Analysis: What changes have occurred in the L1 Infra track in recent months?
Author: Laobai From ABCDE
Edited：Wublockchain
Recently in the primary market, the hottest track is undoubtedly AI, followed by BTC. About 80% of the projects discussed daily are focused on these two tracks, and at my busiest, I can discuss up to 5 or 6 AI projects in a day.
It is foreseeable that the AI bubble will reach its peak in the next year or two. As hundreds of new AI projects are launched, the market value of the AI track will climb to its peak. When the bubble eventually bursts, it will be a mess, but it will also give birth to unicorns that truly find the convergence point of AI X Crypto, pushing this track and the entire industry forward.
Therefore, in the current overheated AI environment, it’s worth taking a calm look at the changes that have occurred in the Infra level in recent months, especially in the public chain Infra track. There are some new developments worth mentioning.
1. ETH, or the further deconstruction of single-chain
When Celestia first introduced the concept of modularity and the DA layer, the market actually took quite some time to digest and understand it. Now, this concept is deeply ingrained, and various RaaS infrastructures have flooded to the point where the number of infrastructures exceeds the number of applications, which exceeds the number of users.
The execution layer, DA layer, and settlement layer have each seen some different technical progress in the past few months, each layer deriving new technical solutions, and even the concept of the settlement layer is no longer exclusive to ETH. Let’s briefly discuss representative technologies of each layer.
2. Execution layer
The hottest concept in the execution layer is undoubtedly the Parallel EVM — represented by Monad, Sei, MegaETH, with existing projects like FTM, Canto also planning to upgrade in this direction. However, just as not all ZK projects will protect privacy, projects labeled with Parallel EVM actually have different technological paths and ultimate goals.
Let’s use a diagram from Sei to make a visual presentation, which clearly shows that, under optimistic circumstances, changing from the existing sequential processing to parallel processing can significantly enhance performance.
Within Parallel EVM, different technological approaches can actually be divided.
From the perspective of how transactions are parallelized — there’s nothing new under the sun; it’s just a matter of a priori versus a posteriori.
A priori, represented by Solana and Sui, requires transactions to clearly declare which parts of the chain state they modify. This way, potential state conflicts (such as accessing the same AMM pool) can be detected before block packaging, and any conflicting transactions can be discarded.
A posteriori, also known as optimistic parallelism, is represented by Aptos BlockSTM. It starts by assuming that there are no conflicts among transactions, processes them, and then checks for conflicts post-execution. Conflicting transactions are declared invalid, results are refreshed, and the process is repeated until all transactions in the block are executed. Sei, Monad, MegaETH, and Canto use similar solutions.
In the primary market, we have also seen solutions for parallelizing in scenarios of state conflicts (like accessing the same AMM pool mentioned earlier). However, these solutions appear to be relatively complex in engineering terms, and their commercial viability is uncertain and still under evaluation.
Based on the emphasis placed on Parallel EVM — it can be divided into two schools.
One is represented by Monad and Sei, which take transaction parallelization as the main scaling strategy, where parallelization is the main narrative. For example, Monad, besides optimistic parallel processing, also developed MonadDB, asynchronous I/O specifically designed to complement parallel processing.
The other approach is seen in Fantom, Solana, and MegaETH, where parallelization is one of the scaling strategies, but only one of them. Here, parallelization serves as a supplementary narrative, and performance improvements rely more on other technological solutions.
For instance, Fantom’s Sonic upgrade primarily features the FVM virtual machine and an optimized Lachesis consensus mechanism. Solana’s next phase focuses on the Firedancer client’s modular architecture, optimized network communication mechanisms, and signature verification, among others.
MegaETH aims to achieve a Realtime-blockchain. First, based on the newly developed high-performance Reth client by Paradigm, it further optimizes and enhances various aspects such as full node state synchronization mechanisms (synchronizing only state differences rather than all data), Sequencer hardware design (using high-performance RAM with storage capabilities for state access to avoid slow disk I/O), and improvements in the data structure of the Merkle Trie. This is essentially a comprehensive enhancement across software, hardware, data structures, disk I/O, network communications, transaction ordering, and parallel processing, pushing the performance ceiling of the EVM to the limit and nearing a “Realtime Blockchain”.
3. DA Layer
There haven’t been significant technological iterations in the DA layer, so this track isn’t as heated as the execution layer. There are only a few key players.
ETH’s CallData has been upgraded to Blob, significantly reducing the costs of various L2s. ETH is now a “less expensive” DA.
Celestia’s greater impact is perhaps after its launch as the first project to introduce the DA layer concept, raising the ceiling from 2 billion FDV to 20 billion, thereby expanding the scope and imagination of this track. Many new Layer2 Appchains naturally choose DA from Celestia as their first choice.
