The wave of Layer1&Layer2 has arrived, taking stock of the token bridging steps and potential opportunities of various new chains.

The arrival of Layer1&Layer2 has brought token bridging steps and potential opportunities for new chains.

Produced by: DODOResearch

Author: dt

Editor: Lisa

This summer, the blockchain world has witnessed a burst of new chains. From Mantle, Linea, and Base, which went online in July, to Sei, opBNB, and Shibarium, which appeared in early August, and the “Quantum Leap” upgrade of the heavyweight public chain Starknet, the public chain field has been exceptionally lively this summer. For many players on the chain, new chains represent new opportunities, new projects, and most importantly, new tokens.

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Below, we will introduce how to bridge tokens to these new public chains and the current infrastructure and potential opportunities on these chains:

Starknet

Starknet was criticized by users in the past for its extremely slow transaction confirmation speed. However, after the Quantum Leap upgrade, user experience has greatly improved, and it has also contributed to a substantial increase in TVL on the chain, reaching a peak of 200M TVL and currently dropping to around 100M, ranking sixth among all L2s.

You can refer to the official tutorials for the way to access Starknet. Currently, there are still relatively few projects on the Starknet chain. In addition to the top three DEXs in terms of TVL, JediSwap, mySwap, and 10KSwap, the chain game projects on Starknet are also worth our attention. Among them, the leading one is Realms (for Adventurers), which is committed to creating an open-source on-chain multiplayer combinatorial game on StarkNet. $LORDS is the utility token of this project and one of the few tokens in the Starknet ecosystem. For more detailed information about Realms, you can refer to the article “Realms X Bibliotheca Research” written by SaulDataman.

Due to its strong backing from investors and the amount of funding, Starknet is expected to be the next potential airdrop opportunity. Therefore, paying attention to Starknet and actively participating in on-chain projects may bring unexpected surprises.

Mantle

Mantle, incubated by BitDAO, has a close relationship with the Ethereum L2 and the Bybit exchange. It announced the opening of the Mainnet alpha at the EthCC conference in mid-July. Unlike other L2 public chains, Mantle uses its token $MNT as the on-chain GAS instead of $ETH. $MNT can be exchanged for the previous token $BIT from BitDAO at a ratio of 1:1. Currently, the TVL on the Mantle chain is about 86M.

Due to its close relationship with Bybit, users can withdraw funds from Bybit exchange to Mantle. It is also one of the few new public chains that have exchange support shortly after launch. In terms of cross-chain bridges, the official bridge supports the cross-chain of multiple mainnet tokens such as $MNT and $ETH, while third-party bridges such as orbiter.finance and Symbiosis also provide support.

In terms of ecological projects, Mantle has not gained favor from mainstream DeFi protocols. Currently, there are no deployments of established projects. The DEX projects Agni Finance and FusionX Finance currently have the highest TVL on the native projects. As for Memecoin, the best-performing $MINU has also experienced a significant decline from its peak.

Unlike many L2 public chains that have not yet issued tokens, Mantle had a protocol token as soon as it went online, which reduced a lot of airdrop hunter users. Under these conditions, it is not easy to have a good TVL performance. The next thing to pay attention to is the level of support Bybit exchange provides to it. Currently, there are no ecosystem protocol tokens listed on Bybit.

Linea

Linea, a Layer2 network developed by the ConsenSys team using ZK Rollup technology, also announced the opening of Linea Mainnet Alpha access to the entire community at the EthCC conference. It has been almost a month since then, but the current performance is not ideal, with a TVL of only 34M, ranking 13th among all L2 public chains.

Because Linea is backed by the ConsenSys team, the mainnet is pre-built in MetaMask. Users can skip the complicated process of manually adding networks and directly switch to the Linea network in their MetaMask. Currently, Linea can be accessed through the official bridge or third-party bridges, including orbiter.finance, rhino.fi, and Symbiosis.

Currently, most of the projects in the ecosystem are DEX or lending, but due to the lack of oracle integration, the variety of coins that lending projects can provide is not complete. The mainstream old protocols currently only include KyberSwap. In terms of ecosystem projects, Linea is relatively lacking compared to other L2 chains, and most of the users are airdrop hunters with few real users, and there is not even a representative Memecoin.

Base

Base, an L2 public chain launched by Coinbase, can be said to be the best-performing among these new public chains. In less than a month since its launch, the TVL has exceeded 200M and is currently around 250M, ranking fifth among all L2 chains. The use of OP Stack also allows many projects to migrate to Base almost effortlessly. Currently, leading DeFi protocols such as Uniswap, Compound, and AAVE have already deployed or are deploying on Base.

