Author: @!0xWang1| @RealResearchDAO

Foreword

As the underlying architecture of blockchain technology, public blockchain is an integral part of the construction of Web3 infrastructure. Due to its decentralization, anyone has the right to read, send and obtain validly confirmed consensus on blockchains, and can develop related ecology on the public chains and develop DAPP based on them. Taking the typical smartphone as a comparison, the public chain is like the Android system developed by Google, and any developer can develop ecology and applications based on the Android system. The Android system is the infrastructure of smartphones, and the public chain is an essential foundation of the Web3 world.

In the last round of the bull market, the major Layer 1 public chains made their debut. Near, Avalanche, Fantom, Solana, Harmony, and others flourished in the crypto market. As the market goes bearish, the major public chains are no longer in the limelight. In the cold market, the crazy rise of token prices is also back to a more rational state. However, the dazzling performance of public chains in the background of the hot market still remains relatively memorable to crypto investors. The public chain ecology in the bull market is full of expectations for the development of the next generation of technology, whether technological development or market price performance. In the context of the recent cold market, the news that various new public chains have received investment and financing has also made people's eyes shine. This article briefly introduces the high-profile new public chains and discusses the highlights of new public chains that attract market attention.

The Diem Gang - Newborn Public Chains

Diem, formerly known as Libra, is a crypto project experimented with by the Meta (Facebook) team in 2019. Libra planned to issue a super-sovereign digital currency in global circulation but was eventually forced to be terminated due to regulatory concerns. Subsequently, Libra was renamed Diem, and its positioning became a stablecoin project similar to USDT. Despite this, Diem still failed due to various unknown reasons. At the end of January, Diem was sold by Meta for about $182 million. Although the Diem project itself has quietly withdrawn from the crypto market, the new public chains developed by its native technical team have indeed appeared on social media and announced their comebacks. The new Layer1 public chains with Diem technical background that have been unveiled on social media include Aptos, Sui, Linera, etc.

Aptos - the Supernova born with a silver spoon

Aptos was launched on social media in February this year, and the Aptos Labs team was co-founded by developers from Diem’s technical team. Aptos announced that it will build its improved decentralized network based on Diem's ​​original technology. That is to use Diem's ​​programming language "Move" and MoveVM development environment and iterative Byzantine Fault Tolerance (BFT) consensus protocol for development.

On July 26, Aptos announced the completion of a $150 million Series A financing, led by FTX Ventures and Jump Crypto. In March of this year, Aptos also raised $200 million of funding from a16z, Tiger Global, Multicoin Capital, and several leading crypto VCs. In the second half of March, Aptos completed another round of financing again. Although the specific information of this round has not been fully disclosed, it is certain that the participating institutions include Binance Labs. Aptos will work closely with Binance in development, code review, infrastructure construction, and Hackathon in the future.

Several rounds of huge financing have made Aptos reach an ultra-high valuation of 2.75 billion US dollars before it begins to perform, becoming a big cake in the eyes of venture capital companies. The experienced technical development team and the background of renowned investors make Aptos the shinest in a number of new public chains.

Unlike Diem, which focused on payment, Aptos' main goal is to take into account the security, scalability, and upgradeability of the blockchain.

Aptos believes that the Layer 1 blockchain should take on more scalability responsibilities to simplify and mainstream the user experience. Therefore, it does not intend to require Layer 2 to improve scalability like Ethereum but to improve network scalability as much as possible in the underlying design. According to its test net data, Aptos can currently process more than 10,000 transactions per second. Ideally, Aptos can process 160,000 transactions per second after the main net is launched.

The ultra-high-performance transaction processing speed enables Aptos to fully realize its own value in the fields of extremely high demand in the current Web3 world (such as NFT transactions, and the extension of the DAO sector).

Aptos is currently in the second round of testing. Although Aptos is still a few months away from its expected launch of the main net at the end of September, there are already many companies and projects participating in the development. In addition to the industry giant Binance Labs, Aptos has also partnered with Google Cloud to further decentralize the Aptos network.

At present, although the main net of Aptos has not yet been launched, the completeness of its on-chain ecology has begun to shape. At present, Aptos has announced 20 ecological projects, including DID, DEX, oracles, wallets, and almost all other sectors in the industry.

Interestingly, 14 of the 20 projects are native to Aptos. As a star public chain with an unlisted valuation of $2.75 billion, it is very likely that the FDV will reach more than $5 billion after the launch. In theory, projects on the public chain will also receive huge capital flows.

Sui, the "super-brain" of high-speed processes

In March of this year, PoS blockchain network developer Mysten Labs announced the launch of the PoS blockchain network Sui.