Avail has spun off from Polygon and technically resembles an “enhanced version of Celestia,” such as using Polkadot’s Grandpa + BABE consensus mechanism, theoretically supporting more decentralized nodes than Celestia’s Tendermint, and supporting Validity Proof which Celestia does not, among other Features. However, technical differences are far less important than the ecosystem, and Avail still has to catch up in terms of ecosystem.
EigenDA was also launched a few days ago along with the EigenLayer mainnet. EigenLayer, as one of the strongest narratives this round and the project best at commercial partnerships, I personally feel that the adoption rate of EigenDA will not be low. In theory, as long as it “feels safe and is affordable,” not many projects really care whether you use Validity Proof or Fraud Proof, or whether DAS is supported, etc.
What’s worth mentioning are the following three DAs.
1. Near DA — Near is a unique public chain that originally focused on sharding and still does, but alongside sharding, it has also developed a DA — cheaper than Celestia, and supports fast settlement for L2s; Chain abstraction — recently, Near introduced chain signatures, allowing users to request signatures for transactions on any chain through a single NEAR account; AI — the founder Illia, one of the eight Transformer pioneers and patted on the shoulder by NVIDIA’s CEO at a conference, is now planning to hire AI engineers and will announce related news at
//near.ai
next month… I’ve also thrown it into the DA track.
2. BTC&CKB — Since BTC’s layer one does not support smart contracts and cannot settle directly, dozens of BTC EVM Layer2s essentially use BTC as a DA. The difference is whether they directly throw ZK Proof onto BTC or just its hash, as if not doing so would prevent them from being called “BTC Layer2.” Recently, I came across a new project that said, “I’m not pretending anymore; I’m just an ETH L2, DA settlements are on ETH, but I serve the BTC ecosystem!” which is quite amusing… The only alternative expansion plan is CKB’s introduction of RGB++, where CKB becomes like a DA, and due to UTXO homomorphic binding, BTC almost becomes the settlement layer for RGB++.
3. New DA -I’ll mention two new DA ideas without naming the projects. One combines DA with AI, not only serving as a high-performance DA but also acting as a storage layer for AI large models, training data, and trajectories. Another has improved the error-correction mechanism of DAs like Celestia, providing a more robust network state in an unstable environment where several nodes randomly go offline each round.
4. Settlement Layer
Originally, this layer was almost exclusively dominated by ETH, with DA having competition from Celestia, and its own host of L2s for execution. Only in settlement was there no competition, with other chains like Solana and Aptos lacking an L2, and BTC’s L2s unable to use BTC for settlement. Currently, the only settlement layer you can think of is virtually ETH alone.
However, this situation is about to change, with several new projects moving in the direction mentioned at the beginning of the article, and some older projects beginning to pivot in this direction too, that is — ZK verification/settlement layer — further deconstructing ETH (and competing with ETH’s business).
Why has such a concept emerged?
The reason lies in the fact that running contracts on ETH L1 to verify ZK Proofs is theoretically not the optimal choice.
From a technical standpoint, to verify the correctness of ZK Proofs, developers need to write verification contracts in Solidity based on the ZK project and its chosen ZK Proof System. This involves relying on a variety of cryptographic algorithms, such as supporting different elliptic curves. These cryptographic algorithms are generally complex, and the EVM-Solidity architecture is not the best platform to implement these complex cryptographic algorithms. For some ZK projects, the cost of writing and verifying these contracts is also very high.
This, to some extent, hinders some ZK ecosystems from natively joining the EVM ecosystem, so ZK-friendly languages like Cairo, Noir, Leo, and Lurk can currently only be verified on their own Layer1. Also, updates or upgrades to ETH are always “hard to turn around the big ship.”
Cost-wise, although the “protection fee” DA takes the major share on L2s, ZK contract verification also requires Gas fees, and Ethereum is certainly not a cheap option for verification. With ETH Gas fees occasionally skyrocketing and turning it into a “noble chain,” the verification costs are also greatly affected.
Thus, new ZK verification/settlement layer concept projects have emerged, still relatively early stage, represented by Nebra. Older projects are also pivoting in this direction, such as Mina, and Zen, which just passed a new proposal.
The overall strategy of most projects in this track is generally:
1. Support multiple ZK languages
2. Support ZK aggregated proofs, which are more efficient and cheaper
3. Faster finality time
The ZK settlement layer and the decentralized Proof Market are likely to be tied together, as having the technology also requires computational power. We might see some settlement layer projects collaborating with Proof Market projects, or a settlement layer with computational power starting its own Proof Market, or a Proof Market with the technology venturing into creating a comprehensive settlement layer. The market will ultimately dictate how this unfolds.
Other areas of Infra, such as Oracle and the MEV field (OEV), and interoperability with ZK light clients, have been extensively discussed in various articles online, so I won’t elaborate further here. Next time I come across some new and interesting developments, I’ll share them with you.
Lastly, thanks to our Tech Lead, the tech guru @cyodyssey, for his review and revisions :)
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