Here's a blunt truth that might offend some: the current Layer 2 landscape is very much like the "battle of a thousand groups" in 2017 or the early bike-sharing market.

If you observe carefully, you'll find that among the dozens of public chains that are well-known today, aside from their different names, the underlying tech stacks are almost identical. Everyone is using Ethereum's Geth client from a few years ago, making fixes here and there, then frantically issuing tokens, creating incentives, and pulling TVL data. This has led to an extremely adverse consequence: liquidity is severely fragmented, and user experience is highly broken.

Do we really need 50 L2s that are functionally identical? Absolutely not.

The rules of the business world tell us that any market with excessive competition will ultimately move towards "unification." The future of Web3 will inevitably require only one or two top-tier underlying networks to carry the majority of value.

And my only criterion for predicting who will survive until the end is this: who is doing the hardest, but most correct thing?

The vast majority of project teams, in order to chase trends, chose the simplest path of "forking (copying) code." But @Plasma a ($XPL L) chose the most foolish, slowest, and hardest route: rewriting the underlying execution engine (Reth) from scratch using Rust. #Plasma