‘Only a few’ Ethereum L2s will survive the next 5 years: Manta founder

According to Kenny Lee, founder of Manta Pacific, of the 44 active Ethereum Layer 2 blockchains currently in existence, “only a few” will exist in five years.

According to data from L2Beat, there are currently a total of 44 active Ethereum Layer2 networks, with a total locked-in (TVL) of $36.92 billion, with Arbitrum (ARB) in first place at $14.5 billion TVL.

However, Lee, the chief operating officer and founder of Manta Pacific, says the future is perfectly paved for “modular” blockchains like Manta, Celestia and Cosmos.

Critics of this view, however, argue that the term is simply “marketing optimization” and that network success has nothing to do with growth and expansion.

‘Monolithic' BTC and ETH killers

Speaking to Cointelegraph, Lee argues that the flood of new Layer 2s on the Ethereum network is changing the same way Bitcoin and Ethereum networks “forked” in the past – none of them “survived”.

“In all Bitcoin forks – Bitcoin Cash and BSV – they all take existing technology and fork it,” Lee explained.

“You know what it is,” he said. We make these minor changes to it. And by making these small changes we create something ‘better than Bitcoin'.

“Fast forward to 2024, it's just Bitcoin. There is no other Bitcoin fork community of comparable scale, not even a comparable community even close to the original Bitcoin.

Li added that in 2016, when new networks like EOS and NEO tried to position themselves as “Ethereum killers”, the same thing played out with Ethereum by offering alternative EVM and VM environments that tried to make small changes to the pre-existing Ethereum ecosystem.

In Lee's view, the central issue with all Bitcoin and Ethereum “forks” was that they were all built “monolithically,” meaning they didn't allow for rapid integration and adoption of new technology that appeared over time. .

“They all built it the same way and what's wrong with them, right? Fast forward to 2024. Ethereum is the dominant player.

“Will we see this many L2s in five years? I don't think so. Only a few will survive,” he said.

Modular blockchains are networks that outsource their core functionality; According to the proponents, performance, agreement, consensus and data availability for external blockchains.

In contrast, monolithic blockchains prioritize a single system architecture that performs all functions within a single network layer.

But some see no reason to argue “modular vs monolithic” at all.

Maybe this is all a ‘marketing show'

Austin Federa, head of strategy at the Solana Foundation, described the relatively new debate around the two terms as “market reform” introduced by Celestia.

While many understand Ethereum's more “modular” architecture — relying on Layer 2s to complete specific tasks — stands in direct contrast to the “monolithic” nature of other high-throughput networks like Solana or Avalanche, Federa disagrees with the term's usage. Completely.

“We have to remember that the modular vs. modular debate is all a marketing show,” Federa said. “Celestia made this distinction between modular and monolithic. It is not a natural variation and there is no organism.

Lee Manta – launched on January 18 – can be described as the “first and largest” modular layer-2 network on Ethereum, as it uses the Optimum OP stack and uses Celestia for data delivery (although Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin calls it “Validum” and a true L2 No) say.

At the time of publication, Manta is the fourth largest Layer 2 network relative to TVL, recently overtaken by the new Layer 2 Blast, which launched its main network on March 1.

“We don't build in a one-size-fits-all manner. We have not built anything on our own in terms of core architecture,” he explained.

Related: Bitcoin layer 2s among the catalysts of this bull cycle, Bitcoin says

“We're taking a very modular approach, which means we can plug and play different technologies available at different times,” Lee added.

Federa, however, argues that there is no need to differentiate between the two approaches.

“The reality is that there is no such thing as a modular system, there is no such thing as a single system.”

Federa explained that a monolithic network is simply one where “integrated” blockchain operations are handled by a single layer, while “modular” – or “decentralized” networks – perform the same operations across multiple layers and don't really contribute much to its success. or results of a particular network.

“That's how the words ‘pro-life' and ‘pro-choice' are, two positive spins on the same thing, right? It's not like anyone is really anti-life or anti-choice, is it? It's all just marketing words to provide the narrative people want to tell.

“I don't think setting these things up against each other is a particularly useful or accurate way to think about these systems. They're just software architecture choices that aren't that different at the end of the day,” Federa said.

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