L2 on Kadena?
One of the most most anticipated events this week has been the airdrop announcement of $ARB, the Arbitrum L2 governance token. Assuming that many of you are probably asking yourself “Why Kadena doesn’t have an L2” or “Does Kadena need an L2” we thought this is a great opportunity to dig into this topic.
What is a L2 (layer-2)
Without getting into too much technical details, you should know it’s a separate blockchain solution able to process thousands of transactions, which are then saved on the layer-1 blockchain, so they’re irreversible.
What is Rollup
Rollup describe a layer-2 scaling solution that packages multiple transactions into one that gets saved on the layer-1 blockchain, inheriting the security provided by that blockchain. There are different types of rollups, optimistic, zk, but we won’t mention any details, you can easily find out more with a few searches on Google or asking Chat-GPT ;)
L2 and Kadena
As we all know, Kadena is the only scalable PoW blockchain in existence, so it’s fair to ask why are we even talking about L2s. We, as builders on Kadena and at the same time simple users, have experienced both its positives and negatives and we believe an L2 could tremendously improve the overall user experience. Couple of things come to mind here: having transactions confirmed virtually instantaneous and not having to deal with the multi-chain architecture (both as a user and builder).
Here’s a diagram of how an L2 (or more) would fit into the multi-chain Kadena architecture:
L2s can be spread among any of the Kadena chains which ensures low gas fees and they will inherit Kadena’s battle-tested PoW security. Any Dapp can then be deployed on an L2 and majority of users will end up only interacting with L2s. In comparison, all Ethereum L2s settle on Ethereum Mainnet and as the usage and number of L2s grow, so will the gas fees on them.
Eventually the experience unlocked by smart-contract wallets and L2 will be similar to Web2 and even though there’s lots of hard work to get there we’re beyond excited just thinking about it.
I hope this short writing serves as a starting point to imagine what’s possible and what future might look like for you as a builder on Kadena or for you as a blockchain user and even if we doubt the stock market we’ll ever be settled on Kadena, we’re confident we’ll see it evolve into a true L2 settlement layer.
Radu
