Although the native token has not yet undergone TGE, Scroll's reputation within the airdrop Farmer community has already collapsed due to the earlier "electronic beggar" incident and the recent "clear card airdrop" controversy.
For any L2 project, the relationship with airdrop Farmers is quite complex. They have collusion points, such as cooperating to inflate data to meet the requirements of VCs and CEXs, collaborating to establish early block space demand and build initial liquidity for LPs, as well as phases of mutual harm. For instance, during airdrops, projects need to make trade-offs among the team, VCs, CEXs, and airdrop Farmers to maximize project benefits, often at the expense of the airdrop Farmers.
This is mainly because the L2 War has effectively ended. Leading projects in the general Rollup space like Arbitrum, Base, and Optimism have fully leveraged their first-mover advantage and operational capabilities, having almost completely divided the incremental market share for Ethereum's parallel expansion.
The ZK general Rollup, which has been promoting itself as "technically superior," is now unable to build a scalable application ecosystem with genuinely active users in the face of the remaining thin ecological resources (recent daily transactions have only been between 200,000 and 400,000).
The typical lifecycle of a ZK general Rollup project is as follows: L2 token airdrop expectations → Farmers enter the scene → Generate attractive L1 > L2 block space gas price differential income → Infinite PUA activities expand gas price differential income → Cancun upgrade reduces DA fees by two orders of magnitude, gas price differential income sharply declines → Easy profit model ends, must TGE airdrop → Farmers dump tokens, withdraw DEX LP, exit TVL, leading to a catastrophic drop in on-chain ecological data → L2 projects enter a phase of survival by selling tokens.
This is true for ZkSync, Taiko, and Scroll.
However, Scroll, which relies on "Ethereum orthodoxy" and "good personal relations with Vitalik," may not care at all about the "noise" from the market and the emotional feedback from the airdrop Farmer community; they continue to do things their own way.
Let us try to maintain a rational and calm mindset and observe how Scroll operates through on-chain dynamics.
- According to the L2beat website's recorded L2 milestones, to maintain the operation of PUA economics and extract as much gas fees from airdrop farmers as possible, the Scroll team, which has always boasted about Ethereum equivalence, will delay the deployment of the Cancun upgrade on its L2 until April 29. In contrast, other mainstream L2s like Arbitrum, Zksync, Starknet, and Optimism deployed within two days after the Cancun upgrade.
As shown in the figure, in March and April of this year, Scroll's on-chain profits easily surpassed those of Arbitrum, with March revenue at $3.63 million and April revenue at $3.21 million.
- Unlike other L2s where TVL is primarily composed of ETH, WETH, WBTC, and stablecoins, Scroll's current $1.26B TVL is mainly composed of Restaking assets. This includes $306 million in Stone, $129 million in solvBTC, $117 million in weETH, $122 million in pufETH, and $74 million in rsETH.
Faced with a fiercely competitive external environment, Scroll, due to a severe lack of genuinely active users (recent daily transactions have only been between 200,000 and 400,000), has to leverage its BD capabilities by collaborating with LRT project parties to attract Restaking assets through a points stacking mechanism to increase TVL.
As shown in the figure, the inflow of Stone, the largest component of Scroll's TVL, is very dispersed, indicating that it is related to specific events or activities rather than normal user behavior.
It is worth noting that compared to bare assets like ETH, WETH, WBTC, and stablecoins, Restaking assets are significantly inferior in terms of liquidity, security, and value derivation capability, and in a sense, they belong to "dead assets," serving more to prop up the appearance of TVL.
- Scroll prides itself on the security of ZK Rollup and the complete equivalence of ZKEVM. However, the Scroll mainnet is still in Stage 0, refusing to upgrade the exit window mechanism, escape pod mechanism, and Rollup crash recovery mechanism, which have not yet been deployed.
Since the token has not yet undergone TGE, Scroll has not built a DAO governance mechanism, and the contract upgrade permissions are currently controlled by a centralized multi-signature address group. It is expected that after the token TGE, these will be transferred to a newly established ecological DAO organization.
On the positive side, Scroll's ZK Proof validity verification system has been deployed on the mainnet. This enhances the system security of Scroll Rollup but also incurs high Proof verification costs, with the highest verification fee paid to L1 (Ethereum mainnet) reaching $2.43 million in March.
To address this, Scroll underwent a Curie upgrade in July, significantly compressing state data and successfully reducing Proof verification costs. Additionally, Scroll is actively exploring ZK co-processor networks to further lower the generation and verification costs of ZKP.
In summary, Scroll's poor operational status can be described in two words: "born at the wrong time" and "the harder they try, the more unfortunate they become." Although the Scroll team has managed to maintain itself in the harsh market environment of the post-Zksync airdrop era through strategies like delaying the Cancun upgrade deployment and siphoning Restaking assets through points stacking, ultimately meeting Binance's listing standards and delivering a result to VCs and the community, it is indeed commendable from a primary market perspective.
However, from a secondary market perspective, Scroll, which lacks a real ecosystem and new narratives, has already transformed from a magic scroll into disposable toilet paper at the moment of TGE.
That's all.
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