l2beat VS baseline

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

Ethereum is by far the most widely adopted blockchain by enterprises. Ethereum’s Enterprise Ethereum Alliance (EEA) is the largest blockchain-enterprise partnership program and Ethereum is by far the most frequently leveraged blockchain for proof of concepts and innovation in the blockchain space by enterprises. Meanwhile, there are protocols like the Baseline protocol which is a shared framework which allows enterprises to use Ethereum as a common frame of reference and a base settlement layer without having to give up privacy when settling on the public Ethereum mainnet. This framework makes adopting Ethereum much easier for other enterprises. Another example is EY’s “Nightfall”, a Zero Knowledge optimistic rollup which provides full privacy and cheaper transactions for enterprise use.

Have a look at decentralised finance (DeFi), have a look at at https://docs.baseline-protocol.org/ , Read about NFTs a little more, read about what a DAO is and think about why crypto may be interesting because of that.

The Baseline Protocol is a new standard that is going to be adopted by enterprises globally. It is a standard created by folks from Enterprise Ethereum Alliance, and led by a team of professionals from several institutions like EY, Microsoft, Consensys, Unibright, SAP, and so on, in different capacities. The protocol is meant to synchronize data between 2 entities while keeping data private + secure. https://docs.baseline-protocol.org/

The Baseline protocol by EY, Microsoft, etc was created specifically for this purpose. It allows SAP and other software to sync up across organizations without using proprietary code and also allows for verified business logic to run that everyone on the system can trust. Coca-Cola is using it to get a real time view of their supply chains, Microsoft is using it for their Xbox licenses, lots of federated industries are using it as a common frame of reference for prices, purchase orders, and other data that multiple organizations share and need to all rely on.

May I introduce you to the baseline protocol: https://docs.baseline-protocol.org/

I don't know the Baseline project, the repo looks active, but the last release (0.1.0) is from 1 year https://github.com/eea-oasis/baseline Mostly developed by 2-3 dev and 1 this year

Ethereum is by far the most widely adopted blockchain by enterprises. Ethereum’s Enterprise Ethereum Alliance (EEA) is the largest blockchain-enterprise partnership program and Ethereum is by far the most frequently leveraged blockchain for proof of concepts and innovation in the blockchain space by enterprises. Meanwhile, there are protocols like the Baseline protocol which is a shared framework which allows enterprises to use Ethereum as a common frame of reference and a base settlement layer without having to give up privacy when settling on the public Ethereum mainnet. This framework makes adopting Ethereum much easier for other enterprises.

Maybe this is just my very biased view (okay, you are also asking this in a Ethereum subreddit), but the discussion which blockchain is suitable for which use-case slowly gets replaced by the question, which scaling solution and which off-chain design patterns are the most suitable for your application. And the blockchain will be Ethereum, an enterprise variant of it (see Quorum) or at least compatible with it (see Baseline Protocol). So for me the comparison of different blockchain types, their throughput, etc. is not very interesting as it is generally very hard to objectively compare those different approaches and I'm sure that many blockchains were built with very different use-cases in mind (see IOTA or VeChain).