Ethereum’s Layer-2 Expansion, Rise of Zero-Knowledge Cryptography, and Bitcoin’s New Frontier in Tokenization, Smart Contracts, and File Hosting

LAYER 2’S EVERYWHERE: In last week’s The Protocol, we dedicated a not-inconsiderable quantity of ink to the fast-growing list of new “layer 2” blockchains aiming to provide a venue for fast and speedy transactions atop Ethereum. Grab another well, cause there’s been plenty more announcements already this week. The most notable was inarguably Tuesday’s disclosure by the crypto exchange OKX that it plans to build a layer 2 using Polygon’s technology. Wednesday brought the news of Kinto, which has raised $5 million this year to develop a layer-2 network that’s fully compliant with anti-money-laundering laws using Optimism’s OP Stack, and Redstone, an “alternative data availability” chain designed by the Lattice team for OP Stack. There are nagging questions about just who is going to use all these networks, but developers suggest there’s still not enough. “We’re going to need a lot of L2s,” Ryan Wyatt, who was just hired by a unit of the Optimism Foundation as chief growth officer after leaving Polygon Labs several months ago, told CoinDesk TV this week. “One chain, a mainnet, is not going to do it.” Even Cardano founder Charles Hoskinson tried to elbow into the mix, posting Sunday on X (formerly Twitter) that “I’m game if you are” – attaching a link to CoinDesk’s article last week about Kraken’s discussions with prospective layer-2 technology partners including Polygon, Matter Labs and Nil Foundation – and tagging Kraken Chairman Jesse Powell. One snarky poster replied, “If this is how we reaching out, most likely not happening.”