What impact will the launches of exclusive chains by Strip, Circle, and Tether have on Ethereum and L2?

With Strip, Circle, and Tether successively launching their own exclusive chains, here are two viewpoints:

  1. Impact on Ethereum layer 2:

Layer 2 solutions are collectively striving to find ways to inherit the security of the mainnet more safely, yet they overlook a fact: the core demand from major clients like Strip, Circle, and Tether, which can truly bring mass adoption opportunities to L2s, is not decentralized security, but rather full control from minting to settlement.

Moreover, the commercial interests of Sequencer revenue, MEV, and Gas fees, which can all be pocketed, make it unreasonable to share a piece of the pie with L2. More importantly, when regulatory inquiries or urgent "compliance" issues arise, having a dedicated chain can clearly meet the risk control requirements of TradFi more quickly and efficiently.

So this is definitely another blow to Ethereum's layer 2 strategy. L2 was originally counting on introducing real users and transaction volume through stablecoins and RWA assets, but the issuers of these assets have directly bypassed them. Ironically, it seems that the more "orthodox" L2 is technically, the less commercially attractive it becomes, because these technological innovations seem to address the concerns of the Ethereum community, but do not solve the pain points of stablecoin issuers.

  1. Impact on the Ethereum mainnet:

The impact on the Ethereum mainnet depends on the perspective from which it is viewed. In my opinion, the stablecoin giants building dedicated chains are actually creating an efficient payment settlement layer, which solidifies Ethereum's status as the global financial settlement layer. These dedicated chains can indeed optimize the throughput and latency of peer-to-peer payments, but they lack true interoperability. When it comes to complex financial operations across assets, the required atomicity and composability can only be achieved within Ethereum's unified state machine.

The key is that innovation in the DeFi derivatives market relies on permissionless liquidity aggregation. For example, the Hook mechanism of Uniswap V4, cross-pool risk management of Aave, and the synthetic asset model of GMX all require access to multi-source liquidity, which clearly cannot generate synergies on closed stablecoin chains, and naturally, cannot showcase the innovative appeal of an infrastructure-less DeFi.

Therefore, Ethereum will ultimately play a dual role: both as a neutral settlement layer between these dedicated chains (similar to the clearing functions of SWIFT), and as a foundational layer for DeFi innovation (providing the composability of complex financial products).

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