However, Boba does not seem to put too much emphasis on the issue of transaction fees, which affects the user experience on the network.
• The ecosystem has no highlights, native projects are just forks from existing models, causing Boba’s TVL to quickly decrease from more than $600M to only $4M, equivalent to a 150-fold division from the peak. . This proves that Boba Network’s ecosystem is not attractive to users.

Metis And Hackathons

Over the past year Metis announced an ecosystem development package worth $100M and participated in many hackathons from third parties such as Devcon, Encode,… However, due to small scale hackathons, the number Some new projects on Metis are not really outstanding.

If people look at Metis’s DeFiLlama, the number of native projects is relatively large, but only around DEX or Lending projects. Multichain development projects are mostly Yield Aggregator or Cross-chain projects. When incentives are exhausted, users will leave the project as well as the platform. Besides, because it is an Optimistic Rollup Chain, the most important thing is that Metis must attract AAVE, Curve Finance, Uniswap,… to be able to attract cash flow from Ethereum but Metis has not been able to do this.

Recently, Metis officially announced a partnership with Chainlink for this project to provide services for DeFi on Metis. Hopefully this combination will open the door for a series of strong DeFi projects on Ethereum to migrate to Metis.

At the present time, Metis has not announced its development roadmap for 2023.

Loopring Joins the NFT War

Up to now, Loopring only supports activities such as trading (AMM, Order Book), in addition, Loopring’s network also supports mint NFT with fast transaction speed and low cost.

During Q2/2022, Loopring also cooperated with Gamestop to make NFT-related products but it did not really explode as expected.

In the early part of the year, they also revealed the story that they were researching zkEVM with many parties and they thought it was the End Game for the Layer 2 war. However, when Polygon, ZkSync or Scroll announced their own zkEVM Personally, the Loopring team is still quite quiet. It can be said that if Loopring does not move forward, of course the piece of cake they are keeping will belong to those who are ahead.

From my personal perspective, zkEVM is the next step forward for this platform and needs to be researched quickly and released soon to attract the community’s attention.

Summary

It can be said that the remaining Layer 2s are really out of breath in this battle, but their efforts to change their position are there, but that change has not brought about a change in perspective from the market. I think with the above Layer 2s there is still a lot of work to do like Boba needs to upgrade the network, Metis needs to have better developers or Loopring needs to move quickly to zkEVM.

And I will continue to observe the roadmap of Loopring and Metis for the upcoming 2023 to have a more accurate perspective on the project.