Robin Hood building its own Ethereum Layer 2 extension reminds me of the blockchain constructions by various major exchanges.
Among these, the well-known ones include Binance's BSC, Coinbase's BASE, Uniswap's Unichain, OK's X1, Kraken's Ink, HashKey's HashKey Chain......
These chains are all EVM chains, with BSC being an independent Layer 1 blockchain, while the others are Ethereum Layer 2 extensions.
If we include Layer 2 extensions without exchange backgrounds, there are even more, with Optimism and Arbitrum being relatively well-known.
Despite the numerous chains, most of them have not formed an impressive ecosystem so far.
Among all these Layer 2 extensions, according to l2beat (https://l2beat.com/scaling/activity), in terms of Value Secured, Arbitrum ranks first, followed by BASE; in terms of Activity, BASE leads, with Arbitrum in second place.
On these two indicators, these two are far ahead of other Layer 2 extensions, with BASE almost leading in activity.
What application caused BASE to be more active than Arbitrum despite lagging in fund retention?
I couldn't find relevant data online, but in my perception, the AI + Crypto ecosystem might occupy a significant proportion in BASE.
I often wonder why this most promising innovative ecosystem of AI + Crypto in the current market is happening on BASE, a chain that neither issued its token nor launched late?
What is special about BASE? Or what are the shortcomings of other chains?
When Optimism and Arbitrum were fiercely competing, I was less optimistic about Optimism and more favorable towards Arbitrum.
The reason was that I felt Optimism showed too much artificial crafting. This team likes to take the upper route, especially valuing collaborations with well-known projects. To bring Uniswap into its ecosystem, they even offered some extra preferential conditions. Such a development approach finds it difficult to attract "wild", native projects, and disruptive applications often grow from these "wild", native projects.
So I easily understand why AI + Crypto did not appear on OP.
Arbitrum is different, maintaining an open collaborative attitude towards all projects without particularly favoring or biasing towards well-known projects. Therefore, I was more optimistic about it. However, over the years, only the DeFi ecosystem seems to have flourished on Arbitrum, without other new applications and models.
Some say BASE's ecosystem is prosperous and active mainly because Coinbase diverted its ecosystem to BASE and has compliance advantages.
I'm skeptical about this explanation.
If it's about diversion, Binance's BSC would be far stronger than Coinbase. Binance not only diverts but also uses its strong financial and channel advantages to support various projects it favors, and indeed has supported some AI projects.
However, until now, it doesn't seem to have formed a scalable AI + Crypto ecosystem.
Take Creator.bid as an example. It was initially born on BSC, but its ecosystem's development and growth eventually moved to BASE.
As for compliance, I think it's even less of an advantage. Because many applications may inherently carry disruptive elements when first appearing, and these disruptive elements are more likely to be non-compliant. Therefore, for a potentially non-compliant project to find a more suitable development ecosystem, I believe the best platforms worldwide are the Ethereum mainnet or secondarily BSC, not BASE.
Interestingly, Virtual, the current largest AI + Crypto platform on BASE, seems to be consistently avoided by Coinbase. One obvious point is that Virtual has not yet been listed on Coinbase's trading platform. Many users are quite puzzled by this move and have directly criticized the co-founder on Twitter.
So how does one see other chains as more likely to develop the AI + Crypto ecosystem?
If comparing BASE and Arbitrum, I feel BASE is more zen-like and has a more geeky atmosphere.
If comparing BASE and BSC, I feel BASE has less of a commercial flavor.
Perhaps this non-interventionist approach has provided the most comfortable and pleasant external environment for ecosystem development.
