Tear Down Those Walls
“Tear Down Those Walls” – a cartoon illustrating how some of the new blockchain protocols are breaking-down the walled-garden nature of the first generation of protocols.
Layer 1 blockchain protocols, which are those that have launched their own token and represent the base foundation (e.g. Polygon, Solana).
The top 100 Layer 1s have a sufficiently large token valuation to support an active developer community and invest in marketing to attract customers.
Historically, these companies took a city-state approach, building proprietary tech and shouting over each other on their relative strengths at solving different parts of the blockchain trilemma challenge.
In the last two years, this has started to change, initially driven by multi-chain evolutions (e.g. flowering of Layer 2 blockchains in Ethereum) and applications building for cross-chain scale (e.g. Chainlink, Trava.Finance).
However, taking this to a new scale and potentially changing the landscape is the recent arrival of Eclipse, which acts as a superchain, picking the best from competing protocols (e.g. is based on a Solana Virtual Machine, using Ethereum for gas, is an Optimistic rollup that uses ZK technology for proof and taps into a Cosmos solution for data availability).
This is generally good for consumers and developers, but challenging for incumbent Layer 1s who will be fighting for relevancy as AOL did back in the early 2000s
