jakiro
Author: 0xNatalie Source: ChainFeeds
Recently, the Ethereum community has been in a downturn.Since the launch of the ETF this year, the price of ETH has not met market expectations.There are many reasons. For example, the rapid development of Layer 2 technology has improved transaction efficiency, but it has also invisibly weakened the economic capture capability of the Ethereum main chain, resulting in a gradual decline in demand for ETH; narratives that once supported the value of Ethereum, such as DeFi,It has also gradually lost its appeal, and there is no fresh enough and attractive narrative in the market at present.
In addition, the price increase in Solana became a direct contrast, and in this context, the FUD sentiment in the Ethereum community spreads.In particular, the Ethereum Foundation’s practice of selling ETH has caused widespread dissatisfaction.Many community members believe that this behavior by the foundation ignores market sentiment in a situation where ETH prices are sluggish, questioning Ethereum’s leadership capabilities, believing they are “destroying their future.”
This negative sentiment broke out on Twitter, and criticizing Ethereum seemed to have become the traffic password for some KOLs.Since the end of October, the debate over Ethereum has continued.While this sentiment spread, the Devcon activity arrived as scheduled, bringing some confidence and positive energy to Ethereum.
In mid-November, I attended the Ethereum Developers Conference (Devcon 7) in Bangkok.As one of the most influential events in the blockchain field, the main venue is arranged with vitality and diversification, and the overall atmosphere is friendly and open.The agenda of the venue is compact and has a lot of information, but it is difficult to keep up with the pace in some aspects.According to official statistics, 60% of the participants attended Devcon for the first time.When communicating with the participants, the most mentioned in everyone’s evaluation of the conference were “chill”, “colorful” and “friendly”.
Interesting new concepts:POD
During the conference, I came across an interesting concept – Provable Object Data (POD), a data structure used to store and manage data that needs to be verified by zero-knowledge proof.GPC is a circuit used to verify these POD objects.In GPC, POD data will be used as input, and the circuit will check whether the data meets certain preset conditions to obtain a verification result.For example, Zupass, the ticket system of this conference, used POD technology to ensure the uniqueness of each ticket.When a user purchases a ticket, the Zupass system will generate a POD for the ticket, which contains the ticket’s unique identifier, basic information, purchase time and other data.After processing POD data through the GPC circuit, venue staff will not directly see the specific information of the ticket.You will only see the results verified by zero-knowledge proof.
Core points in communication
During the gaps in speeches, booths, Hubs and other communication spaces, I discussed multiple topics with technical/market staff from different projects, among which ZK, Based Rollup and Appchain were deeply impressed.
Aztec software engineer Adam Domurad mentioned in the exchange that ZK technology is very suitable for blockchain expansion due to its constant proof size and significant advantages of efficient verification.Compared with OP Rollup, ZK Rollup uses zero-knowledge proof to ensure the correctness of each transaction, which not only avoids the risk of nodes doing evil, but also reduces the workload of repeated verification.Currently, OP Rollup occupies a mainstream position mainly because users are more concerned about low fees and high speeds than the superiority of underlying technologies.The long-term value of ZK Rollup lies in its excellent security and scalability, and many blockchains, including Ethereum, have begun redesigning architectures to leverage the full potential of ZK technology.In addition, ZK technology has also shown great application potential in the field of privacy protection.For example, the Anon Aadhaar project presented on Devcon, developed by a PSE team supported by the Ethereum Foundation, does not disclose specific identities when verifying Indian citizenship through zero-knowledge proof.However, ZK Rollup needs to further optimize speed and cost to win wider market recognition.He expressed with confidence,In the future, with the continuous maturity of ZK technology, ZK Rollup is expected to replace OP Rollup and become the mainstream expansion solution.
Ethereum researcher mteam is a 17-year-old student who focuses on the research of Based Rollup.He shared with me the design advantages of Based Rollup as an independent execution environment.Through a shared sorter, multiple Based Rollups can share liquidity without direct bridging, which can flow between different Based Rollups with the help of the Ethereum mainnet.This design improves the efficiency of cross-chain operations while reducing dependence on a single bridging solution.Based Rollup’s decentralized sorter runs higher than the centralized sorter, but multiple Based Rollups can allocate costs by aggregating blocks., thereby significantly reducing individual operational overhead.In terms of performance, Based Rollup can achieve the same speed as other Rollups through a pre-confirmation mechanism, providing a fast user experience in Ethereum block time (12 seconds).In economic model, Based Rollup returns most of the MEV’s revenue to Ethereum, so its main revenue comes from Gas fees paid by users.In addition, Based Rollup achieves economic sustainability through front-end service fees and smart contract execution fees, avoiding reliance on MEV benefits.Due to its deep integration of the Ethereum main network, Based Rollup inherits the censorship resistance and high reliability characteristics of Ethereum.In other words, the future upgrades of Ethereum (such as stronger censorship resistance) will directly bring additional advantages to Based Rollup.
Carbon project leader Mark Richardson mentioned that DeFi currently faces two major challenges: liquidity fragmentation and user experience complexity.He mentioned,Protocols like Uniswap can capture more value through development of Appchain, but this approach may further exacerbate the problem of liquidity dispersion..In contrast, cross-chain deployment and sharing liquidity mechanisms are a more efficient solution.For Appchain, he believes that while as a trend, it can indeed help protocols capture more value, as protocol controls the entire chain can better optimize cost structure and user experience while achieving more efficient value extraction.However,From the perspective of the entire DeFi ecosystem, Appchain’s path is not necessarily the best choice.Mark predicts that with the continuous development of cross-chain technology, multi-chain collaboration will become simpler, and at that time, the specific attributes of the chain where users are located during transactions will become irrelevant.Therefore, he tends to focus more on dealing with liquidity fragmentation through cross-chain solutions rather than letting the protocol isolate itself from the ecosystem through Appchain.In addition, he mentioned that intention-driven trading models are becoming a major trend.This design allows users to clearly express their trading needs while obtaining a zero slippage and MEV-protected trading experience.For market trends,He believes that “DeFi Summer” is unlikely to appear again in the near future, but “Memecoin Summer” may be welcomed.In this environment, DeFi applications need to seize opportunities while combining flexibility and robustness to meet user needs.He particularly emphasized that future projects’ success will not only depend on technological leadership, but also on how to optimize the user experience through data analysis and achieve coordinated development in a multi-chain ecosystem.
idea
Communicating with these Buliders made me realize that Ethereum’s current dilemma is that it is too focused on infrastructure construction but lacks useful and attractive applications.However, from a macro perspective, Ethereum is still at the forefront of underlying technological innovation, which is very important.After all, other chains seem to be “replicating” Ethereum in different places, including the meme phenomenon.
Ethereum’s chance of losing meme is partly due to its not being fast enough to make it forced some small and medium-sized users to find chains that are more suitable for their needs, such as Solana.However, Solana’s success does not rely solely on lower transaction fees, but more importantly, it has successfully attracted a large number of excellent developers and is more focused on the end user experience.These factors set Solana apart from the competition, attracting a large number of users seeking efficient, low-cost transactions.However, as Solana’s transaction fees and MEV continue to rise, the use of trading robots and high-end tools has become popular, which may also lead to the loss of ordinary users.Most of the remaining players trade through complex tools, which is similar to the early meme phenomenon in Ethereum.
Therefore, I think other chains may be all the rage at some stages, but overall, Ethereum’s ecological status and potential are still solid.Ethereum’s unique advantages in technology and ecological depth are irreplaceable to other chains in the short term.
