Under the AI ​​boom, what changes have occurred in the public chain infrastructure track?

Recently in the primary market, the hottest track is undoubtedly AI, followed by BTC. 80% of the projects discussed every day are concentrated in these two tracks. I personally can talk about 5 or 6 AI projects a day at most. project.

It is foreseeable that the AI ​​bubble will reach its peak next year. With hundreds of new AI projects coming online, the market value of the AI ​​​​track will reach its peak. In the end, the bubble will burst and all will be wiped out. , there will also be unicorns that truly find the convergence point of AI X Crypto, and continue to push this track and the entire industry forward.

So in the current overheated environment of AI, calm down and take a look at the changes that have taken place at the Infra level in recent months, especially the public chain Infra track. Some of the new things are worth a look. explain..

1. ETH, or the further deconstruction of the monolithic chain

When Celestia first proposed the concept of modularity and the concept of DA layer, the market actually spent a lot of time digesting it and understanding, now this concept has long been deeply rooted in the hearts of the people, and various RaaS infrastructures have spread to an exaggerated stage where the number of infrastructure > the number of applications > the number of users.

The execution layer, DA layer, and settlement layer have made some different technical progress in the past few months. Each layer has derived new technical solutions, and even the concept of the settlement layer is no longer ETH. Proprietary. Let’s briefly talk about representative technologies for each layer.

2. Execution Layer

The hottest concept in the execution layer is undoubtedly Parallel EVM - represented by Monad, Sei, and MegaETH, some existing projects such as FTM and Canto have also begun to plan in this direction. upgrade. However, just as not all ZK projects will protect privacy, projects labeled by Parallel EVM actually have different technical routes and ultimate goals.

Let’s take a picture of Sei as an intuitive demonstration. It is obvious that under optimistic circumstances, the performance improvement of changing from existing sequential processing to parallel processing is still very obvious.

Parallel EVM can actually be divided into several different technical routes.

From the perspective of how transactions are parallelized - there is nothing new under the sun, except the difference between a priori and a posteriori

The a priori, represented by Solana and Sui, requires transactions to explicitly state that they have modified the chain Which parts of the state are there, so that we can detect whether there is a state conflict (such as access to the same AMM pool) before packaging the block, and if so, discard these conflicting transactions.

Posterior is also called optimistic parallelism, represented by Aptos BlockSTM, that is, it is assumed that there is no conflict among everyone before accepting the transaction, and then testing after execution is completed. If a conflicting transaction is found, the transaction is declared invalid, the result is refreshed, and re-executed. This step is repeated until all transactions in the block are executed. Sei, Monad, MegaETH, Canto use similar solutions.

We have also seen parallelization solutions in the primary market for state conflict situations (like the same AMM pool access mentioned above), but it seems that the project will be relatively complicated, and I am not sure about the commercial aspects. Whether this is feasible is still under evaluation.

From the degree of emphasis on Parrallel EVM - it can also be divided into two schools

• One is Monad, represented by Sei, which regards how to trade in parallel as the main expansion idea, that is Parallellization is the main narrative. For example, in addition to optimistic parallel processing, Monad also has a specially developed MonadDB, which specializes in asynchronous I/O to cooperate with parallel processing.

• The other is the idea of ​​​​Fantom, Solana, and MegaETH. Parallelization is one of the expansion solutions, but it is only one. Parallellization is an auxiliary narrative, and performance improvement depends more on other solutions. Technical solutions.

For example, Fantom’s Sonic upgrade focuses on the FVM virtual machine and the optimized Lachesis consensus mechanism. Solana's next phase focuses on the modular architecture of Firedancer's new client, optimized network communication mechanism, signature verification, etc.

The goal of MegaETH is to implement Realtime-blockchain. The first is based on Paradigm's newly developed Reth high-performance client, the state synchronization mechanism of the whole node (only synchronizing state differences rather than all data), and the hardware design of Sequencer (a large amount of high-performance RAM with storage function for state access , avoid slow disk I/O), Merkle Trie's data structure improvement and other aspects have been further optimized and improved, which is equivalent to the comprehensive integration of software, hardware, data structure, disk IO, network communication, transaction sorting and parallel processing All-round improvements push the performance ceiling of EVM to the limit, approaching "Realtime Blockchain".

3. DA layer

The DA layer does not have particularly large technical iterations, so the level of this track volume is far less than that of the execution layer. After all, there are only a few major players.

ETH's CallData has been upgraded to Blob, and the cost of each L2 has dropped significantly. Now ETH is already a "not expensive" DA.

The greater role of Celestia is that as the first project to propose the concept of DA layer after its launch, it has raised the DA track from the ceiling of 2 billion FDV to 20 billion. From then on, the pattern and imagination have opened up. The DA of choice for many new Layer 2 Appchains is naturally Celestia.

