Recently, @drakefjustin's statement "The golden age of Solana is over" has sparked heated discussions in the market. Previously, Ethereum's focus was on a Rollup-centered grand strategy, where the performance of layer2 directly impacts Ethereum. Now, BeamChain's new direction is about to be finalized. In my view, for Ethereum to achieve synchronized enhancement of L1 and L2, it should focus on: 1) zkVM; 2) layer2 interoperability.

1) zkVMs

Justin stated that the Ethereum Foundation will gradually invest tens of millions of dollars in zkVM projects, including zkRISC-V, Poseidon cryptographic analysis, L2beat for zkVMs, and so on. This will undoubtedly provide a significant emotional boost to project teams working on zkVMs in the market. Whether the golden age of Layer2 can arrive is uncertain, but zkVMs hope to usher in a silver age first. Why is the Ethereum Foundation supporting zkVMs? I have analyzed this in the article below:

1) Ethereum's upcoming focus, including Verge and Purge, revolves around achieving underlying SNARKs for Ethereum.

2) The proposed BeamChain is also aimed at enhancing the consensus layer to facilitate the integration of SNARKs into the VM execution environment.

3) The VM execution layer will be customizable and pluggable, and excellent VMs from layer2 or other zkVMs may be mentioned at the Ethereum mainnet execution layer level.

Overall, the mainnet's implementation of SNARKs will completely overhaul the system, making zkVMs an inevitable choice for enhancing Ethereum's L1 mainnet.

Therefore, it is foreseeable that excellent upstream ZK virtual machine solutions in the zkVM direction will receive attention, including: the @RiscZero team’s zkVM based on RISC-V and @ProjectZKM’s zkVM based on the zkMIPs microprocessor instruction architecture. Additionally, some layer2 solutions that have optimized off-chain execution layer performance may also be elevated to mainnet-level execution layers one day, such as @Starknet, a hardcore tech team that consistently brings surprises in the ZK field; and @zksync, which has had a "hard to describe" airdrop, but its product strength and engineering capabilities in the zk direction are commendable.

2) Layer2 Interoperability

Justin mentioned that the sellers on Solana are actually Ethereum's layer2, and I agree with this viewpoint. In a previous article comparing ETH and SOL, I clearly expressed the opinion that Ethereum is undoubtedly a top-tier public chain in terms of ecological richness, application scenario expansion, and technical decentralization stability.

Currently, Ethereum's layer2 grand strategy is facing a shortage of application scenarios and excessive homogeneity in infrastructure, manifested in: 1) DeFi, MEME, and other previously validated application scenarios are fermenting and landing on Ethereum at a slower pace, with public chains like Solana and Sui capturing part of the market share by being more suitable for MEME dissemination and DeFi engagement; 2) The prevalence of Rollup As A Service and OP Stack, ZK Stack layer3 large-scale business expansion strategies has led to severe homogeneity in Ethereum layer2 infrastructure. Although "one-click chain creation" has reduced the cost of building chains, it has also resulted in excessive homogeneity of infrastructure, severely fragmenting the expected market for layer2 and even threatening market confidence in Ethereum L1. How to break the deadlock? In a series of articles by @VitalikButerin during the Devcon conference, it can be found that the answer lies in layer2 interoperability.

The excessive homogeneity of layer2 has caused liquidity fragmentation and has failed to meet the differentiated configuration needs in certain application scenarios. The strategic optimization direction of "interoperability" will enhance both of these shortcomings. On one hand, to unify liquidity, various layer2 solutions will actively align with the mainnet to optimize data structures and leverage the advantages of the mainnet Helios light client, as well as promote the standardization of cross-message chain advancement to enhance their interoperability capabilities. On the other hand, once the capability for transactional interoperability is strengthened, differentiated specialty applications will become the competitive advantage of the chain (focusing on categories like gaming, trading, MEME, etc., rather than being an all-purpose chain). Therefore, each layer2 will intensify efforts to differentiate in order to build their flagship applications.

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