In-depth analysis of the 5 most potential new public chains in 2022

 Abstract：United together likes fire. Seperated apart likes stars.

Foreword: Technology serves the ecology. Therefore, the expansion of the new public chain is essentially a top-down path: from upper-layer applications to underlying technologies, and the prosperity of ecological applications promotes a variety of public chain use cases. ETH's inclusiveness of smart contracts, Solana's high-efficiency transaction performance ecology, Terra's high-end financial management in finance, and Avalanche's P2E for chain games have all found their own applications.

The public chain, which has always been regarded as the "infrastructure" of the encrypted world, plays a necessary role. Whether it is a bull market or a bear market, we can always see new public chains, all trying to use technology to tell "new stories", or to ignite their technology with "new ecology". Also under the current normal market conditions, the new public chains in 2022 are eye-catching. This article will analyze the five public chains with the greatest potential in 2022 from multiple perspectives.

• Aptos: Inheriting Diem's "will", "Meta" is the first player in the public chain
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Aptos is the most well-known new public chain in 2022. From the perspective of the top investment lineup, a16z led the investment. The participating list also included Tiger Global, FTX Ventures, Jump Crypto, Coinbase Ventures, Binance Labs, GriffinGamingPartners, FranklinTempleton, Well-known institutions in the crypto industry such as CircleVentures and Superscrypt.

As of July 27, 2022, Aptos has completed a total of $350 million in financing, of which a16z, FTX Ventures, and Multicoin Capital have participated in the two rounds of financing so far.

In terms of technology, Aptos, which inherits the vast majority of technical heritage of "Diem", is indeed a commendable core technology.

Aptos uses a secure and flexible blockchain language, the Move language. This language was originally a programming language tailored for the Diem project, designed for secure resource management and verifiable execution on the blockchain, so it pays more attention to the security, scalability and upgradeability of the blockchain sex.

In order to avoid the problem of billions of dollars of value being locked due to lost keys, the Aptos team is committed to developing new key recovery technologies that can be directly integrated into the blockchain account model. Additionally, to prevent key theft, Aptos supports the ability for any account to rotate its private key. Validators can also periodically rotate their consensus keys for increased security.

Aptos uses the Byzantine consensus "Proof-Of-Stake Diem BFT" that has completed four iterations to achieve high transaction throughput, low latency and more energy efficiency. According to Aptos official testnet data, the current network can process more than 10,000 transactions per second, and under ideal conditions, the Aptos mainnet can even process 160,000 transactions per second.

Among them, "upgradability" is also another key point that Aptos emphasizes. Aptos manages and configures block validators directly through the on-chain state, so that the community can quickly perform upgrades after voting. Aptos has verified such a design, and it has not experienced network downtime in several major upgrades, which fundamentally solves a major pain point of many current blockchains - it is difficult to make major protocol improvements after startup.

Aptos ecological construction also has impressive achievements. The current on-chain ecosystem has 100+ projects, covering DeFi, NFT, games and other fields. However, the number of projects that have released available products on the testnet is actually limited, including Martina, Fewcha, Multimask, Liquidswap, Vial Protocol, Mobius, Topaz, and Aptos Name Service. In other words, most of the Aptos ecosystem projects are still in a relatively early stage of continuous development, and some projects are still under development.

It is worth noting that since Aptos adopts the Move smart contract language, it is not compatible with DApps developed based on the mainstream Solidity language in the market. Therefore, developers need to rewrite the code to build applications on Aptos. This may lead to a slowdown in the establishment of Aptos ecological applications.

Comments:

1. Aptos is currently the best-developed Meta-based public chain with a luxurious investment lineup. Among the new public chains, its development and ecological construction are relatively rapid;

2. "Upgradability" is a highlight of the Aptos public chain, ensuring that problems arise in the later upgrade process, and the performance security and scalability of the public chain are higher.

• Sui: "Meta" with a valuation of 2 billion is the second player in the public chain

As a member of the Meta public chain family, Sui, like Aptos, has been well received for its establishment. The development team of Sui is Mysten Labs, which was established by the Novi research team of Meta, and has also been committed to the development of the Diem blockchain. As Mysten Labs, Sui has developed a high-performance Layer 1 public chain from 0. It adopts the PoS consensus mechanism to improve the composability of metaverse applications including games, social networking, and commerce, and build dynamic NFTs.

In December 2021, Mysten Labs announced the completion of a $36 million Series A financing led by a16z, with participation from Coinbase Ventures, NFX, Slow Ventures, Scribble Ventures, Samsung NEXT, and Lux ​​Capital. At present, Mysten Labs needs at least $200 million in Series B financing at a valuation of $2 billion. At present, the project party has received $140 million in funding support in this round of financing. This round of financing is led by FTX Ventures. Judging from the investment institutions and investment amount, the market is also full of expectations for Sui.

Like Aptos, Sui also uses Diem's ​​development language Move, but Sui has been upgraded and adjusted so that the language can write both smart contracts involving homogeneous encrypted assets and smart contracts involving non-homogeneous NFT assets .

