The king is trapped in the "prosperity" dilemma: innovation needs to return to L1

Ethereum has once again become a hot topic in the crypto community, with many topics and controversies emerging. Not only has Vitalik Buterin personally come out to explain his position, but the Ethereum Foundation has also frequently spoken out to ease the doubts and dissatisfaction within the community.

The concerns expressed by users and investors about Ethereum this time are mainly because Ethereum's performance has fallen far short of expectations in this round of cryptocurrency market boom cycle. In particular, the approval of the Ethereum spot ETF in the United States did not stimulate a strong rebound in ETH prices as investors wished. Especially after a wave of L2 collective prosperity, innovation has stagnated several times, and Ethereum has no new narrative to guide the outside world to maintain continuous trust in Ethereum.

Ethereum and L2, the struggle of the drowning

L2 is the core component of Ethereum's rollup-centric roadmap. They are envisioned as an extension (technical and cultural) of Ethereum, designed to expand its functionality and attract a wider user base. In essence, L2 has a deep connection with Ethereum. For example, they share Ethereum's universal token ETH, while L2 benefits from Ethereum's security and uses it for data storage and settlement. This is a symbiotic and win-win relationship.

In reality, L2's performance is indeed outstanding, and it has largely solved Ethereum's problems in network performance and fees. As a result, more and more assets and applications are flowing to L2, ushering in an explosive "prosperity".

But some people believe that it cannot fundamentally solve the problems of L1. The founder of Cyber ​​Capital recently publicly stated that Ethereum is declining and L2 is "dancing on its grave." He pointed out that since the implementation of EIP-4844 (Proto-Danksharding), Ethereum's fee income has dropped significantly and cannot keep up with the rate of inflation. At the same time, the usage and fee income of the L2 network have hit new highs, and it has lobbied to keep Ethereum's capacity low. Crypto celebrity Bons believes that this constitutes a "parasitic relationship."

Bons said that the L2 network is actually stealing Ethereum's users and fees, and attracting users by pretending to be "the same as Ethereum". If it continues to develop in this way, the L2 network will eventually migrate or become an independent L1 network, and Ethereum will gradually decline.

Return to L1 to solve the problem

Problems like the irreconcilable relationship between Ethereum and its own L2 are also common in the world of public chains. The core reason lies in the backwardness of its own system. The old-fashioned architecture and consensus mechanism are difficult to adapt to new market demands. At the same time, due to the obsolescence of the L1 architecture design, the Rollup L2 layer still has many problems, which in turn limits the sustainability of L2 as a general layer to further develop the application ecosystem.

Solana's success proves that innovation at the L1 level can fundamentally solve the problem. Of course, the innovation of the EVM system is still continuing. The new public chain PandoraChain, which was unveiled at the "Web3.0 Future Conference" in Singapore, hopes to establish a new L1 to adapt to the implementation of more complex application scenarios. The core is to provide the core capabilities of complex computing, so that it can meet the computing needs of more complex products and businesses, not just simple transaction transfers. The current construction of Pandora's complex computing capabilities comes from the continuous evolution of a complex computing system, that is, integrating the subsystems, interfaces and related resources involved in complex computing together, and then running based on a decentralized architecture. At the same time, based on the new PD-Rollup solution, developers and enterprises can quickly copy the underlying capabilities of Pandora L1, establish their own application chain system, and achieve rapid development at the application ecosystem level.

Returning to the main line of application, this is also the view most mentioned by professionals at the Singapore TOKEN2049. Therefore, we are expected to witness more innovation and prosperity on L1 in this cycle.