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Welcome back to 0xResearch. Here's what we’ve got for you today:

• New tech for cross-chain interoperability

• Analyst Opinion: Why I’m bullish Sui

• Chart: Base increases gas limits

• Listen & Read: Analyst roundup

New tech for cross-chain interoperability

Several teams are making strides to enhance the crypto developer experience, offering advanced tech stacks with the ultimate goal of simplifying the onboarding experience for new users.

OKX has launched OKX OS, an open-source infrastructure suite of tools, SDKs and APIs needed to build applications across a wide range of blockchains, including Ethereum, Bitcoin and Solana.

This new stack allows developers to leverage the same technology that powers the OKX Wallet, and aims to simplify and scale development for 100+ chains, the company announced Monday.

Another new path toward an omnichain user experience is Axelar’s Mobius Development Stack (MDS).

The tech stack, unveiled today, is offered as vendor-agnostic architecture integrated into popular OpenZeppelin libraries.

Axelar’s MDS also marks the mainnet debut of its Interchain Amplifier for permissionless cross-chain connections at the smart-contract layer. The Interchain Amplifier is secured by staked AXL, or restaked assets like ether and bitcoin.

This approach places cross-chain interoperability front and center, spanning diverse L1s including Solana, Stellar and XRP Ledger — without requiring bridges. But it also offers a way to connect off-chain resources, like zk or AI co-processors.

Features such as the Interchain Token Service (ITS) facilitate native cross-chain tokens, with use cases such as tokenizing real-world assets, enhancing liquidity and enabling fractional ownership across different chains.

According to Axelar co-founder Georgios Vlachos, MDS is “empowering developers to build decentralized applications that compose resources, logic, value and network effects freely across a truly global internet landscape.”

OKX and Axelar’s recent launches tie into a broader trend in the Web3 space around improving developer experiences and user onboarding through enhanced infrastructure. 

W3.io, launched in September, is building the Orchestration Cloud, an industry utility that aims to bring the benefits of an orchestration layer — long proven in Web2 environments — into Web3.

Backed by an impressive cadre of crypto builders, W3 functions like an advanced oracle and is designed to string together multiple services to support complex transactions across Web3.

Similar to Axelar’s MDS, W3 also looks to enable developers to build applications that not only function efficiently across blockchains but also integrate off-chain resources.

W3.io can simplify the process of coordinating multiple actions, according to Scott Dykstra, co-founder and CTO at Space and Time.

“The challenge that developers have right now is stringing together a bunch of different services to accomplish very complex onchain tasks,” Dykstra told Blockworks.

For example, it could help a game manage steps such as tracking player achievements, minting NFTs and updating the game server with new data. W3.io acts as middleware that connects off-chain and onchain actions seamlessly.

Together, these technologies point to the creation of a holistic ecosystem where developers can build decentralized applications that are interoperable, scalable and easier to use across the entire Web3 space.

— Macauley Peterson (X: @yeluacaM | Farcaster: @Macauley)

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Why I’m Bullish Sui: Analyst Opinion

Ethereum proved there is value ($300 billion today) in having distributed statefulness that can coordinate transactions between applications, but it is stunted by scaling consensus. Solana has more scale, but also has much more work to do in throughput and consensus (Firedancer partially solves this).

Researchers much smarter than me are bullish on leaderless consensus because it costs more to censor transactions with k leaders vs. one leader. Sui (like Aptos) already has leaderless consensus and higher throughput. The Sui L1 uses a Directed Acyclic Graph design (DAG), a unique construction by which the protocol can order transactions based on sequences of transactions from multiple leaders and achieve consensus. So, in theory, they are (arguably) more censorship-resistant and already have competitive scale, but they have not been battle-tested. 

I’m speculating that DAGs continue to grow as they increasingly get stress-tested. By this point, there would presumably be more network activity, in which case the competition for users is higher. From there, we'll see how the network shifts (i.e. how it confronts MEV or responds to network outages) — which I view as really important determinants for a network's success –- and grows to more than 100 nodes.