Mysten Labs believes that the low scalability of the existing crypto infrastructure and the non-cross-platform smart contract language hinder the adoption of Web3. Like Aptos, Sui's technical team also comes from the original development team of Diem. It also inherits Diem's ​​development language Move, with improvements made on the original version (Core Move) called Sui Move. The new version inherits the security and flexibility of the Move language on the basis of the storage mechanism, address type, etc. Certain optimizations have been made to improve network performance and reduce transaction confirmation time.

Sui has the following features:

1. High scalability and instant settlement: Sui scales horizontally to meet the needs of the application. According to Mysten Labs, Sui authorities (nodes) can theoretically effectively and infinitely scale network throughput to meet the needs of builders and creators. As of March 19, 2022, unoptimized single-worker Sui authorities running on an 8-core M1 Macbook Pro can execute and submit 120,000 Token Transfer transactions per second (TPS).
2. Use the Move smart contract. The move is designed to prevent attackers from exploiting vulnerabilities such as reentrancy vulnerabilities and deceptive token approvals.
3. The scalability of Sui is not limited to transaction processing, it is also low-cost and horizontally scalable in terms of storage, enabling developers to define complex assets with rich properties that exist directly on-chain rather than off-chain storage. For example, developers can implement dynamic NFTs that can be upgraded, bundled, and grouped in application-specific ways.
4. Mysten Labs will also release the Sui Developer Kit, an open-source toolkit that allows developers to reduce the time spent debugging smart contracts, waiting for reviews, or building basic technology stack elements. The three building blocks of the Sui Developer Kit include the Game SDK, the Community Bootstrap SDK, and the Handshake SDK.

Among them, in terms of the Community Bootstrap SDK, SuiEcho allows existing NFT owners to "copy" them into Sui. For example, Ethereum NFT owners can use SuiEcho to provide proof of ownership to the Sui network and mint the corresponding Sui-based NFTs. Subsequently, the Sui-based NFTs become independent assets and are no longer tied to the original asset. Mysten Labs believes that "true decentralization means that the benefits of assets can be enjoyed in different places at the same time, and NFT owners are completely independent and free to use the original NFT and Sui-based NFT."

Sui's extremely high on-chain processing speed achieved by parallel high throughput and low latency will bring users an excellent user experience. For the high data processing efficiency and data storage technology required by the SocialFi and Gamefi sectors, Sui All are excellent choices for future related sectors.

Linera - the “Not-to-be-Outdone” of the three

While Aptos and Sui, the two new star public chains of the "Meta army", came out successively and attracted the attention of the market, another Layer1 public chain Linera, which was as well born out of Meta, announced in June this year that it had obtained a seed round of financing of USD $6 million. The lead investor of this round of financing is still a16z, with participation from Cygni Capital, Kima Ventures, and Tribe Capital. The funds raised will be used to hire developers and other staff to build the protocol together.

Linera was founded in 2021. The founding team includes ex-Zcash, ex-Meta/Novi, and London City University engineers and researchers with strong technical backgrounds in both Web2 and Web3.

In the blockchain, the fastest confirmation time is still a few seconds due to the consumption of the mempool and the coordination between the validators. The Linear team realized that simple operations like payments could be greatly accelerated by removing the mempool entirely and minimizing interactions between validators. In these protocols, blockchain clients communicate directly with validators to submit and confirm new account operations. The Linera block draws on this notion and hopes to generalize this approach to enable most account-based operations to be confirmed in fractions of a second, resulting in a low-latency blockchain.

The Linera team believes that it is necessary to provide low-latency guarantees at any scale for future decentralized systems, comparable to the evolution of databases from SQL to NoSQL.

So Linera will develop and promote a new execution model suitable for linear scaling, where by default, operations on different user accounts will run concurrently in different execution threads. This way, execution can always be scaled by adding new processing units to each validator. In traditional web2 architectures, these additional processing units (called "workers" or "shards") are provided on-demand by the data center or cloud provider.

In the face of the triadic paradox in blockchain technology, that is, blockchain cannot support the following three attributes at the same time, namely security, decentralization, and scalability, Linear team believes that this paradox only applies to fixed-size validators, With large, high-throughput validators, there is theoretically a lot of room for improvement. Also, processing high-throughput systems using commodity hardware has historically been challenging because it is impossible for a single auditor to run all transactions.

As such, Linera intends to leverage its concurrent execution model to support large-scale auditing by the community, while keeping an eye on ongoing progress in the proof-of-validity space. Linera targets low latency and linear scalability and is currently working on the first steps in implementing the Linera protocol and open source release. In terms of low latency, Baudet said: "I hope that the speed of user interaction can be close to that of traditional exchanges, and the standard centralized system rewards these actions in near real-time very quickly.

For linear scalability, Web2's system can add additional processing units as needed, while in Linera, it consists of shards of the chain or a single thread, adding additional validators to improve network efficiency.

The once glorious old public chains

The popular public chains that performed well in the last bull market have exposed a variety of different situations in their ecological development so far.

