Mike Abundo retweetledi
unpopular take right now, but i don't think the L2 roadmap is obsolete at all. it's just been rewritten.
ethereum mainnet is cheaper and faster than ever right now. 99% of major apps right now can be done on the L1 as easily as anywhere else. a few extra cents in fees or seconds in latency is a negligible tradeoff for the liquidity and onboarding tools you get to handle millions of dollars of transactions.
but this will not always be the case. there is a world of future apps that require cheap transactions and low latency. i'm thinking about apps like @worldmarketsinc, @Euphoria_fi, @avon_xyz, @legendtrade (built on @megaeth and @GTE_XYZ). these aren't apps anyone would even have tried to build a few years ago because cost and latency wasn't sufficient for what they want to do.
these apps can be built on L1s (like @solana, @monad, @GTE_XYZ) or they can be built on performant L2s (like @megaeth). the advantage of an L2 is simply that the underlying security of the L1 lets it scale service.
what i'm going to say sounds so old that it is new. nobody wants to say it right now. but there is, potentially, a very important role for L2s in the future, just as there's potentially a very important role for alt-L1s.
that role is to host apps that need to scale speed, the likes of which we've never seen.
there are two challenges, however. the first is that for L2s to compete with the L1 for apps (and yes, they do need to compete with the ecosystem they're built on), they have to be able to offer top-of-the-line improvements in speed and cost. being #3 or #4 won't cut it. if you don't need the best, you might as well build on ethereum.
the second is that the vibe-based valuation model for these chains continues to implode. revenue will never be a good metric for them *when their entire value proposition is that cost is negligible.* L2s are at a special disadvantage because none of them even offer their own native currency enshrined as the medium of transaction across their ecosystem, so there isn't even a good model to value them based on GDP like a currency-backing nation-state.
@megaeth is the one L2 i can think of working to solve both these problems by 1) trying to build the most performant chain, and 2) building an actual value model in which the whole chain is just the frontend to support its actual revenue-accruing business through a stablecoin, USDM. with that said, i'm seeing lots of criticisms of @megaeth right now that mostly feels like hype-based bullshit, but nobody is giving the one criticism that might make sense. USDM should be their native gas currency, not eth, since only USDM builds their business.
which is to say: ethereum has clearly on the L1 level for whale-driven defi that doesn't require state-of-the-art latency or the lowest fees.
but at the opposite end of the spectrum, the point where the future will be built, the game is far from won.
fud now at your own peril.
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