Currently, there are two ways to go to Base: the official bridge and third-party bridges. Coinbase exchange has not yet enabled ETH deposit and withdrawal on Base, but it is expected to be supported soon. Due to the seven-day verification period required by Optimistic Rollup to return to the mainnet, the official bridge still needs time. Third-party bridges such as orbiter.finance, synapse, and the aggregation bridge bungee.exchange provide cross-chain services.

In addition to many well-established protocols deployed on Base, the native protocols include the recently popular friend.tech. It can be expected that there will be more derivative protocols related to friend.tech in the future. As for the native infrastructure, Aerodrome, which has not yet been launched, is being closely watched by many. Ve33 DEX, launched by Velodrome, the team with the highest TVL on the OP chain, has reached cooperation with many cross-chain deployment projects, including Thales, Liquity, QiDAO, and other well-known protocols. It is expected to have many opportunities when it goes live.

Sei

Unlike the recent hot L2 public chains, Sei is a high TPS parallel Layer1 public chain built on Cosmos. It is also the latest Lauchpool project of Binance. It went online on many exchanges on the first day of its launch, and with the ongoing airdrop activity, the on-chain TVL has also increased significantly, currently reaching around 3 million USD.

Sei is currently conducting airdrop activities for active users on six major networks: Solana, Ethereum, Arbitrum, Polygon, BNB Chain, and Osmosis. The airdrop rules state that active addresses that bridge funds to the Sei network have a chance to receive varying amounts of $Sei token airdrops. The supported cross-chain bridges include cosmos’ interchain communication ibc, Wormhole, and Axelar.

opBNB

opBNB is part of Binance Exchange’s BNBCHAIN roadmap and will be available for user use on August 17, 2023. It is built on Binance Smart Chain (BSC) using OP Stack technology to upgrade to Optimistic Rollup L2. Due to the strong support from Binance, it has also received considerable attention. The total TVL on the chain is currently only 840K, which is not ideal.

opBNB does not currently support token deposits and withdrawals on Binance Exchange and can only be done through cross-chain bridges. Due to the use of Optimistic Rollup technology, it takes seven days for the official bridge from opBNB back to the BSC mainnet to go through a verification period. The supported third-party bridges include rhino.fi and Polyhedra Network, among others.

Currently, its ecosystem projects mainly focus on DEX, such as Binary Swap, and there are no major projects from BSC migrating to opBNB. On the first day of its launch, there were many Memecoins, but now most of them are performing poorly as the market cools down. It is necessary to continue to observe how Binance Exchange positions it or implements incentives such as the ecosystem fund.

Shibarium

Shibarium is an Ethereum Layer2 public chain created by the Shib Inu team, which has been highly anticipated and prepared for nearly a year. It was announced to go online on August 17th last week, but it encountered issues immediately after launch. The official stated that due to the unexpected surge in traffic after the launch, the network entered “fail safe mode”, causing the cross-chain bridge function to malfunction and over 1.7 million USD worth of user assets to be stuck. Currently, the chain has stopped running to ensure the safety of funds.

Currently, cross-chain funds are still in a stage where users cannot control them. The main developers of Shib stated that the network is “almost ready to reopen to the public” and have developed mechanisms to prevent further interruptions, but the specific recovery time has not yet been announced.

Author’s Opinion

Although the chain is new, the players are still the same old group of people in the unchanged environment. Even the project teams are the same, constantly starting businesses or migrating to different chains. The new public chain represents the same group of players on the chain, continuing to compete and fight with the same funds on a different public chain. The start of each new public chain almost follows the same set of SOP standard procedures: the first step is DEX, followed by Memecoins, Lending Protocols, LaunchLianGuaid IDOs, etc. These types of plays are performed alternately on different chains.

At the same time, because these new public chains are launched almost at the same time, this indirectly makes the on-chain liquidity more dispersed. From the competition of TVL between projects to the competition between public chains. Finally, what is compared is which public chain has a better background and obtains more support for infrastructure construction, so that this kind of public chain can become the winner in the competition. In the bear market with reduced liquidity, there is usually only one winner. The winner takes all, and only with deep liquidity can it attract more whales and more powerful developers.

Only when a project appears that is not just the standard SOP process (such projects have weak moats, if Uniswap / AAVE and other mainnet projects migrate and deploy, they will quickly lose their advantages), can a positive cycle be achieved, resulting in derivative projects based on this popular project.Currently, BASE, which is supported by Coinbase and has given birth to the popular project friend.tech, is the winner in this stage.

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