The grand picture of the meta-project ICP

For example, in May last year, the meta public chain ICP of the DFINITY Foundation was officially launched. Before the official launch, ICP has been warming up for four years. It can be said that before the launch, it is a go-to project in the eyes of everyone. ICP itself has indeed built its own grand image with its solid foundation and strong technical background. But it backfired. The ICP token experienced the classic event of being born at its peak. In just a few months, the currency price fell from hundreds of dollars to about 6 dollars. The once-stunning meta-project was also dubbed by the market as dead.

So what happened to ICP, which made it impossible for a project with technical strength and financial background to be able to rush out of its own achievements? It may be because the ICP project itself has a very big picture, and the grand blueprint of its own public chain construction is too exaggerated. ICP is mainly or advertised as a "full-stack world computer". Known as a web3.0 Internet computer, DFINITY has attracted a large number of developers and active users. At present, the applications in the DFINITY ecosystem cover many fields and aspects, mainly including social, infrastructure, DApps, DeFi, and NFT. However, the market does not appeal to it. The ICP ecosystem does have unique technical strength, however, compared with the Web3 world it promises to build, the current technical application of the ICP ecosystem is still too much false glory. It still requires a long period of practice and development for the implementation of technology applications. If a project that once claimed to be benchmarked against Ethereum wants to achieve the same results as Ethereum, it must first be down-to-earth and build its own unique ecology step by step.

Solana - the monolithic chain gangster

In the last bull market cycle, Solana’s phenomenal performance from obscurity to entering the top ten crypto market caps was indeed unexpected. With the development of technology and the popularity of market awareness, more and more projects have begun to choose Solana as the basic public chain for project ecological deployment. As the market value continues to soar, Solana has also made achievements in the market.

The Solana network is designed to provide developers with a high-performance Web 3.0 cloud platform that provides scalability on Layer1 blockchains. This approach is designed to optimize speed, and cost, and improve network decentralization, removing the complexity of Ethereum Layer 2 solutions. Specifically, these features can be quantified as:

• Speed: 400ms block time
• Cost: 0.000005 SOL (~$0.001) per transaction
• Decentralized: 2,242 global nodes

The benefit of Solana as a monolithic chain is that all applications on the chain are in the same layer and they have little friction with each other, so composability is a big advantage of Solana.

But monolithic chains are also a double-edged sword, and as the ecosystem growth strategy continues to drive adoption of the Solana network, challenges around network reliability persist. From a validator node’s perspective, Solana can currently handle up to 65,000 transactions per second, and the high throughput means the hardware to run validators is extremely demanding. The high barrier to entry makes the Solana Foundation the only entity developing core nodes on the Solana blockchain, which means it can control the network, thereby reducing the extent of decentralization of the network. The Solana network has been down many times, and the top-down solution has attracted a lot of skepticism: It looks like a "centralized bank with a more advanced database" instead of a so-called decentralized blockchain. Once Solana goes down, all the above applications will be inaccessible, which is very unpleasant for the overall experience of the Solana users.

Hawkish monetary policy and macro forces such as the $60 billion collapse of Terra USD (UST) and LUNA have thrown markets into disarray as L1 network activity plummeted across space. Like most networks, Solana was impacted by the macroeconomic environment, with declines in financial and network usage metrics.

However, the bear market has not stopped Solana from implementing solutions to improve network stability and expand its ecosystem.

Solana keeps implementing solutions that improve network stability and expand its user base. Core developers are focused on building QUIC and a new fee prioritization mechanism to improve network reliability and reduce downtime during congestion. Additionally, with the continued expansion of the NFT market, progress in EVM compatibility, advancements in Solana Pay, and the launch of Solana Mobile, strategies for expanding ecosystem adoption have become more apparent.

The explosion of Okay Bears has made more people realize that Solana NFT has a strong wealth-making effect. In the face of the ether chain that has taken the lead in the NFT market, the ultra-low handling fees and fast processing speed have enabled many NFT projects to find their own development stage, and have also attracted many people who are discouraged from participating in NFT due to the high gas fee on Ethereum. The explosion of Solana NFT is only the tip of the iceberg of the characteristics of Solana. For the now and future increasingly huge Web3 market, using a low-requirement participation method to attract long-tail users is a great opportunity for Solana to overtake ETH.

Cosmos - the inclusive multiverse of blockchains

Cosmos is a Layer0 dedicated to achieving horizontal expansion. The Layer0 protocol believes that the future inter-chain trend (inter-chain, not multichain) will be unstoppable. While Cosmos provides scalable and independent solutions, it regards itself as a sovereign and independent blockchain where critical infrastructure can coexist in a composable manner.

