Sonic Labs (previously Fantom) cofounder Andre Cronje believes that builders ought to keep away from utilizing layer 2 (L2) app chains. Appchains are personalized L2 blockchains designed to fulfill an utility’s particular wants.
In an X put up, Cronje listed a number of disadvantages hindering the expansion of appchains. These drawbacks embrace the excessive value of infrastructure, fragmented liquidity, and lack of help for builders.
Cronje famous that appchains lack infrastructure for deploying stablecoins, oracles, and institutional custody. Extra importantly, Cronje mentioned that the price of infrastructure is grossly underestimated.
Based on him, the prices of custody, exchanges, oracles, bridges, and so on. are fairly excessive. Cronje’s group has already spent $14 million on such bills this 12 months, a big a part of which incorporates recurring prices.
Nevertheless, Hilmar Orth, the founding father of Gelato Community, has a distinct opinion. Based on Orth, builders can simply entry infrastructure by rollup-as-a-service suppliers (RaaS). Orth mentioned that RaaS suppliers and framework groups present a lot help to builders, opposite to Cronje’s claims.
Cronje additionally claimed that appchains result in fragmented liquidity compelled onto susceptible bridges.
Marc Boiron, CEO of Polygon Labs, famous that the AggLayer (aggregation layer) may doubtlessly clear up the difficulty by creating an interoperable community of appchains. Polygon’s AggLayer permits sovereign blockchains to share liquidity.
Alternatively, Orth famous that every rollup comes with its personal bridges and market makers. Due to this fact, liquidity is prone to accumulate in a small variety of chains with excessive whole worth locked (TVL). This implies the remaining chains will simply plug into that liquidity based mostly on demand.
Orth added that sooner zero-knowledge (zk) proofs will additional make transferring funds throughout rollups extra seamless.
Neighborhood and community results
Based on Cronje, appchains lack a neighborhood of builders and customers, which in flip “kills network effects.” Boiron, nevertheless, acknowledged that community results can be “alive and well” on the AggLayer, which aggregates customers and liquidity. He wrote:
“So many frens contributing to the AggLayer and all are going to want to help grow the pie.”
Orth, nevertheless, believes that apps are there to compete with one another for customers and are, due to this fact, not associates.
