Andre Cronje, co-founder of Sonic Labs (previously Fantom), believes that builders ought to keep away from utilizing layer 2 (L2) utility chains. Appchains are customized L2 blockchains designed to fulfill the precise wants of an utility.
In an article X, Cronje listed a number of disadvantages hindering the expansion of appchains. These disadvantages embrace the excessive price of infrastructure, fragmentation of liquidity and lack of help for builders.
Cronje famous that functions lack the infrastructure to deploy stablecoins, oracles, and institutional custody. Extra importantly, Cronje mentioned the price of infrastructure is vastly underestimated.
In line with him, the prices of custody, exchanges, oracles, bridges, and so forth. are fairly excessive. Cronje's crew has already spent $14 million on such bills this 12 months, a lot of which incorporates recurring prices.
Nevertheless, Hilmar Orth, the founding father of Gelato Community, has a distinct opinion. In line with Orth, builders can simply entry infrastructure by means of rollup-as-a-service (RaaS) suppliers. Orth mentioned RaaS suppliers and framework groups present a number of help to builders, opposite to Cronje's claims.
Cronje additionally claimed that appchains result in fragmented liquidity compelled onto weak bridges.
Marc Boiron, CEO of Polygon Labs, famous that the AggLayer (aggregation layer) might probably remedy the issue by creating an interoperable community of utility chains. Polygon's AggLayer allows sovereign blockchains to share liquidity.
However, Orth famous that every rollup comes with its personal bridges and market makers. Due to this fact, liquidity is prone to accumulate in a small variety of chains with excessive whole worth locked (TVL). Which means that the remaining chains will merely hook up with this liquidity primarily based on demand.
Orth added that quicker zero-knowledge (zk) proofs will make transfers of funds between rollups even smoother.
Neighborhood and community results
In line with Cronje, apps lack a group of builders and customers, which “kills community results.” Boiron mentioned, nonetheless, that community results can be “very a lot alive” on the AggLayer, which aggregates customers and liquidity. He wrote:
“So many frens are contributing to the AggLayer and all will need to assist make the pie greater.”
Orth believes, nonetheless, that the functions are there to compete with one another for customers and are subsequently not mates.