8 Major Chains Outperforming Ethereum: Future Prospects

After the smooth completion of Ethereum’s Dencun upgrade on March 13, in the past few days, L2 solutions like Starknet, Optimism, and Arbitrum have been integrating successively, resulting in sharp reductions in transaction fees and making the narrative around Ethereum and L2 more appealing.

However, alongside this, in recent times, new public chains that have been struggling under the radar outside of Ethereum have also begun to see their own moments of minor prosperity, with a surge of noteworthy ecosystem projects and new variables emerging.

01 Outstanding New Public Chains Showing Strong Performance

In the last six months, with the resurgence of heterogenous chains represented by Solana, as well as the developmental bottlenecks faced by Ethereum L2s, the industry has reignited a major discussion about Ethereum and its L2 solutions. Especially, the new Layer2 solutions based on the concept of scaling have caused issues like liquidity fragmentation and incompatibility among each other, leading to a somewhat weakened narrative around Ethereum.

The continuous surge in value of SOL and AVAX has acted as a strong boost to the “new public chains”, drawing market attention and investment back, which has prompted the ecosystem of new public chains like Solana to experience their own moments of growth.

• Solana: A Model for Post-Disaster Reconstruction

In a span of 5 months, SOL’s price soared from 20 USD to a peak of 200 USD, bringing its market value back to ten billion dollars. Solana has completely emerged from the shadows of FTX, leaving behind new blockchains like Avalanche and NEAR, becoming an almost unparalleled entity in the smart contract blockchain space, second only to Ethereum.

With the surge in SOL’s price, the Solana ecosystem has also developed, from DeFi and NFTs to the currently popular DePIN track, spawning numerous noteworthy ecological sub-projects in all directions, flourishing as a model for post-disaster reconstruction.

Especially recently, the emergence of new generation meme leaders like SILLY, DRAGON, and WIF visibly shifting from Ethereum to Solana highlights Solana’s unique standing in terms of on-chain funds and community traffic among new blockchains.

• Avalanche: Shaping the “RWA+Blockchain Gaming” Dual Narrative

Last year, Avalanche gained prominence through collaborations with traditional financial giants like Fidelity and JPMorgan, becoming the go-to blockchain for traditional enterprises looking to issue crypto assets, thus successfully branding itself as the “RWA Blockchain.” Especially with the feature of customizable subnets (subnets), more traditional enterprises looking to issue RWA assets are likely to partner with Avalanche, which has a first-mover advantage.

Following the successful narrative around RWA, in March this year, South Korean game publisher Nexon Group announced that its 2D MMORPG “MapleStory” would enter the Avalanche network in collaboration with Ava Labs, launching a Web3 version called “MapleStory Universe.” This marks a significant step in game empowerment for Avalanche’s subnets.

Previously, Avalanche also launched Arcad3, aimed at helping traditional game developers transition seamlessly to Web3 gaming, planning to replicate the support path of RWA and positioning blockchain gaming as a second core growth area.

Overall, Avalanche’s dual narrative around “RWA+Blockchain Gaming” is gradually taking shape, with the potential to bring forth new variables and products beyond conventional competition in 2024.

• Sui: Significant Improvement in On-Chain Liquidity

Sui has demonstrated a trend of gradual but significant growth over the past half year, perfectly embodying the crypto world’s logic that good things come to those who wait, especially in terms of on-chain liquidity construction over the past six months:

From August to October last year, the liquidity staking hackathon organized by the official team awarded projects Aftermath, Haedal, and Volo, which have been main contributors to the TVL growth in the past few months.

Sui’s market value trend this year, source: DeFillama

As of the most visible indicator, since October 14, 2023, Sui’s TVL surpassed 50 million USD for the first time, and by February 15, it reached a new historic high of over 600 million USD. The significant improvement in on-chain liquidity, along with the community’s enthusiasm and market discussion, has far surpassed another “Move-based blockchain leader,” Aptos.

02 What are the latest developments in new public blockchains worth paying attention to?

• NEAR: DA + Chain Abstraction + AI

Recently, NEAR has not missed a single hot narrative.

First of all, in the battle for legitimacy of Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DA), while solutions like Celestia for external Ethereum data availability (DA) are making significant strides, NEAR has also launched its own NEAR DA service—Polygon has now opted for NEAR, stating it is “8000 times cheaper than Ethereum.”

Next is the emerging narrative of “chain abstraction,” a step further from account abstraction as a massive adoption solution for Web3. The biggest potential of chain abstraction lies in separating the blockchain from users, allowing DApps and project teams to return to a user-centric paradigm.

In simple terms, it means creating a low-barrier Web3 product environment that is easy to start with and offers an experience close to traditional Web2 applications, thereby smoothing the transition for non-crypto users into the Web3 world.

