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Apple

During a recent podcast interview, Michael Saylor explained that Bitcoin being bought and centralized by corporations should not be feared. He also outlined three main reasons driving the need for custodians.

During a recent podcast interview, MicroStrategy’s Michael Saylor expressed the opinion that large corporations purchasing and then proceeding to centralize Bitcoin (BTC) should not be a cause for concern.

While speaking to Natalie Brunell on the Coin Stories podcast, released on Aug. 7, Saylor emphasized the inevitability of third-party and corporate participation growing in the Bitcoin space.

However, he suggested that while Bitcoin enthusiasts may desire total self-control over their Bitcoin – aka self-sovereignty – it might not be the only answer, as people will be using Bitcoin for diverse purposes.

“We need to be prepared for Bitcoin to infuse everything” Saylor stated, explaining that as Bitcoin becomes more integrated into society, it will have many use cases and there will not be a one-size-fits-all model.

“There are different type of wrappers. Some people will always be self-custody, some will be multi-sig, some will need a layer 3 custodian. There will be a need for political or utility or functionality purposes.”

*Michael Saylor* *speaking to Coin Stories host Natalie Brunell. Source: Coin Stories*

Saylor outlined three main reasons underpinning the need for custodians – technical, political, and natural reasons.

From a political standpoint, relying on a third party might be the only course of action.

“The mayor of New York is still the mayor of New York. Unless you get rid of New York City, California, or Iceland the country, political reasons will mean the need for custodians.”

On a technical note, there will be people that will want to transact crypto with their mobile phones, so trusting layer 3 third parties, such as Bank of America and Apple is going to be unavoidable.

“Bitcoin is going to be a base layer. There is going to be layer 2's like lightning to make things fast. Then there is going to be layer 3's like Bank of America and Apple. Custodial layer 3 is going to exist to provide functionality.”

As for natural reasons, Saylor suggested the possibility that it is safer for certain people to entrust their assets with others.

He gave the example of an 85-year-old grappling with Alzheimer’s, or the desire to secure holdings for a yet-to-be-born grandchild.

“I didn’t complain that my mother and father had the car keys when I was twelve years old, and I didn’t get the car key” Saylor stated.

Saylor stated that the optimal blend of Bitcoin integrations will be determined by the market.

“We shouldn’t be afraid of all the different ways people integrate, wrap, embed or execute with bitcoin, there is no one right answer, the marketplace will determine the right mix of integrations of bitcoin."

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Web3 social media protocol launches ‘layer 3’ to provide instant posts

April 26, 2023 Coin Telegraph

blockchain social media

The new layer relies on Bundlr, a decentralized storage platform built on Arweave, for mass storage of social media data.

The team behind Lens, a Web3 social media protocol, has announced the launch of a new “layer 3” network to scale blockchain social media apps. Called “Bonzai,” the new network processes and stores posts, comments and shares, taking this data off the Polygon network and thereby increasing scalability for Lens, according to an April 26 announcement viewed by Cointelegraph.

Introducing Bonsai, an Optimistic L3 scaling solution, that will process transactions at hyperscale, and is designed to support the next generation of web3 social users.

Available for Lens devs in closed beta today. pic.twitter.com/AaqfikZWxT
— Lens Protocol (@LensProtocol) April 26, 2023

Lens is a blockchain protocol that allows users to form a portable “social graph,” or digital set of connections, between themselves and others. When users form a connection with another person on one Lens app, they can transfer those connections to any other app built on the protocol. There are 17 different Lens-based social media apps listed on the protocol’s official website, including Buttrfly, DumplingTV, Lenster, Lenstube and others.

Lens runs on the Polygon network, a layer 2 of Ethereum.

In a technical document linked to in the announcement, the Lens team stated that the Polygon network cannot handle the transaction volume or data-storage needs of large-scale social media apps, making it necessary for a new “optimistic L3 hyperscaling data solution” to be launched. According to the document, shared blockchain networks can only handle up to 200 transactions per second (TPS), while the previous incarnation of Lens could only handle 40 to 50 TPS. By contrast, it stated that Twitter often does 25,000 TPS during peak periods.

The team anticipated this limitation could prevent the protocol from scaling as its user base grew. To solve this problem, Bonzai launched as a layer 2 of Polygon itself, or an “L3” of the Ethereum network. Bonzai uses Bundlr, a decentralized storage platform built on Arweave, to store large files while storing verification data about them.

According to the technical paper, the Bonzai network consists of three types of nodes: submitters, verifiers and timestamps. Submitters validate transactions, build metadata and submit them to Bundlr. Verifiers monitor the data submitted by submitters and confirm that it is valid. And timestamps determine the proper block number and timestamp for a particular piece of data.

The paper states that this system should “[provide] consumers the experience (instant posts, etc.) they have come to expect from social networks.”

Stani Kulechov, the founder of Lens Protocol, believes Bonzai will be an important step toward spurring mass adoption of Web3 social apps:

“To be competitive with web2, decentralized social must scale. With the ability to support mass consumer adoption, we’ll see continued web3 innovation – new, exciting and compelling features and business models that will spur web3 adoption.”

Several companies in recent years have created decentralized social media protocols, including Lens, Subsocial, DeSo and others. Developers hope these apps will help broaden the appeal of blockchain networks beyond the financial world. While none of them have attained the success of Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and other Web2 social apps, some blockchain experts believe decentralized social media will be the next big thing in crypto.

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Ethereum-scaling protocol zkSync’s layer-3 prototype set for testing in 2023

October 11, 2022 Coin Telegraph

Coin Telegraph

Matter Labs chief product officer Steve Newcomb emphasized to Cointelegraph that the launch of its L3 prototype will significantly improve the performance of its L2 solution.

