Although the chains are new, in the unchanged environment, the players are still the same old group of people.

Author: dt, DODO Research

This summer, the blockchain world has seen a surge of new chains, from Mantle, Linea, and Base launched in July to Sei, opBNB, and Shibarium in early August. In addition, the "Quantum Leap" upgrade of the heavyweight public chain Starknet has made this summer particularly lively in the public chain field. For many on-chain players, new chains represent new opportunities, new projects, and most importantly, new tokens.

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

Starknet

In the past, Starknet was criticized for its extremely slow transaction confirmation speed. However, after the "Quantum Leap" upgrade, user experience has greatly improved, contributing to a significant increase in on-chain TVL, reaching a peak of 200M TVL and currently stabilizing around 100M, ranking sixth among all L2 chains.

The way to access Starknet can be referred to the official tutorials. Currently, there are relatively few on-chain projects on Starknet. In addition to the top three DEXs in terms of TVL, JediSwap, mySwap, and 10KSwap, the on-chain gaming projects on Starknet are also worth tracking. The flagship project is Realms (for Adventurers), which is dedicated to building an open-source on-chain multiplayer combinable 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 Realm, refer to the article "Realms X Bibliotheca Research" written by SaulDataman.

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

Mantle

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

Due to its close relationship with Bybit, users can withdraw funds to Mantle through the Bybit exchange, making it one of the few new public chains supported by exchanges upon launch. In terms of cross-chain bridges, the official bridge supports multiple mainnet tokens such as $MNT and $ETH, while third-party bridges such as orbiter.finance and Symbiosis are also supported.

Mantle has not gained the favor of mainstream DeFi protocols in terms of its ecosystem projects. There are currently no established projects deployed, and the highest TVL native projects, Agni Finance and FusionX Finance, are both DEX projects. Even in the Memecoin sector, the performance of $MINU, which was the best performer, has declined significantly from its peak.

Unlike many L2 public chains that have not issued tokens, Mantle had protocol tokens upon launch, which reduced the number of airdrop hunters. Despite this condition, it has still shown good TVL performance. The next focus will be on the level of support from the Bybit exchange, as no ecosystem protocol tokens have been listed on Bybit yet.

Linea

Linea is a Layer2 network developed by the ConsenSys team using ZK Rollup technology. Similar to Mantle, Linea announced the opening of the Linea Mainnet Alpha to the entire community at the EthCC conference. However, despite being operational for nearly a month, its performance has been less than ideal, with a TVL of only 34M, ranking 13th among all L2 public chains.

Backed by the ConsenSys team, Linea's Mainnet is pre-set in MetaMask, allowing users to skip the complex process of manually adding the network and switch directly to the Linea network in their MetaMask. Currently, users can transfer to Linea through the official bridge or third-party bridges such as orbiter.finance, rhino.fi, and Symbiosis.

Most of the ecosystem projects are still DEX or lending projects, but due to the lack of oracle integration, the variety of currencies that lending projects can provide is not comprehensive. Currently, only KyberSwap has been deployed among mainstream established protocols. In terms of ecosystem projects, Linea appears relatively lacking compared to other L2 chains, with most users being a few real users and a few airdrop hunters, and not even representative Memecoins are present.

Base

Base, a Layer2 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, its TVL has surpassed 200M and is currently around 250M, ranking fifth among all L2 chains. The use of OP Stack has made it almost effortless for many projects to migrate their protocols to Base. Currently, leading DeFi protocols such as Uniswap, Compound, and AAVE have already been deployed or are in the process of being deployed on Base.

The way to access Base can be divided into official bridges and third-party bridges. Although Coinbase has not yet enabled ETH deposits and withdrawals for Base, it is expected to support it soon. Due to the limitations of Optimistic Rollup, the official bridge still requires a seven-day verification period to return to the mainnet. Third-party bridges such as orbiter.finance, synapse, and the aggregated bridge bungee.exchange provide cross-chain services without this limitation.

