l2beat

Ethereum Layer 2 data platform L2BEAT announced its rebranding to ETHBEAT. The team stated that their work has clearly exceeded the scope of Layer 2, and the new name aligns with their new mission. The name change does not signify a abandonment of Layer 2 coverage; relevant monitoring will continue, but Layer 2 will no longer be the sole focus. The current emphasis is on confirming whether systems built on Ethereum truly deliver the assurances of Ethereum to users.L2BEAT was launched over five years ago, with the initial goal of organizing the rapidly developing Ethereum Layer 2 at that time. The team tracked adoption through dashboards, starting with total locked value, later adjusting to total assurance value, and expanding to data such as activity levels; they also reviewed the source code of deployed smart contracts to assess whether these systems inherit Ethereum's security guarantees.ETHBEAT will bring its existing transparency and review methods to a broader Ethereum ecosystem and collaborate with other Ethereum organizations. Layer 2 remains one of the core areas, alongside privacy and the upcoming liquid staking, while cross-chain interoperability, tokens, zero-knowledge proofs, native Rollups, and foundational layer changes will also continue to be tracked. The team also launched the CROPS guide, which includes projects that meet principles of anti-censorship, open-source, privacy, and security. Its mission is to help users understand and reduce reliance on intermediaries, clarifying whom users must trust, what these entities can do, and whether users can still exit after other participants withdraw.

According to L2BEAT analysis, users of the Ethereum Layer 2 network Scroll were overcharged more than $50,000 in transaction fees within about four days last week. The reason is that the Scroll team manually adjusted two rate multipliers in their Gas price oracle six times within six days, increasing each by 2 to 10 times, cumulatively raising the L1 data cost parameter to 1,280 times the original benchmark.Approximately 139,000 affected transactions originally had a total cost of only about $280, but were actually charged over $50,000, with automated bots accounting for the vast majority. L2BEAT pointed out that the overcharging was not an issue with the sequencer, but rather stemmed from the team's multiplier adjustments executed through a multi-signature wallet. This incident has raised questions about whether Scroll had previously subsidized users with rates below cost to maintain activity. According to DeFiLlama data, Scroll currently has a TVL of only $24 million, down 96% from its peak of $585 million in October 2024. As of the time of publication, Scroll has not publicly responded.

ChainCatcher news, Ethereum co-founder Vitalik published an article titled "Making Ethereum's Alignment Visible," discussing how to balance Ethereum client teams, researchers, Layer 2 teams, application developers, and local community groups to ensure that all these projects collectively build a unified Ethereum ecosystem, introducing the concept of "Ethereum alignment."This can include value alignment (e.g., open source, minimizing centralization, supporting public goods), technical alignment (e.g., adopting ecosystem-wide standards), and economic alignment (e.g., using ETH as a token as much as possible). Vitalik analyzes from the perspectives of open source, open standards, decentralization and security, and positive-sum outcomes, with the ideal goal of seeing more entities like L2beat emerge to track various projects' performance in meeting the above standards and other standards proposed by the community. Instead of competing for connections, projects should compete on alignment based on easily understandable standards."Dashboard organizations" like L2beat, block explorers, and other ecosystem monitoring tools are a great example of this principle successfully operating within the Ethereum ecosystem. If the different aspects of alignment can be made clearer without focusing on a single "overseer," this concept can be made more effective and better serve the fairness and inclusivity that the Ethereum ecosystem strives for.

ChainCatcher news, the open-source L2 data analysis website L2BEAT has introduced a risk framework aimed at assessing the security of data availability (DA) solutions.From the perspective of Ethereum, the security assumptions of external DA providers depend not only on the intrinsic characteristics of the DA solution itself but also on how its security attributes map to the data proofs of the DA bridge published on Ethereum.The category of fraud detection mechanisms measures the effectiveness of user self-protection in the face of a malicious majority of committee members (such as validators); proof security assesses the ability of the DA bridge to validate data commitments without introducing additional trust assumptions. The exit window criteria examine the upgradability of the DA bridge, with a particular focus on the withdrawal mechanism and the time allowed for users to exit during upgrades.