A new layer-3 (L3) prototype aimed at further solving Ethereum’s scalability issues is set to be deployed for testing as soon as Q1 2023.

zkSync, a provider of zero-knowledge blockchain solutions on Oct. 10 announced it is aiming to deploy a new EVM-compatible layer-3 prototype called “Pathfinder” on testnet early next year.

zkSync is a L2 Ethereum scaling protocol designed to bring down network usage costs. It launched a 1.0 version back in June 2020, and is now gearing up for the launch of zkSync 2.0 later this month.

In its most recent blog post the team explained that the L3 Pathfinder will be a “prototype demonstrating a ZK rollup as a fractal Hyperchain in Layer 3.” It will use recursive scaling.

“It will serve as a foundation for public experimentation, research, and development of Layer 3,” the post read.

With 18 days to zkSync 2.0 on mainnet, we're thrilled to share another exciting milestone on the horizon: zkSync's Layer 3 Pathfinder will be released to the public testnet in Q1 2023.https://t.co/7HnibHn2dX

(1/6)
— zkSync (@zksync) October 10, 2022

They stated that while Layer 2 will see a 10X–100X performance increase, "in Layer 3 performance is limitless."

The zkSync team has outlined that it is aiming to build an L3 “ecosystem of customizable and trustlessly linked blockchains powered by zkEVM that we refer to as ‘HyperChains’.”

The team is touting that its L3 prototype will provide a series of opportunities to significantly improve different areas of blockchain performance such as scaling, customization and security.

It also adds to zkSync’s upcoming EVM compatible L2 network (version 2.0) which is slated to launch on Oct. 28.

Speaking with Cointelegraph, Steve Newcomb, the Chief Product Officer of Matter Labs — the engineering team behind zkSync — said that the team is eyeing some serious scalability with its L3 solution:

“[Our] L2 solution is going to be 10x to 100x at the max at L2, but it's L3 where we have like a star cluster of 10x moments where we make it faster, cheaper, more usable.”

“That's where the game is going to be had [L3] and you know, the reason why people should see us differently than Polygon really is all about by the time they get around to getting that L2 solution, which is much less performant than us,” he added.

Newcomb noted that after zkSyncs L2 mainnet launches later this month, there will be a testing period of roughly a month before decentralized applications (dApps) launch. The team expects there to be around 150 projects ready at launch.

In terms of the L3 solution adding to the L2, zkSync has noted that the team is looking to “aggressively experiment” with it to ascertain its supposed performance-enhancing potential.

The five key areas the project is looking at is performance, cost, ease of use and composability.

“Developers will be able to choose from 3 data availability options all using the same proving infrastructure for their project. Developers can choose their own trade-offs between price, performance, and security,” the post reads.

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin shares vision for layer-3 protocols

September 20, 2022 Coin Telegraph

Coin Telegraph

While layer-2 protocols have been focused on “scalability,” layer-3 protocols would serve a much different purpose, says Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin.

While Ethereum-based layer-2 solutions have been focused on hyperscaling the network, Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin believes layer 3s will serve a far different purpose — providing “customized functionality.”

Buterin shared his thoughts in a Saturday post, providing three “visions” of what layer 3s will be used for in the future.

The Ethereum co-founder said a third layer on the blockchain makes sense only if it provides a different function to layer 2s, which have been used mainly to enhance scaling via zero-knowledge (zk) Rollup technology:

“A three-layer scaling architecture that consists of stacking the same scaling scheme on top of itself generally does not work well. Rollups on top of rollups, where the two layers of rollups use the same technology, certainly do not.”

But, “a three-layer architecture where the second layer and third layer have different purposes, however, can work,” said Buterin.

One of layer 3’s use cases would be what Buterin describes as “customized functionality” — referencing privacy-based applications which would utilize zk proofs to submit privacy-preserving transactions to layer 2.

Another use case would be “customized scaling” for specialized applications that don’t want to use the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) to do computation.

Buterin also said that layer 3 could be used for “weakly-trusted” scaling through Validiums, a zk-proof technology. Buterin said this may be beneficial for “enterprise blockchain” applications by using “a centralized server that runs a validium prover and regularly commits hashes to chain.”

But, Buterin added that it’s still unclear whether layer-3 structures will be more efficient than the current layer-2 model when it comes to building customized applications on Ethereum.

*Layer-2 Vs Layer-3 Network Architecture. Source:* *StarkWare.*

“One possible argument for the three-layer model over the two-layer model is: a three-layer model allows an entire sub-ecosystem to exist within a single rollup, which allows cross-domain operations within that ecosystem to happen very cheaply, without needing to go through the expensive layer 1,” Buterin said.

But, Buterin said that because cross-chain transactions can be executed easily and cheaply between two layer 2s that have committed to the same chain, building layer 3s may not necessarily improve the efficiency of the network.

Buterin’s comments on possible layer 3 use cases come as StarkWare’s newly produced recursive validity proofs appear to have possibly put an end to Ethereum’s scalability concerns.

Declan Fox, the product manager at Ethereum software firm ConsenSys, recently told Cointelegraph that “with recursive rollups and proofs, we theoretically can infinitely scale.”

These recursive proofs have been well tested in production, with StarkWare co-founder Eli-Ben Sasson recently telling Cointelegraph that its recursive proofs have rolled up as many as 600,000 nonfungible token mints in a single transaction on Immutable X and that 60 million transactions could soon be on the cards “with more engineering and tweaking.”

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