In addition to numerous established protocols deployed on Base, native protocols include the highly popular friend.tech. It can be expected that there will be more derivative protocols related to friend.tech in the future. Aerodrome, which has not yet been launched, is also attracting attention from many people. Ve33 DEX, launched by the team behind Velodrome, which has the highest TVL on the OP chain, has not yet been launched but has already reached cooperation with many cross-chain deployed projects, including Thales, Liquity, and QiDAO, among others.

Sei

Unlike the recent popular L2 public chains, Sei is a high TPS parallel Layer1 public chain built on Cosmos and is the latest Lauchpool project of Binance. It was listed on numerous exchanges on the first day of its launch, and with the ongoing airdrop activities, its on-chain TVL has also increased, currently reaching around 3M USD.

Sei is currently conducting airdrop activities for active users on six major networks, including Solana, Ethereum, Arbitrum, Polygon, BNB Chain, and Osmosis. Active addresses that meet the criteria have the chance to receive varying amounts of $Sei tokens by bridging funds to the Sei network. Supported cross-chain bridges include cosmos' interchain communication ibc, Wormhole, and Axelar.

opBNB

opBNB is part of Binance's BNBCHAIN roadmap and was made available to users on 8/17, 2023. It is an Optimistic Rollup L2 upgrade built on Binance Smart Chain (BSC) using OP Stack technology. Due to the strong support from Binance, it has gained considerable attention, but its total TVL is currently only 840K, which is less than ideal.

opBNB currently does not support token deposits and withdrawals from the Binance exchange and can only be accessed through cross-chain bridges. Due to the use of Optimistic Rollup technology, the official bridge from opBNB back to the BSC mainnet requires a seven-day verification period, while supported third-party bridges include rhino.fi and Polyhedra Network, among others.

The ecosystem projects are mainly DEX, such as Binary Swap, and there have been no migrations of established BSC projects. On the first day of its launch, there were many Memecoins, but most of them have not performed well as the market has cooled. Continuous observation is needed to understand Binance's positioning of opBNB and the implementation of incentives such as the ecosystem fund.

Shibarium

Shibarium, an Ethereum Layer2 public chain developed by the Shib Inu team, which has been in preparation and preheating for nearly a year, was announced to be launched on 8/17 last week. However, it encountered issues immediately after launch. Due to traffic exceeding expectations, the network entered "fail safe mode," causing the cross-chain bridge function to malfunction and over 1.7 million USD of user assets to be stuck. The chain is currently not operational to ensure the safety of funds.

Cross-chain funds are currently in a stage where users cannot control them. The main developers of Shib have stated that the network is "almost ready to be reopened to the public" and have established mechanisms to prevent further interruptions, but a specific restoration time has not yet been announced.

Author's Viewpoint

Although the chains are new, in the unchanged environment, the players are still the same old group of people. Even the project parties are the same, just constantly starting new businesses or migrating to different chains. New public chains only represent the same on-chain players, the same people, and the same funds, just on a different public chain to continue their competition and struggle. The beginning of each new public chain almost follows the same standard operating procedure (SOP): the first step is DEX, followed by Memecoin, Lending Protocol, Launchpad IDO, and so on, with these plays rotating on different chains.

At the same time, because these new public chains have almost launched at the same time, this indirectly makes on-chain liquidity more dispersed. From the competition for TVL between projects to the competition between public chains. Ultimately, the comparison is which public chain has better background and more support for basic infrastructure, making it the winner in the competition. In a bear market with reduced liquidity, there usually won't be more than one winner. The winner takes all, and only with deep liquidity can a public chain attract more whales and more powerful developers.

Only when a project appears that is not just following the SOP standard procedure (such projects have weak moats, and if mainnet established projects like Uniswap / AAVE migrate and deploy, they quickly lose their advantage), can a positive cycle be achieved, generating derivative projects based on this popular project. Currently, it seems that BASE, supported by Coinbase and giving birth to the popular project friend.tech, is the winner at this stage.

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