ChainCatcher news, L2BEAT data shows that the current Ethereum Layer2 TVL is $38.37 billion, with a 7-day decrease of 1.11%. The top five TVLs are as follows:Arbitrum One TVL is $15.91 billion, with a 7-day decrease of 4.17%;OP Mainnet TVL is $7 billion, with a 7-day increase of 7.14%;Base TVL is $5.41 billion, with a 7-day decrease of 2.42%;Blast TVL is $2.57 billion, with a 7-day decrease of 2.81%;Mantle TVL is $1.18 billion, with a 7-day decrease of 6.56%.

ChainCatcher news, March 14, L2BEAT data shows that the total locked value (TVL) of Ethereum Layer 2 has increased to $39.38 billion, with a 7-day growth rate of over 6%, setting a new historical high.The top three in locked value are: Arbitrum One TVL at $16.2 billion, OP Mainnet TVL at $9.33 billion, and Blast TVL at $2.94 billion.

ChainCatcher news, the open-source, public analysis and research platform for L2 scaling solutions, L2BEAT, has released the Blast security report.The report states that Blast is a Stage 0 Optimistic Rollup based on the OP Stack. Its core feature, which also distinguishes it from other Rollups, is that their investment policy is to keep assets in bridge custody to generate additional returns. This is achieved by using tokens deposited in the L1 bridge across various investment strategies. This means that users now face the risks associated with these investments. If everyone wishes to withdraw their funds immediately, Blast may not be able to meet the demand.It is worth noting that, although the current investment strategies appear to be very conservative and safe, the Blast team has no restrictions on how these assets can be used. This means they could be allocated to other high-risk strategies or potentially abused by malicious actors, leading to the risk of users losing their funds.

ChainCatcher news, DWF Labs partner Andrei Grachev posted on X that DWF Labs has just launched a new donation program, primarily aimed at projects in the L1/L2/Ecos space, designed to provide support to project founders.

ChainCatcher news, Polygon Labs officially tweeted to congratulate the launch of the ZKFair mainnet. As the first Polygon CDK chain recognized by Polygon, ZKFair went live on the mainnet on December 20 and was quickly listed by the Ethereum Layer 2 data platform L2Beat.In addition, ZKFair's audit report was also released yesterday, further enhancing the project's credibility and security through audits by several well-known global auditing firms. As the first Polygon CDK chain to launch a mainnet, ZKFair will further collaborate with partners such as Polygon, Celestia, and Lumoz in the future.ZKFair is the first L2 network based on Polygon ZK and Celestial DA, supported by computing power from Lumoz. Based on the concept of fair launch, it airdrops 100% of its tokens, making it a completely community-driven L2 network. ZKFair is expected to launch a $3 million Gas Fee Airdrop event on December 23 at 11 AM.

ChainCatcher news, Layer2 technology research and data website L2BEAT announced the launch of the Build Your Own Rollup (BYOR) tool.It is reported that BYOR is a simplified version of a sovereign Rollup, making the code easy to read and understand. BYOR is currently deployed on the Holesky testnet, and its functionalities include fee sorting, sending and retrieving state to and from L1, deleting invalid transactions, viewing account balances, sending transactions, and checking transaction statuses.Compared to Optimistic and ZK rollups, sovereign Rollup does not validate the state root on Ethereum, relying solely on it for data availability and consensus. This prevents trust-minimized bridging between L1 and BYOR, while significantly simplifying the code. The BYOR codebase consists of three programs: smart contracts, nodes, and wallets, which, when deployed together, allow end users to interact with the network.

ChainCatcher news, Optimism announced the voting results of RetroPGF 2, which will distribute 195 grants to individuals and projects, totaling 10 million OP. The median OP received by RetroPGF 2 projects was 22,825, while the top 10% of projects will receive over 140,000 OP, with funds evenly distributed among three categories: education, infrastructure, and tools and utilities.In the education category, 70 individuals or projects were funded, with the top three recipients being L2Beat, ETHGlobal, and BuidlGuidl; the infrastructure category funded 43 projects, with the top three recipients being Protocol Guild, geth, and Solidity; the tools and utilities category funded 82 projects, with the top three recipients being OpenZeppelin, DefiLlama, and wagmi. (source link)

ChainCatcher news, the Layer2 data platform L2BEAT has launched the cross-chain bridge dashboard L2BEAT Bridges, which is a dashboard for displaying cross-chain data between Ethereum and other chains. (source link)