The rights and wrongs of L3 expansion: is it a redundant move or a completely new narrative?

Comprehensive Editor: Felix, PANews

Recently, Memecoin trading activities have exploded on Degen Chain. Although Degen Chain has been a huge success, it has also attracted criticism from people such as Polygon Labs CEO Marc Boiron. And this triggered a debate on the X platform.

Degen Chain is based on the L3 network running on Base, which in turn runs on Ethereum. Degen Chain was launched on March 28 by infrastructure provider Syndicate and is built using Arbitrum Orbit. The network caters to users of the Farcaster Web3 platform, offering ultra-low-cost trading for the Degen token ($DEGEN).

Since the launch of the Degen Chain network, it has attracted quite a few speculators, and early investors have made considerable profits. One trader who invested less than $7,000 made more than $2 million in profits. Meanwhile, Farcaster is breaking user activity records, demonstrating growing interest in L3 chains.

Despite their success, critics such as Polygon Labs CEO Marc Boiron remain opposed to L3 networks, claiming that they divert value from Ethereum’s base layer. Marc Boiron believes that Ethereum does not need L3 network expansion. L3 exists only to snatch the value of the main network and transfer it to L2s that build L3. Polygon Labs will not develop L3 either.

Boiron has faced questions recently. One user commented that L2 on Ethereum “is valuable on Ethereum,” but Boiron argued that he “doesn’t think the L2 value is the value on Ethereum.” If all L3 converged on one L2, there would be no value on Ethereum. Therefore, the security of Ethereum will be at risk.

Offchain Labs senior partner manager Peter Haymond believes that L3 has many benefits and does not necessarily take away the value of Ethereum.

Patrick McCorry, a researcher at the Arbitrum Foundation, was surprised by Boiron's perspective. He thinks L3 is similar to the obvious, especially when it allows L2 to eventually become the settlement layer (i.e. it is cheaper to perform bridging) and ultimately relies on the Ethereum Global Queuing Service to be the final arbiter of settlement.

Helus Labs CEO Mert Mumtaz seemed to agree with Marc Boiron in a March 31 tweet, saying: “L3 is basically a centralized server built on top of other centralized servers (L2s). style server - controlled by multi-signatures. In other words, just re-creating Web2, but with higher fees, more scams, and a worse user experience?"

But Uniswap founder Hayden Adams said on April 1 In a tweet on the day, he refuted Mert Mumtaz’s views. He responded: “L3 is effectively the same as L2, not everything needs the exact same level of decentralization”.

In fact, for L3, Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin shared his vision as early as 2022. At the time, he said L3 would serve different scaling purposes by providing "custom capabilities." L3 on the blockchain only makes sense if it provides different functionality than L3.

It is worth mentioning that Polygon Labs is known for various Ethereum L2 scaling solutions, including Polygon and Polygon zkEVM chains and other services. Polygon zkEVM experienced a brief outage over the weekend but is now back in operation. As Degen Chain gains popularity, the debate over L3 networks continues.

Related reading: Is the Meme token DEGEN released? A quick look at the L3 chain Degen Chain

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