For other monolithic chains and other Layer0 protocols, Cosmos provides a modular, pluggable solution and better scalability, enabling horizontal scaling by assuming dynamic setpoints for acceptable counterparty security. These application chains can independently choose virtual machines, node requirements, rate models and governance, security assumptions, etc., so it is more difficult to be forked. Compared with applications on a monolithic chain, specific application sovereign chains have the advantage of reducing MEV attacks, meaning more methods and more control/pricing power over the various incentives for economic activity. In general, Cosmos provides sufficient personal space for applications in the ecosystem, so that DApps are not subject to the rules of the chain itself, but can better develop their own characteristics and develop to their fullest.

Cosmos ecosystem is Layer0, so success or failure depends on each individual chain. Some decentralized cores have been successfully integrated into the Cosmos ecosystem. There is no single boss in the ecosystem as a whole. Even if the project is at the top of the ecosystem, the impact on the entire Cosmos ecosystem when it collapses will not be like other chains, or even smaller than expected. Whether the Cosmos Hub can be removed or the demise of the Terra ecosystem is not a big problem. The interchain design of Cosmos minimizes the blast radius problem with the security assumption of interconnected independent interchains.

The current problem Cosmos is facing is how to provide excellent value capture for itself and its users in addition to the excellent inter-chain ecological construction. Opening up the ecosystem with a high degree of freedom can naturally drive the vitality of the development of the entire ecosystem, but at the same time, ATOM, which is the token for Cosmos, does not force ecological projects to be connected to it, hence Cosmos loses part of its value capture ability. How to cause the "Zuma effect" on the Cosmos chain like the beginning of the year again is the direction that the Cosmos public chain needs to delve deeper into.

Waves after waves. Can the new public chains break through the shackles of the old public chains?

Among the high-profile star public chains, Aptos, which is highly similar to Solana, focuses on on-chain scalability. Aptos, with its high efficiency and expansion as its selling point, is seen by many old users as Solana packaged in the Meta system. Perhaps the biggest difference is that Aptos uses the Move programming language developed in-house by Meta, and uses an iterative Byzantine consensus protocol.

Solana's co-founder also said in a July podcast that he sees Aptos as one of his competitors. There are also veteran Solana supporters or employees expressing their hopes for the Aptos chain on social media. This also drives a question: What is the difference between Aptos and Solana?

The competition of public chains starts with the competition of smart contract languages, from BTC/Script -> ETH/EVM/Solidity -> EOS/WASM/C, as well as Flow/Cadence, Solana/Rust., etc. With a brand-new language and with the advantages of multiple chains such as Aptos and Sui, Move is likely to bring a certain market share to the new public chains.

The second will be ecological competition. An ecosystem that is more complete and prosperous can retain and attract more developers, users, and capital, so as to stand out in the competition and become a real blockchain infrastructure, not a false glory, which can only be seen from a distance.

A mature public chain has a more diverse ecosystem, with hundreds of applications built on it. There are also a considerable number of public chain main nets that have been online for a long time but lack ecological bonuses and landing applications.

The trials of the new public chain by the market and industry ecology will only become more and more severe. In the competitive world of public chains, it is not that the older the public chain is, the more value the public chain has, since the test of public chains in the crypto world has never stopped. Even the old public chains that show their unique charm in the bull market will continue to surprise the market with various unexpected events. The recent attack on Solana wallets by a hacker on August 3rd once again sounded the alarm for the public chain ecology. It also proves that age and experience are not feasible for the evolving crypto industry. Whether Aptos has enough technical strength to solve a series of problems such as "connection" and "insufficient decentralization" of the old public chain Solana and to walk out of its own unique ecological path, is not only a challenge faced by Aptos but also a challenge for many new L1 public chains to consider in addition to their grand narratives.

Is the market putting an excessively high expectation on the new public chains?

For the new public chains that have not been officially put into application and have already attracted the attention of the audience, is the extremely high valuation a reflection of their own value or the impulse of the market overheating? In addition to better scalability and faster transaction processing speed, the market's expectations for the new generation of public chains also have high hopes for the ability to overcome the "evil dragon" triad in the blockchain. The solid technical background and the new public chains that are favored by powerful investors will live up to their expectations or will experience a high opening and a low move like ICP, which urgently needs the test of time, ecology, and market.

The public chain is transitioning from a single dominance to a prosperity of a hundred competitors, and what awaits us will be a future of coexisting multi-chain. As the impact of the crypto economy on the traditional industry deepens, more blockchain projects are likely to emerge in the coming years. Multi-chain will become the mainstream consensus in the future, which is very similar to the physical world where each project is defined by itself, has its own economic system, and operates under its own rules.

Join Us Here:

https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSel53Un2E3WrVPCm5Niq3GpHjaYuZ7LdyJECdx-9qUWMpY-FA/viewform

About Us：

Twitter: @RealResearchDAO

Medium: https://medium.com/@RealResearchDAO

Discord: discord.gg/ZSdgM7x6pc