l2beat VS optimism

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

open source. we’re building base on the OP Stack — which means that if you want to contribute, you can! you can review the code and start contributing here. we’ll be open sourcing as much as possible, so more people can get involved.

OP Labs | Remote-first | Full-time |

https://optimism.io

Optimism is an Ethereum scaling solution that enables anyone to execute any vision on an open source protocol that will never be captured by private interests. We’re building this technology as a public good, in order to fundamentally change the relationship between companies and their users.

From code to ethos, we are Ethereum-aligned. By operating as a Public Benefit Corporation, we align private incentives with public good and create a positive-sum economic model that provides a sustainable future for the internet.

Today, the most pressing bottleneck to Ethereum and crypto’s growth is its performance and scalability. We are building the most elegant solution to this problem. We do this out in the open because we believe in open source and its ability to accelerate innovation.

To date, we have raised $178M. Both series A and B were led by Andreessen Horowitz and Paradigm.

We are actively hiring for the roles listed here: All open roles are listed here:

https://boards.greenhouse.io/oplabs

Join us in scaling Ethereum and empowering the creators of public goods! :)

Optimism's Bedrock contracts have pretty good examples - https://github.com/ethereum-optimism/optimism/tree/develop/packages/contracts-bedrock

Perp-maker is an open-source market-making template for Perpetual Protocol v2, the most popular dApp on Optimism (a layer-2 scaling solution for Ethereum). Anyone can use or modify the template to facilitate trades on the protocol and earn fees.

Except that anyone with a minimal involvement with Ethereum already knows that the base layer is not meant to be used on day-to-day operations.

We already learned about the decentralization trillema. The strategy to scale Ethereum through will be through the adoption of "layer-2" systems, where users are expected to be doing their transactions and avoid these costly transactions altogether.

There are roll-ups already dealing with NFT marketplaces [0]. There are roll-ups that can execute any type of ethereum smart contract [1] [2]. There are payment channels that allow completely decentralized and gas-less transfers of ERC-20 tokens [3].

[0] https://loopring.io

[1] https://optimism.io/

[2] https://offchainlabs.com/

[3] https://raiden.network

Boba is a compute-focused L2. We believe that L2s can play a unique role in augmenting the base compute capabilities of the Ethereum ecosystem. You can learn more about Turing hybrid compute here. Boba is built on the Optimistic Rollup developed by Optimism. Aside from its main focus, augmenting compute, Boba differs from Optimism by:

The Across bridge is the fastest, cheapest, and most secure bridge between L1 and L2 (and soon between L2 and L2 hopefully). Across has integrated with the canonical bridges of Boba.network, Optimism.io, and Arbitrum.io, with more to come. Go take it for a spin and save yourself some ETH here: https://across.to/

Optimism - Already usable in alpha phase

Optimism Arbitrum Starknet dYdX Immutable X Hermez Aztec ZKSync Loopring