Visa is worth $600 billion, and the plan is for a chain like Sui to host something like Visa. That is just one app. Imagine all sorts of other apps, and suddenly we are looking at over $1 trillion of application valuations. Today, my mental model is L1s will capture a portion of the value from the application (e.g. ISPs and data centers capture a portion of the internet’s traffic and value), but even if it’s 5-10% (just spitballing here) of at least $1 trillion, alt L1s still look very attractive.

TL;DR: I think the L1 trade is still on. I find it hard to imagine a world where the L1 competition is Ethereum vs. Solana in perpetuity. DAGs are theoretically promising in terms of scale and consensus, and I bet we'll eventually visit conditions in which we can observe real world results.

— Hayden Tsutsui (X: @magicdhz)

Base increases gas limits:

In pursuit of scalability, Base continues to ramp up gas limits per block. 1 Megagas/s per block will be added weekly, with this week’s increment going from 11 to 12 Mgas/s. Base’s stated goal is to reach 1 Gigagas/s capacity eventually.

L2s drastically increasing gas limits have some subtle, but far-reaching implications for Ethereum’s grand roadmap. As explained on The Rollup podcast by Justin Drake, raising gas limits reduces the baseline profitability accrued from priority transaction fees paid by users, which in turn increases the dependency on centralized sequencer profits (MEV).

Since MEV profits for L2s outweigh transaction fee profits, this may ultimately reduce the incentive for L2s to decentralize its sequencer and enter into a multichain-like shared sequencer arrangement, sometimes referred to in Ethereum research circles as “synchronized composability.”

— Donovan Choy (X: @donovanchoy | Farcaster: @donovan)

Is AI x crypto overhyped? Permissionless is bringing you the highest signal conversations at the nexus of these two nascent technology sectors.

Can Solana outrival NASDAQ?

Marc Arjoon: A centralized machine will always outperform a decentralized cluster of machines. That is Computer Science 101 and just one of the tradeoffs [that comes with] adding more nodes. Anatoly’s argument for latency efficiency with distributed nodes in different geographical locations makes sense. But that same logic applies to a centralized exchange with globally distributed data centers, which do not need consensus. So I can’t see how a blockchain network like Solana can compete [on] the same level as a NASDAQ, though I would love for that to be the case.

Is Sui a credible competitor to Solana?

Danny Knettel: With Sui’s recent traction, I’ve seen calls on Twitter talking about a SUI to SOL rotation. Sui is a fast blockchain but the big question I have for Sui is: Where will the demand for high TPS come from?

Ryan Connor: I’m not worried about oversupply of blockspace. I think you need it. When you provision resources in a traditional data center, you’ll spin up more resources than what you need to prepare for usage spikes because you don’t want the system to go down, which inevitably leads to unused capacity. What the discourse right now misses is that all the chains are going to be fast and it comes down to a BD game to attract good builders to your ecosystem. The technical stuff matters a lot less today than four years ago.

What is the impact of Firedancer?

Danny Knettel: Solana today ranges about 600-1000 TPS. The Firedancer testnet showcased at Breakpoint showed about a TPS of 18000-19000 TPS, which is a 10-20x improvement. If they actually get that significant improvement over the current numbers, that’s a huge win.

Ryan Connor: With that level of improved throughput for Solana, high frequency trading is probably going to be the highest value activity, which represents the biggest use case (DeFi) for blockchains today. You may also have interesting new use cases like micropayments in DeFi and DePIN.

Marc Arjoon: I’m personally excited about Franklin Templeton building a mutual fund on Solana directly. I’ve spoken to funds, and historically, their hesitancy to build on Solana is due to liveness issues, which is becoming less of an issue now with Firedancer as a backup client.

Danny Knettel: When we break down Solana’s DEX volumes, more than 70% of volumes are captured by wallets trading a lifetime value of more than $500k, which is a sign that institutional players do drive a lot of trading volume on Solana, [and will] benefit from Firedancer.

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The insights, views and outlooks presented in the report are not to be taken as financial advice. Blockworks Research analysts are not registered broker/dealers or financial advisors. Blockworks Research analysts may hold assets mentioned in this report, further outlined in the Firm’s Financial Disclosures.