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Wow, the announcement that was going to launch an Ethereum Layer 2 (BASE) using the Optimism stack is pretty cool! A centralised exchange that is going to leverage Ethereum scaling technology to potentially expose all those customers gently to the wilds of DeFi!
... and this is happening in the lulls of the bear/transition market. No hype, just working on cool things for the future of digital society! This is a bit of a boring season for those who are into quick cash grabs... but to be honest, this is quite a nice moment in time for people who are more idealistic. All the bombast has gone elsewhere, and the space is nice and quiet (sort of what I like in real life as well....)... hopefully all the crazies have gone over to AI or something like that, perhaps there is quick money to be made there (actually... please go there, there are pots of gold all ripe for the taking...).
The quieter atmosphere is also good for taking stock of what is actually important. Yeah sure, decentralise this and that... not your keys, blah. What I mean is... what is the essential infrastructure that needs to be built out and adopted. In the bull market, it was all about APPLICATIONS!... and that was because it was easily to just built some application and then dump and run. Easy cash... and think about all the Earn-to-blah tokens and all the weird governance tokens with little to no intrinsic value. Everything was a governance token, and it started to get tricky to see which actually had worth or not...
During the last lull and the last run up... well, the focus was on Ethereum dominance and the lack of scaling/privacy. Most of those Ethereum challengers have fallen by the wayside as they sacrificed some critical principles to target performance metrics... meanwhile, Ethereum slowly evolved and scaled... and still kept the bulk of quality projects.
Anyway... for quite some time, I've been quite interested in interoperability and privacy as two of my core principles that I hope will realised.
In the case of Interoperability, I had my sights set on Ethereum, Cosmos, and Polkadot... unfortunately, Polkadot seems to have fallen by the wayside... it is just too much of a pain in the arse to use it, and it appears that I'm not the only person who thinks that. Meanwhile, Cosmos is super easy to use and they are moving to a shared security model based around ATOM which will give the ATOM* coin a good deal more reason to have some value. So, app-chains first... and now migrating to a shared security model: ala Ethereum!
Meanwhile, Ethereum.... started as a central security chain... and that has built out various flavours of sidechains... then Layer 2s in the form of Optimistic Rollups, and then app-chains and zk-rollups are in the near future pipeline. Open and constantly evolving development... this is the way to go, not the baked in trade-offs from the failed Layer 1 challengers. So, interoperability-wise... we are seeing that Ethereum and Cosmos seem to be approaching a similar mid-point, just approaching from different sides (Ethereum departing from a central chain, whilst Cosmos comes in from the periphery of chains).
announcement puts it squarely in the Ethereum EVM camp... and that must be a bit of a disappointment for Cosmos, however, it would be foolish to rule them out at this point. Meanwhile, all the hype had been on Arbitrum (airdrop chasers...)... and whilst I did play around on Arbitrum, my first Optimistic crush was on Optimistic Ethereum with Synthetix (and associated dApps) having found their home there. As OE has matured and released a governance token, I have found that I have been much more interested in their hybrid governance and public goods funding models. It seems to be the first team to actually start thinking about these two critical aspects of decentralisation from a point of view that WASN'T pure and undistilled capitalistic principles (which I don't think is the best form of governance... note the "pure and undistilled" qualifier...).
Privacy is still a work in progress... and Monero and ZCash are interesting tools for that sort of thing (as well as some Secret on Cosmos)... however, I find that they have similar limitations to Bitcoin in that they are ONLY aiming to be store of value rather than programmable settlement layers. So, my hopes for that (and many are also banking on this...) are the Zk-rollups that will be coming to Ethereum... bringing, privacy, scalability, AND programmable wallets. This would be a killer feature... and it is apparently possible to integrate these advantages into existing Optimistic Layer 2s! Previously, I had thought that it would be one or the other... zk vs Optimism... but Zks linked with the optimistic head start... wow! I'm ready for that!
Anyway... as we are ramping back up to the hype season with lots of people with big mouths that are looking to part you with your hard earned... store of values.... take the time now to think about what it is that is important to this movement. Find your core principles, stick to them, and don't be distracted by the bright lights and loud noises... that said, I'm also pragmatic, take the opportunity to make the market for those who want to chase quick riches...
I can also be found cross-posting at:
Publish0x
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