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

LAYER 2 IS EVERYWHERE: In last week’s The Protocol, we devoted a fair amount of ink to Rapidly growing list of new “layer 2” blockchains aiming to provide a place for fast and rapid transactions on top of Ethereum. Grab another one, because there have already been plenty of other announcements this week. The most notable was undoubtedly the revelation on Tuesday by crypto exchange OKX that it plans to build layer 2 using Polygon technology. Wednesday brought the news of Kinto, who raised $5 million this year to develop a layer 2 network which is fully compliant with anti-money laundering laws using Optimism’s OP Stack and Redstone, a “availability of alternative data” channel designed by the Lattice team for OP Stack. Nagging questions remain about who will use all these networks, but the developers suggest there still aren’t enough. “We’re going to need a lot of L2”, Ryan Wyatt, who was just hiring by a unit of the Optimism Foundation as chief growth officer after leaving Polygon Labs several months ago, told CoinDesk TV this week. “A single channel, a main network, will not be enough.” Even Cardano founder Charles Hoskinson tried to get in the mix, assignment Sunday on X (formerly Twitter), “I’m up for it if you are” – attaching a link to Article from CoinDesk last week, about Kraken’s discussions with potential Layer 2 technology partners, including Polygon, Matter Labs and Nil Foundation – and tagging Kraken President Jesse Powell. A sarcastic poster replied“If that’s the way we reach out, it probably won’t happen.”