Layer 2 Scaling Solutions | January 2022 | Week 3

We see the market going down and that affects some ecosystem numbers as well. The only Layer 2 that could add to its TVL is Metis Andromeda, which we cover this week for the first time. The project is still small compared to alternative L1s, but in case you have never heard about it: Metis is supposed to be a platform for DACs which are an upgrade of DAOs. DACs aim to map more functions of an organisation to a decentralized system than voting, e.g. running payrolls, insurance, etc. The project has its own token MetisDAO. They also have a middleware called Polis that should help non-blockchain developers to build their DAC on Metis. Technologically, Metis is an Optimism Fork with an alternative fraud-proof protocol.

What happened in the Ecosystem?

• Again, definitively check out Faina’s post on Twitter about this week’s L2 ecosystem.
• If all StarkEx users would be integrated into StarkNet, then this Layer 2 system could compete with alternative L1s by the numbers and outsmart them by security, see here.
• After announcing that it has enabled Arbitrum withdrawals, Binance suspended them because demand was so high that available liquidity used up too fast! Bullish, yeah? But maybe they should set up some automation to bridge liquidity as needed.
• #EIP1559 went live on the @0xPolygon mainnet. Burn baby, burn! Crypto markets are hurting across the board but this is probably very good news for $MATIC price long term. … in case we have a rational market somehow.
• Video of a Computer Scientist explains zero-knowledge proofs in 5 levels – from a 10-year-old kid to a professor of cryptography, see here.
• Joe Lubin on why Ethereum is inevitable.

Look at the data

• In terms of TVL, Polygon PoS is shrinking. It is not within the top5 L1s anymore, and Arbitrum as a Layer 2 is only 2b$ away.
• Terra – No1 alternative L1 by TVL – sees a massive increase in daily transactions (36%), whereas, at the same time, daily transactions on Polygon and Solana plummet. Terra has even more value locked than the Binance Smart Chain. ConsenSys products do not support Terra because this blockchain is not EVM compatible.
• Boba Network and zkSwap v2 are too small to track them weekly. Boba only has 300 transactions a day and zkSwap 100.
• dYdX that runs on StarkEx see a 95% increase in daily transactions. This increase means that dYdX processes 5x more transactions than all other L2s that we track combined, AND considering that Ethereum has 1.2m daily transactions, dYdX almost has half of this.

Bridge aggregators – Bridge news

We analyzed bridges and bridge aggregators. So in case you want to try them, we have found 4 aggregators that are worth a try.

For the internal newsletter only

Check out our scorecards – even though it is still the old version. I will find a better way to show this table below.

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