ion VS l2beat

- For completeness and good scientific practice, also look at solutions beyond Ethereum: https://identity.foundation/ion/

ION decentralized identity (an implementation of the SideTree protocol)

Other uses are extremely limited IMO. Microsoft ION, an implementation of decentralised identity w3c spec, for example. It makes a Bitcoin transaction containing a hash that refers to several identities. Since the identities are mutable there does not seem much value in remembering the hash at a point in time.

I agree the website is very bad, currently. Maybe this page has better resources:

https://essif-lab.github.io/framework/docs/ssi-standards

But there's quite a lot going on... the work on SSI is being coordinated by the W3C Working Group on VCs (Verifiable Credentials) and DIDs (Decentralized Identifiers).

https://www.w3.org/community/credentials/

https://www.w3.org/2019/did-wg/

I don't know of any real-world usage yet, despite the fact that the specifications required for things to work and be used by real people already exist, and that there's a lot of DID methods (over 80 last I checked) registered, but as people have noted, most are based on blockchain (but not all... there's stuff like the peer, git, jwk DID methods that do not require blockchain)... but I have to say that, in this particular instance, blockchains may actually be a proper solution for a real problem (that of looking up public keys and metadata for entities/users in a distributed, highly-reliable manner).

https://www.w3.org/TR/did-spec-registries/#did-methods

If you want to look for related stuff, look for things that users would need to have to use SSI, like DID wallets... Some random examples I found by quickly searching:

https://www.abtwallet.io/en/

https://www.didwallet.io/

https://igrant.io/

https://www.dock.io/dock-wallet-app

https://identity.foundation/ion/

The OpenID Connect Standard is being extended to support self-issued OIDC (SIOP) which allows OIDC to interact with SSI constructs:

https://openid.net/specs/openid-connect-self-issued-v2-1_0.h...

So, yeah, there's a lot of stuff being created around SSI, but admitedly, almost nothing practical yet... Hence why I was hoping to find something where this work could be very helpful, like logging into Codeberg :)

I would also recommend checking ION¹. I have tested a few DID Methods including Sovrin, Veres One, and ION, and the latter is the most spec-adherent and well-implemented, apart from receiving funding from companies like Microsoft and TBD (which is proposing web5 in the first place). And yes, it is the only DID Method to receive support from big tech (was incubated within Microsoft, then donated to the Decentralized Identity Foundation), and it also happens to be a technically good solution.

¹ https://identity.foundation/ion/

Microsoft ION --->https://identity.foundation/ion/

Doing some more research: Looks like the idea is developed by tbd.website and uses a L2 tool called ION that utilizes the SideTree protocol. Interestingly, ION does not introduce a new token which I find interesting, and one of the things I've found confusing about Stacks.

A real layer 2 would look more like something built on Ethereum (can see all its L2s at https://l2beat.com).

Essentially it's a separate network that every few minutes takes every transaction and compresses it into a data blob that it saves on Ethereum along with a proof that the computation was done correctly. The Ethereum L1 nodes then only need to verify the proof instead of re-executing all transactions that happened on the L2.

With this design users can go straight from an exchange like Coinbase onto the L2 and never need to use Ethereum, and fees are 10x cheaper because of the data compression. Fees will soon be 100x cheaper as Ethereum is adding extra space just for these L2 data blobs that is much cheaper than normal Ethereum data space.

Unfortunately it can't be done on Bitcoin right now because Bitcoin nodes don't have Turing complete scripting and so can't verify the proof that an L2 posts to Bitcoin.

We are running & maintaining the site (https://l2beat.com). Our work is to look on the current Layer 2 deployments on Ethereum & show risks and statistics to the end user. Very interesting thing is that we are a public goods company trying to stay as objective as possible in the industry full of subjectivity. What I mostly like in this job is that I am a part of the project shaping how it looks, not only mindlessly taking someones orders.

Candidate:

Ecosystem fragmentation is not necessarily a bad thing. It leads to rapid development through competition. Different L2s are competing against each other to provide the best service and that has lead to a cambrian explosion of solutions. It's also a very effective way to explore the solution space, I'm sure many will disappear, others will get eaten, and at some point there will be consolidation. But all this seems like a good approach early on when tackling complex problems for which the ideal trade-offs are not entirely obvious. Explore as much of the solution space as possible and trim later on.

A perhaps more pernicious problem is liquidity fragmentation. Moving assets between L2s is a tedious friction that leads to fragmentation of liquidity. In that respect, zero-knowledge rollups present a big advantage as you can share liquidity between them as long as they share some zk-circuits that allow to prove statements to both chains. All this is being very actively worked on. And the technology behind it is short of fascinating. The typical HN audience would have a huge hard-on for it, if they didn't have such a strong preconception against crypto-anything.

If anyone is curious to learn more about L2s a good starting point is here: https://l2beat.com/

And if you want to see Ethereum scaling progress you can check it here: https://l2beat.com/scaling/activity

The next major upgrade to the protocol, slated for late this year or early 2024 (date is not finalized yet), will focus on scalability by making L2 activity veeery cheap.

These two links will give you a lot of the info you need to compare L2s: https://l2beat.com/ and https://www.growthepie.xyz/ - enjoy.

Source: https://l2beat.com

Thanks! l2beat.com is the best.

In addition to what others said, I always find https://l2beat.com useful to see a summary of the security assumptions behind the various L2s. Currently, all L2 need to be trusted to some extent as they are still quite in development.

Exponential.fi has good summaries and links to the projects. And https://l2beat.com is also great for judging L2s.

Take a careful look at https://l2beat.com