Avail is independent from Polygon. Technically speaking, it is more like an "enhanced version of Celestia". For example, it uses Polkadot's Grandpa BABE consensus mechanism. Compared with Celestia's Tendermint, it can theoretically support more Decentralization of nodes, and support for Validity Proof that Celestia does not support, etc. Of course, the technical differences are far less important than the ecology. Avail still needs to catch up at the ecological level.

EigenDA was also launched two days ago along with the EigenLayer mainnet. EigenLayer is one of the strongest narrative projects in this round and the most commercial cooperation project. I personally feel that the adoption rate of EigenDA will not be low. In theory, as long as "It feels safe and the price is cheap." There are not many projects that really care whether you use Validity Proof or Fraud Proof, whether DAS is supported, etc.

The following three DAs are more worth mentioning

• Near DA — Near is a magical public chain. It was originally used for sharding, and it is still there now. Do, but while doing sharding, he also did DA - cheaper than Celestia, and also supports L2's fast settlement; chain abstraction - Near recently launched chain signatures, allowing users to request to any chain through a single NEAR account Transaction signature; AI - Founder illia is one of the eight Transformers. The person who was tapped on the shoulder by Boss Huang at the NVIDIA conference is now planning to hire AI engineers and will make an announcement related to near.ai next month... Hexagon Warrior , I also threw it on the DA track.

• ##BTC&CKB — Because the layer of BTC does not support smart contracts and cannot be settled directly, dozens of BTC EVM Layer2s now basically use BTC as DA. The difference is that Is it better to throw ZK Proof directly into BTC or throw ZK Proof’s Hash? It seems that if you don’t do this, you can’t call yourself “BTC Layer 2”. Recently, I actually encountered a new project saying, "I don't want to install it anymore. I am ETH L2, and DA settlement is all on ETH, but I serve the BTC ecosystem!", which is quite joyful... The only alternative expansion plan is CKB For the withdrawn RGB, in this framework, CKB has become a DA-like existence, while BTC has almost become the settlement layer of RGB due to the black technology of UTXO isomorphic binding.

• New DA — Let’s talk about two new DA ideas that we have seen, without mentioning the project name. One is to combine DA with AI. In addition to being a high-performance DA, It can also serve as a storage layer for large AI models, training data and training trajectories. One is to improve the error correction code mechanism underlying DA such as Celestia, which can provide a more robust network status in an unstable state such as a dynamic network (several nodes randomly drop out in each round).

4. Settlement Layer

Originally this layer was almost exclusive to ETH. DA had Celestia to compete, and the company had a lot of L2s. Only for settlement, other chains such as Solana and Aptos do not yet have L2. If BTC’s L2 is not used, BTC cannot be used for settlement. Currently, the only settlement layer you can think of is ETH.

However, this situation will change soon. We have seen several new projects moving in the direction mentioned at the beginning of the article, and some old projects have also begun to transform in this direction, namely - ZK Verification/ Settlement layer - further deconstructing ETH (grabbing the business of ETH).

Why is there such a concept?

The reason is that running the contract on ETH L1 to verify ZK Proof is indeed not an optimal choice in theory.

Technically, in order to verify the correctness of ZK Proof, developers need to write a verification contract based on Solidity based on the ZK project and the ZK Proof System they choose. Among them, it needs to rely on a lot of cryptographic algorithms, such as supporting different elliptic curves. These cryptographic algorithms are usually relatively complex, and the EVM-Solidity architecture is not an optimal platform for implementing these complex cryptographic algorithms. For some ZK projects, the cost of writing and verifying these verification contracts is also very high.

To some extent, it hinders some ZK ecosystems from natively joining the EVM ecosystem. Therefore, ZK-friendly languages ​​such as Cario, Noir, Leo, and Lurk can currently only be verified on their own Layer1. At the same time, updating or upgrading these things in ETH is always a "disaster".

In terms of costs, although the "protection fee" DA handed over by L2 accounts for the majority, ZK's contract verification also requires Gas fees. Verification on Ethereum is definitely not a cheap option. In addition, ETH Gas fees soar from time to time and it transforms into a "noble chain", and the verification cost will also be greatly affected.

As a result, new ZK verification/settlement layer concept projects have emerged. New projects are still relatively early, represented by Nebra. Some old projects are also pivoting in this direction, such as Mina, and Zen, which has just passed a new proposal.

The overall idea of ​​most projects on this track is basically:

• supports multiple ZK languages;

• supports ZK aggregation proves that it is more efficient and cheaper;

• Faster Finality time;

ZK settlement layer and decentralized Proof Market are currently It seems likely that they will be tied together. After all, to have technology, you need to have computing power. You may see some settlement layer projects cooperate with Proof Market projects, or the settlement layer that has the computing power may directly create a Proof Market by itself, or the Proof Market that has the technology may end up creating a settlement layer package by itself. The market will have the final say on how it will proceed.

In other areas of Infra, such as OEV in the Oracle and MEV fields, and ZK light clients in the interoperability field, there should be many articles written on the Internet, so I won’t go into details here.

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