Title: “Exploring the Future of Solana: L2s and Appchains”
Author: Yash Agarwal
Translator: Ladyfinger, BlockBeats
Editor’s Note:
Solana, as a high-performance public chain platform, is facing unprecedented opportunities and challenges. In this article, Yash Agarwal takes an in-depth look at key issues in the Solana ecosystem – modularity, appchains, Rollup, and how they collectively drive Solana towards a broader future.
Introduction:
A month ago, Vibhu, the founder of DRiP, the top NFT distribution app on Solana, made a statement that sparked a wide discussion:
Solana is going to have and needs Layer 2 and Rollup.
He expressed this view because with the rise in SOL prices and network congestion, DRiP was losing about $20,000 in value per week. The increase in Solana network activity has brought about two impacts:
Advantages: Enhanced liquidity, increased capital and trading volume (benefiting from composability)
Disadvantages: Rising infrastructure costs, poor user experience, network congestion
However, DRiP, primarily distributing millions of NFTs from artists to thousands of wallets weekly through Solana as infrastructure, does not have a significant need for high composability. The growth in Solana’s TVL and capital inflows has minimal impact on DRiP, but is mainly troubled by high infrastructure costs.
Vibhu pointed out, “The returns brought by composability are diminishing.” He also mentioned that Solana app developers privately discussed their need for Rollup because these Rollups can increase transaction throughput, reduce block space competition, lower fees, and better control the economic value generated by businesses.
In the past few months, Solana has experienced several congestion events, from the JUP airdrop to ORE mining and peak meme coin trading. While some believe Firedancer can solve these issues, the reality is the timeline is unclear, and it cannot scale beyond 10x. Nevertheless, Solana remains the only chain among all battle-tested main chains to maintain a single shard.
Should Solana remain a single shard or become modular?
Will Solana evolve like Ethereum with sharded Layer 2 and Layer 3 solutions?
What is the current situation of Solana’s appchains and Rollup?
To answer these questions and consolidate a summary, this article will explore various possibilities, discuss the pros and cons of each project. This article will not delve into technical details but will discuss various scaling methods from a market-oriented and practical application perspective, providing an overview. All insights, no nonsense, just a lot of exclusive information.
In summary, we will discuss the following issues:
– Solana’s issues and the need for modularity
– Making Solana modular
– Solana appchains – with examples
– Solana Layer 2 and Rollup – with examples
– Infrastructure supporting Rollup and appchains
The article continues with detailed discussions on Solana’s problems and the need for modularity, as well as the development of Solana appchains and Rollup. It also delves into the potential impact of appchains on the Solana ecosystem and the unique aspects of Solana’s Rollup compared to Ethereum’s. The article concludes with a vision for the future of Solana appchains and Rollup technologies.
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