Scroll's dire situation can be described in two words: "born at the wrong time" and "the harder you work, the more unfortunate you become."

Written by: NingNing

Although the native token has not yet undergone TGE, Scroll's reputation has already collapsed within the airdrop Farmer community due to the earlier "electronic beggar" incident and the recent "clear airdrop" controversy.

The relationship between any L2 project and airdrop Farmers is quite complex. There are areas of collusion, such as cooperating to inflate data to meet the requirements of VCs and CEXs, collaborating to establish early block space demand, and building initial liquidity for LPs. However, there are also phases of mutual harm, where during an airdrop, the project needs to maximize its interests, requiring trade-offs between the team, VCs, CEXs, and airdrop Farmers, who often end up being the sacrificed party.

This is mainly because the L2 War has effectively ended. Leading projects in the OP general Rollup space, such as Arbitrum, Base, and Optimism, have fully leveraged their first-mover advantage and operational capabilities, effectively dividing up the incremental market share for Ethereum's parallel expansion.

The ZK general Rollup, which has always promoted itself as "technically superior," is now unable to build a scalable application ecosystem with real active users in the face of the remaining thin ecological resources.

The typical lifecycle of a ZK general Rollup project is as follows:

L2 token airdrop expectations ➡️ Airdrop 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, forced to TGE airdrop ➡️ Airdrop Farmers dump tokens, withdraw DEX LP, withdraw TVL and exit, leading to a catastrophic drop in L2 on-chain ecological data ➡️ L2 projects enter a phase of survival by selling tokens.

ZkSync is like this, Taiko is like this, and Scroll is also like this.

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.

So let's try to maintain a rational and calm mindset and observe how Scroll operates through on-chain dynamics.

1. According to the milestones recorded on the L2beat website, 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 revenues of $3.63 million in March and $3.21 million in April.

2. 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 intense external competition, Scroll, due to a severe lack of real active users (with recent daily transactions only 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 Scroll's largest TVL component, Stone, 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 much weaker 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.

3. 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 established 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 handed over to a newly established ecological DAO organization.

On a positive note, Scroll's ZK Proof validity verification system has already 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 you work, the more unfortunate you 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, this 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 magical scroll into disposable toilet paper at the moment of TGE.

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