Why does OP-Rollup beat ZK-Rollup in developer ecological competition?

Author: Haotian

The competition for Layer 2 to snatch developer resources has intensified. I roughly sorted out a map of the number of Eco projects of the four kings of layer2. It can be seen that the OP-Rollup camp is currently winning over ZK-Rollup in terms of developer resources. **

why? It is certainly an advantage that the two major project parties of OP-rollup have been operating for a long time. However, in the post-coin era, without airdrops, the growth rate of developers is expected to slow down, and the ZK camp, which has no currency issuance, should be more concerned. Is this really the case? ? What have the four kings of Layer 2 done to attract developers? What are their advantages and disadvantages? Let’s briefly analyze:

1. **Arbitrum has the strongest existing ecology, and the number of One+Nova agreements is as high as 598. The ecology of Arbitrum is the most stable in layer2. **Moreover, Arbitrum recently launched the Stylus artifact, and many developers reported that this will further stimulate the expansion of the Arbitrum Orbit ecosystem. Because Stylus' WASM parser allows developers to write smart contracts using Solidity, Rust, C, C++ and other languages, WASM will execute these contracts at a near-native compilation and execution speed and reduce Gas consumption.

(Knowledge point: Since WASM is in binary format, contracts in different languages can be converted into source codes that can be recognized and executed by EVM. During this process, bytecode will be compressed and optimized to reduce resource consumption on the chain. When the original smart contract is compiled into EVM bytecode without these optimization operations).

The launch of Stylus is enough to show the Arbitrum team’s good intentions in bringing in developers. **Although in the post-coin era, without the expectation of airdrops, a layer 2 project will be less attractive to developers, Arbitrum is lowering the threshold for developers. It can be said that a lot of effort has been put into it. **Although the layer3 application chain has not been proven to have greater market potential, and there is a possibility that Arbitrum will be surpassed by OP in the short term, once the layer3 ecosystem is established, the situation will soon be reversed.

2. Although the ecology of Optimism is not as good as that of Arbitrum (473), the success of the OP Stack strategy is well known. With Base, opBNB, Celestia and other top OP Stacks extending the L2 public chain, the large ecological coverage project of its SuperChain in the future is likely to surpass Arbitrum Become No.1**. The first-mover advantage of OP Stack's one-click chain launch will siphon off other layer1 chains and their corresponding ecosystems.

**The cleverness of OP Stack lies in its extremely inclusive and open attitude and low threshold, so that some public chains looking forward to transformation to layer2 have the fastest and low-cost practice. **OP did not deliberately attract developer resources, but developers need a new narrative for Layer 2, and OP Stack just helps. However, the current hugeness of OP-Rollup is due to attracting most of the resources of the existing blockchain ecosystem. Should these chains engage in Layer 2, and what can layer 2 bring? If the one-click link is only adopted for layer 2, its subsequent growth space will be greatly reduced.

3. There are more than 300 zkSync official website projects, but only 87 have been launched on the main network live on era. The situation is similar with Starknet, with 84 projects having been launched on the main network. It can be clearly seen that although zkSync and Starknet of the ZK camp have not issued coins, they can attract and stimulate developer activity through airdrop expectations. But the current progress of the ZK ecology is not ideal.

On the one hand, it is because of the short time. It only took half a year for zkSync to go online on the mainnet, and only about one year for Starknet. Developers need more time to build; on the other hand, the core is still the difficulty of learning professional knowledge of zero-knowledge proof, although they all have The difficulty of development is reduced by the way of zkEVM, but the inherent complexity of the chain is difficult not to affect the development progress of the project.

In my opinion, although everyone says that ZK technology is strong, developers have not stepped out of the established narrative (DeFi), and developers will take it for granted that OP- Rollup solution. **ZK-Rollup technology is ahead of the current narrative, and needs an infra track driven by a more grand narrative, an application track that can fully utilize the original characteristics of ZK transaction throughput, lower gas fees, and lower gas fees. ** Note: The number of each layer2 Eco protocol is taken from their respective official websites. The statistics may not be complete and are for reference only.