After all, from a product perspective, many people may not need to understand what Web3 is, and if it wants to become mainstream, Web3 must be easily usable by the general public—most people won’t even know Web3 exists, and that’s enough. Currently, aside from projects like NEAR, the narrative of “chain abstraction” has not yet attracted widespread attention, so pushing it forward might open up new realms of possibilities.

Finally, there’s the super narrative of “AI,” mainly due to NEAR co-founder Ilia Polosukhin’s appearance at the NVIDIA AI conference—scheduled to attend the “Transforming AI” keynote and panel discussion during the GTC24 conference on March 20, with NVIDIA founder Jensen Huang also participating. This has propelled NEAR to become a leading “AI blockchain.”

The reason behind this is simple: Ilia Polosukhin is one of the co-authors of the AI research paper “Attention Is All You Need” published in 2017, which is considered the foundational work of the Transformer language model. This paper is the origin of the various GPT models that have emerged.

As such, NEAR has recently become the sole project intersecting the three hot narratives of “DA + Chain Abstraction + AI,” showing impressive performance in the secondary market.

• APT: Accelerating On-Chain Liquidity Learning from Solana’s Web3 Phone

Aptos and Sui, both emerging from the core team of Diem, have shown divergent paths in recent times. Unlike Sui, which has seen simultaneous growth in on-chain liquidity and secondary market performance, Aptos seems to lag behind in this competitive landscape. However, recent developments surrounding Aptos have garnered attention, notably its initiative following Solana’s successful venture into the Web3 phone market with the Saga. Aptos has introduced its Jambo Web3 phone, aiming to penetrate markets in Africa, Southeast Asia, and Latin America through a hardware-centric approach. Priced at $99, the offering appears more enticing, yet its potential for widespread adoption in the blockchain era remains to be seen.

The liquidity switch within ecosystems built on the Move programming language, such as Cetus, is relatively straightforward due to shared technological foundations. This facilitates Aptos in potentially capturing overflow capital from Sui, evidenced by the recent strength of APT compared to SUI.

• Arweave: Doubling Down on AO to Craft New Narratives

In the ever-evolving crypto landscape, fresh narratives are plentiful but few manage to catalyze market and domain convergence. Arweave stands out with its late-February launch of the public testnet for Arweave AO, sparking interest in both AR and the storage domain. Its positioning as a “new generation internet computer” echoes the ambitious vision once held by Dfinity. With AO, Arweave extends its existing storage capabilities to include verifiable distributed computing, allowing for the execution of various tasks on data stored permanently on Arweave, thereby enhancing its value. This development can be viewed as a decentralized, SCP-based alternative to centralized cloud services like AWS, expanding Arweave’s narrative beyond permanent storage to a broader decentralized data economy.

• Telegram: The Giant Pivots with 900 Million Users

For crypto enthusiasts and Web3 players, aside from exchange apps, Telegram likely ranks as the most frequently used application. TON, the blockchain associated with Telegram, has seen significant growth, spurred by multiple factors including Binance’s introduction of TON perpetual contract trading pairs and the subsequent liquidity support. Additionally, Telegram’s announcement of expanding its advertising platform to nearly a hundred new countries, offering channel owners a 50% revenue share from ads displayed on their channels, has utilized the TON blockchain to ensure quick and secure payment processing. This opens up vast potential for TON, integrating crypto transfers, trades, and custodial services directly within the Telegram app, leveraging its massive user base.

• Filecoin: Steady Progress in the FVM Ecosystem

On March 14, 2023, the Filecoin Virtual Machine (FVM) was officially launched on the Filecoin mainnet, introducing programmable smart contracts and the capability to run the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) atop FVM. This development has made the Filecoin network programmable for the first time, allowing developers to deploy smart contracts written in Solidity or Yul. As of the launch date, over 3,000 contracts had been deployed on FVM, with a net deposit exceeding 23.2 million FIL. Entering 2024, platforms like Uniswap have begun deploying on FVM, and protocols such as Glif and STFIL have significantly enhanced the liquidity and diversity of DApps within the Filecoin ecosystem.

03 Summary

Overall, public blockchains have always been the most imaginative long-term narrative in the Web3 world. From the “new public chain” craze in 2018 with Polkadot, Cosmos, EOS, etc., to the rise of homomorphic chains and L2 networks like BSC and Arbitrum in 2020, and the rapid development of public chains like Solana, Avalanche in 2021, and the Move family in 2022, public chains have never lacked protagonists.

Today, as the outline of a new bull market cycle gradually emerges, the public chain track, initially full of speculation and frenzy, is also beginning to lean towards grand narratives and innovation. People’s understanding of public chains is constantly changing. In 2024, we may see more practical and widely adopted public chains emerge, which is worth looking forward to.

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