In addition, in terms of scalability of network performance, the Sui public chain focuses on "transaction parallelization" - the network can process multiple transactions at the same time. Sui is that Aptos can lock the relevant data of a transaction and achieve independent verification, so as to complete the parallel processing of transactions. Since independent transactions can be validated in parallel, Sui can scale by adding more devices to each validating node to linearly increase throughput.

Interestingly, Sui is very subtle with the Gas mechanic. Sui is able to keep gas prices low and predictable, while incentivizing validators to optimize transaction processing and prevent denial of service (“DoS”) attacks.

We know that Sui runs in units of [epochs], and the set of validators changes every epoch (24 hours). The validators of the new [Epoch] will vote based on the reference Gas fee of the Epoch. Most blockchains are subject to gas cost volatility due to large changes in the network and the market. In order to keep gas fees low and predictable, the protocol will provide some incentives to encourage validators to keep transaction fees at A level close to the reference price allows users to perform at a more predictable speed by providing a more stable gas fee, creating a more optimized user experience.

Not only that, but Sui also solves the state inflation problem. Every time a user submits data on-chain, they must also pay a gas fee and other fees to Sui's "storage fund". This funding is used to cover the real-world cost of validating nodes for storing user data. As the network matures and storage costs increase, validators will be paid by the storage fund.

Although, Sui is also BFT consensus, both it and Aptos' consensus mechanism minimize the communication required between validators to process transactions to achieve lower latency. The difference is that Aptos' BFT is partially asynchronous, while Sui's consensus-implementing design separates the protocol's memory pool from the consensus layer.

In terms of ecological deployment, Sui is obviously much more conservative. At present, Sui Network has launched two encrypted wallets for testing: the official Chrome plug-in wallet Sui Wallet and the third-party wallet Ethos Wallet. The ecological progress of Sui is relatively slow. In addition to the wallet, there are browsers, games and social projects currently under construction.

Obviously, Sui's ecological positioning is also more inclined to the expansion of a wide range of metaverse applications including games, social networking, and commerce.

And these 4 types of applications will highly rely on Sui's high throughput and low latency to provide the best user experience. Therefore, gaming and social apps also have unique advantages built on Sui. And, games can take advantage of Move's security and expressiveness for digital avatars. Meanwhile, social media applications can take advantage of Sui’s data storage economics to store all data directly on-chain.

Of course, the ecological value of all this is based on the fact that Sui has a rich enough ecological scene.

Comments:

1. Sui's original creation [provides a low gas price and a predictable mechanism], which is an advantage that other public chains do not have;

2. Like the Aptos public chain, Sui inherits the resources and technology of Meta, and has a large endorsement;

3. The prospect of Sui is good, but its ecological construction is relatively slow.

• Linera: It belongs to the "Meta" public chain focusing on low latency and linear scalability

Linera, founded in 2021, has a founding team including ex-Zcash, ex-Meta/Novi and London City University engineers and researchers with strong technical backgrounds in both Web2 and Web3. Linera's goal is to create a low-latency blockchain that can scale as easily as a Web 2 application, enabling most account-based operations to be confirmed in fractions of a second. Simply put, Linera is a Layer 1 blockchain project that aims to bring Web2 scalability and low latency to Web3.

On June 29 this year, Linera completed a $6 million seed round led by a16z, with participation from Cygni Capital, Kima Ventures and Tribe Capital.

The ultimate goal of Linera is to transform the speed of centralized data interaction into decentralization, and another highlight is linear expansion. In Linera's linear model, operations for different user accounts run concurrently in different execution threads, in this way execution can always be scaled by adding new processing units to each validator.

Interestingly, Linera's linear expansion refers to the dynamic provision of database resources based on real-time throughput, so companies don't have to worry about website downtime when encountering high concurrency, or idle resources in normal times. It is worth noting that the added resource is the processing unit (software) of the database, not adding more processing nodes (hardware). The latter is horizontal expansion, while Linera is vertical expansion. The advantage is that different functions are handed over to the corresponding database for processing (such as search database, column database, document database), rather than all handed over to relational databases for unified processing. .

This avoids the common pain point of public chains - all tasks are processed uniformly in order (high gas can be queued), and it is difficult to imagine that it can handle millions of different requests per second from users.

In short, in Linera's linear scaling model, operations of different user accounts can run concurrently in different execution threads.

At present, Linera has not been explicitly developed in the Move language in the public information, but only indicates that it is based on the Rust language, but from the technical characteristics of Linera, the logic of the two is very similar.

The concept of Linera is relatively new, but it is still in the early stage of development, not to mention the richness of the ecology. But not for the new direction of the future public chain, once the "target" is achieved.

Comments:

1. The development and construction process of Linera is slow, it is still in the early stage of development, and its popularity is low;

2. The concept of "linear expansion" proposed by Linera is very novel. If it can be realized in Web3.0, it must be an epoch-making breakthrough, but it lacks the construction of ecological applications;

3.Linera officially announced that the financing amount and the strength of the investment team are weak.

