I just mentioned in the article the day before yesterday that I now feel a sense of fatigue whenever I see a project wanting to create a new Layer 1 blockchain (L1). Today, I came across this news online:

The once well-known Layer 1 blockchain Kadena recently announced the cessation of its project. Of course, this cessation does not mean that the blockchain itself has completely shut down, but rather that the team will no longer be responsible for its maintenance.

I looked up the historical information of this public chain online.

In 2017, the project completed an initial round of financing, raising about $15 million.

In 2019, it completed another round of financing, raising $20 million, with participating companies including Multicoin Capital and 1confirmation.

In 2020, it conducted a final strategic financing round, raising $30 million.

In November 2020, the project successfully launched.

A public chain that raised over $60 million has inadvertently fallen after years of refinement.

Seeing this historical data, I suddenly became curious: what is the status of other public chains that launched around the same time?

So, I went to https://defillama.com/chains to check the TVL data of all chains (including Layer 1 expansions and Layer 2 expansions).

The reason for checking TVL is that it is a barely acceptable indicator for judging whether a blockchain ecosystem is active.

If we take $100 million as the standard, only 45 blockchains on defillama have reached or exceeded this standard. Among these 45 blockchains, only 19 are Layer 1 public chains that support smart contracts:

Ethereum, Solana, BSC, Tron, Hyperliquid, SUI, AVAX, Aptos, SEI, Berachain, Cardano, Movement, Hydration, Sonic, Provenance, Flare, dYdX, Stellar, TON.

Among these 19 Layer 1 public chains, I believe that no more than 10 are commonly known and frequently mentioned in ecosystem news. Even among these 10, I estimate that at least half are being propped up by the project parties or investors to maintain their TVL. If the ecosystem were built purely on market forces, some of these 10 would likely be delisted.

Therefore, I estimate that ultimately, no more than 5 of these 19 public chains will be able to establish themselves and develop a strong ecosystem in the crypto space.

In fact, this situation is not limited to Layer 1 blockchains; Layer 2 expansions are in the same situation.

I checked the current status of L2s on https://l2beat.com/scaling/summary. Only 14 have a TVL of $100 million or more, and we only frequently hear ecosystem news about 3 of them: Arbitrum, Base, and OP.

So, for those projects that are still building chains (including L1 and L2), I estimate that most of them will likely repeat the fate of KDA in the future.

However, this seems to do nothing to dampen the enthusiasm of project teams for building chains. The biggest reason for this, I suspect, is not necessarily a genuine need, but rather that the grand narrative of "blockchain" can attract venture capital and demand a certain amount of funding.

For general venture capitalists, since it is a crypto project, it seems insufficiently "authentic" or not enough for promotion if it is just about creating "applications" without a "blockchain"?

Thus, these two parties perfectly align, maintaining a high level of enthusiasm and interest in building chains.

But in reality, the current crypto ecosystem does not lack "chains"; it lacks specific applications and the ecosystems supported by these applications.

So, what applications can currently attract attention and support the ecosystem in the crypto space?

Recently, there was a joke online saying that Solana is the stronghold of meme coins in this market cycle, but recently this stronghold has been overshadowed by BSC, as BSC has seen the emergence of some highly popular meme coins.

I do not dislike meme coins, but if the entire crypto ecosystem relies solely on applications that have emotional value but no application value to attract attention and maintain TVL in the long term, then there is a problem with this ecosystem.

I still optimistically believe that this is just a temporary issue for the crypto ecosystem; it is certainly not the future of the crypto ecosystem.

But I truly hope that this temporary situation does not last too long and that the crypto ecosystem can once again experience moments like the past DeFi or NFT boom in terms of applications.

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