The narratives in Crypto move fast.
Austin Federa, the head of strategy at Solana Foundation wrote on X about a month ago that “Most of the L2-ish things on Solana are better thought of as Network Extensions.” Solana’s main purpose is to enable the network to perform different tasks than other layer-1 networks.
The debate began online between Federa supporters and Ethereum supporters who claimed that Solana had merely rebranded the idea of layer-2s. This is a topic which Solana has often railed against.
Neon EVM has adopted the Ethereum centric platform Solana today. “network extension” title. This move is just one month and half after this term was first used in public.
“Unlike an L2, Neon EVM doesn’t add an extra layer on top of Solana,” Davide Menegaldo is the chief commercial officer of Neon EVM. He told me this in a message. “L2s are built on top of a base Layer 1 blockchain to enhance scalability, they batch transactions before settling on the main chain, and they [fragment] liquidity as well as user experience.”
Menegaldo claims that Neon EVM is not capable of any of the above, and should be viewed as an extension of a network.
Federa said that when I asked him about the term, it was meant as a broad term to replace Ethereum’s centric notions of L2s.
“Neon EVM is not an L2 on Solana, it’s a ‘L1.5′ because it’s its own VM but it can atomically compose with SVM stuff. What do we call that? It’s not a rollup, not an L2… [it’s] a network extension,” Federa sent out a personal message.
Neon isn’t the only company to use this label. Anatoly Yakovenko expressed his support for the label, while MegaETH’s MegaETH Co-Founder said that she also supported the name.
But L2s don’t only belong to Ethereum. Tristan Frizza, founder of Solana’s DeFi platform Zeta, told me that the platform is developing a layer-2 using a sequencer that follows many of the same principles as Ethereum L2 designs.
Frizza believes that Zeta is also on a mission of achieving lower latency, than Solana would be able to allow with 400 ms Block Times. “hesitant” The network extension is a term that has been adopted by the industry.
“I feel like it’s a Solana marketing term for L2s, but idk if there are other apps/chains that are genuinely completely different,” Frizza wrote in a text.
Mert Mumtaz, CEO of Helius, also spoke out against labeling L2-like project on Solana Network Extensions as “so-called”. “too general.”
Instead of debating semantics, the debaters should instead “build something people need so crypto overall can grow the pie…hope this helps,” Mumtaz wrote.
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