04.PlugChain: A bridge to reality and the world of bits

PlugChain is a public chain based on Cosmos, created in 2021. From the official vision, PlugChain is committed to building an aggregated cross-chain oracle protocol. It is not difficult to see that the PlugChain public chain has two main advantages, one is cross-chain interaction and collaboration, and the other is a decentralized aggregated oracle network.

First of all, PlugChain is a Proof-of-Stake (PoS) blockchain based on Cosmos SDK and Tendermint, making it a regional hub connecting Cosmos, and the PlugChain hub is equipped with a service protocol that processes transactions on the chain Coordinate with off-chain data processing and business logic execution. In addition, the PlugChain team enhances the IBC protocol to facilitate off-chain services to be invoked across chains at any time when necessary, so that it can effectively solve the information interaction between networks of many independent blockchains in the same way as Cosmos, even better than Cosmos. more efficient.

In addition, PlugChain provides developers with modular underlying components through public chains such as BSC, Heco, Polkadot, Solana, and Cosmos, so that it can practically support global commercial-level application networks. In this way, PlugChain continues to expand while being compatible with any blockchain, and integrates into the ecology of more public chains. Secondly, unlike ChainLink, which only supports the Ethereum oracle network, PlugChain supports a wider range of oracle networks on the public chain on the basis of cross-chain ecology. Therefore, PlugChain is more accurate and sensitive to the capture and connection of external data, which greatly solves the pain point of the price delay of external oracles.

According to the official white paper, PlugChain's aggregated oracle protocol has the ability to serve 100+ mainstream public chains in the world. It realizes data input and output, data governance process through PlugChain cross-chain protocol, smart contracts, big data, and AI technology, and through ONP (Oracle Network Protocol) is delivered to 100+ mainstream public chains around the world to build an era bridge between the Web2 world and the Web3 world.

  PlugChain received a $10 million investment from the Alpha Hadge Foundation on November 11, 2021. Compared with the above-mentioned public chain projects, the financing amount is not large. In the ecological construction, PlugChain is still in its infancy. Except for the well-known projects of Plant GameFi and SoulMeta, the rest of the ecological projects are not outstanding.

Comments:

1. The concepts of "cross-chain" and "aggregation oracle protocol" proposed by PlugChain are very novel and have their own core technologies;

2. The development cycle of the public chain is close to one year, the team focuses on technology development, and the ecological construction lags behind;

3. Break the barriers of independent blockchains through cross-chain collaboration, and aggregate the oracle network protocol to improve the integration of the real world and the bit world, which is conducive to the construction of Web 3.0, with huge potential and promising future!

05.Aleo: A seed player focusing on privacy public chains

Privacy issues are an increasingly important topic in the blockchain industry, and there is a huge rigid demand. Therefore, the privacy field is also a competitive field for many public chain segments. The blockchain faces the challenge of both privacy and programmability. When we emphasize privacy, but too much public data information, there is not enough data information to achieve programmability. Otherwise, data privacy will not be protected.

Aleo, as a senior player in the privacy public chain, solves this problem through zero-knowledge recursive proof Zexe.

From the very beginning, Aleo has been positioned as a privacy-based Layer 1 that supports smart contracts. Its technical core lies in the two core sectors of Zexe and Leo. The Zexe consensus protocol is improved on ZeroCash's original zk-snarks technology, which can not only encrypt pure Tokens Transfer transactions, but also interactive transactions at the application level. In addition, the Aleo public chain provides developers with a Leo programming language that is more friendly to zero-knowledge proof DAPPs, which can modularize the zk-snarks settings of the Zexe consensus protocol, so that any Dapp operating on the Aleo platform can use zk-snarks. , which is more conducive to the rapid construction of the privacy DAPP ecosystem.

In terms of financing, Aleo's strength should not be underestimated. According to the official announcement, Aleo will complete Series A and Series B financing of $28 million and $200 million in April 2021 and February 2022, respectively. Investors include SoftBank, Tiger Global Management, a16z, Placeholder, Coinbase Ventures, Galaxy Digital, Polychain Capital, etc. The 3 co-founders of Aleo have worked for Google, IBM, ConsenSys, Gnosis, etc.

From the perspective of development progress, on August 2, Aleo launched Testnet 3, which means that it is one step closer to the mainnet launch. This round of Testnet 3 will be divided into 3 stages, which will be held in August, September and October of this year, and each stage will provide "Aleo Points" rewards, which are suitable for developers to participate.

Comments:

1. Use zero-knowledge proof technology to improve security and privacy protection capabilities;

2. Provide tools for writing zero-knowledge proof applications: Aleo Studio, Aleo Package Manager, lowering the threshold and shortening the development cycle;

3. It has been developed for a long time in the privacy field and has been supported by a16z and Softbank;

4. Aleo ecological construction is relatively scarce.

Conclusion: The competition pattern of this round of public chains is unfolding due to the continuous development of new public chains such as Aptos, Sui, Linera, PlugChain and Aleo. "Meta" players not only received support from many top VCs during the market downturn, but also brought the Move programming language, which is highly anticipated by the encryption market, while PlugChain and Aleo are forging ahead in their respective segments, with huge potential and promising future. . In the near future, who will take the lead in becoming the new king of the market, let us wait and see.