Ethereum’s Layer-2 Enlargement, Rise of Zero-Data Cryptography, and Bitcoin’s New Frontier in Tokenization, Good Contracts, and File Internet hosting

LAYER 2’S EVERYWHERE: In final week’s The Protocol, we devoted a not-inconsiderable amount of ink to the fast-growing listing of latest “layer 2” blockchains aiming to supply a venue for quick and speedy transactions atop Ethereum. Seize one other properly, trigger there’s been loads extra bulletins already this week. Probably the most notable was inarguably Tuesday’s disclosure by the crypto alternate OKX that it plans to construct a layer 2 utilizing Polygon’s know-how. Wednesday introduced the information of Kinto, which has raised $5 million this 12 months to develop a layer-2 community that is absolutely compliant with anti-money-laundering legal guidelines utilizing Optimism’s OP Stack, and Redstone, an “various knowledge availability” chain designed by the Lattice staff for OP Stack. There are nagging questions on simply who’s going to make use of all these networks, however builders counsel there’s nonetheless not sufficient. “We’ll want a variety of L2s,” Ryan Wyatt, who was simply employed by a unit of the Optimism Basis as chief progress officer after leaving Polygon Labs a number of months in the past, advised CoinDesk TV this week. “One chain, a mainnet, just isn’t going to do it.” Even Cardano founder Charles Hoskinson tried to elbow into the combo, posting Sunday on X (previously Twitter) that “I am recreation in case you are” – attaching a hyperlink to CoinDesk’s article final week about Kraken’s discussions with potential layer-2 know-how companions together with Polygon, Matter Labs and Nil Basis – and tagging Kraken Chairman Jesse Powell. One snarky poster replied, “If that is how we reaching out, almost certainly not taking place.”