Author: Blockchain Knight
Rewinding back to the previous market cycle, the Crypto market entered a bull market in 2021, with DeFi, Non-Fungible Token (NFT), and GameFi applications rapidly emerging. At the time, Ethereum's limitations, such as transaction congestion and high fees, were exposed. This provided a breakthrough for the new generation of public chains, leading to the emergence of numerous public chain projects, such as Solana, BNB Chain, Polkadot, Avalanche, and FTM, which attempted to challenge Ethereum's dominant position.
These emerging public chains not only competed in consensus mechanisms, transaction speeds, and scaling solutions, but also engaged in fierce competition to attract developers, build communities, and gain capital favor, which is also known as the "public chain war".
Although the advantages among these chains have been constantly shifting in the short term, this public chain war has not only greatly promoted the progress of blockchain technology, but also made the entire Crypto ecosystem more diversified, laying the groundwork for the rise of subsequent new public chains such as Aptos and Sui.
However, four years after the outbreak of this public chain war, it seems that people can no longer see this prosperity. Over the past few years, only Solana has climbed out of the trough, becoming the new public chain leader with a dominant position. Given the various issues facing Ethereum, Solana has even threatened Ethereum's position, although there is still a gap of around 60% in market capitalization, the market seems to have higher expectations for Solana.
What about the other public chains? We can get an overall understanding through the comparison of market capitalization and current status of several popular public chains back then, as shown in the table below.
It can be seen that currently, Solana and BNB are still relatively strong in terms of market capitalization, with not much difference between them, but other public chains are still "struggling" to climb the hill, including Ethereum.
In the past week, CZ has started to frantically hint that BNB Chain will undergo various transformations and innovations by 2025, and has been tweeting to promote it for several consecutive days. He has also experienced a small peak in the name guessing battle of his pet dog Broccoli, indicating a readiness to challenge Solana's glory of the past year.
Of course, in addition to these established public chains actively promoting themselves, there are also emerging public chains like Sui and Bera striving to catch up. However, it seems that for the current market, people's expectations for public chains are no longer just about faster and better performance, but gradually shifting to whether they can experience truly applicable products. But this path is full of thorns, and without the MEME craze of the past year or so, it is unclear how Solana would have fared.
After all, when it comes to products, no public chain has yet to produce a flagship application, and to create innovative products that meet market demand (PMF) and can be widely sought after, apart from stablecoins and certain DeFi applications, other directions are still lacking, even the once-hot Agent has fallen into a new "death spiral".
Looking at the present, for the operators of public chains, the public chain war is no longer limited to the past era of competing in marketing and rewards, but has become a real battle of product refinement. We can also say that MEME is a form of product, but pure MEME is not a long-term solution, and on-chain PVP will eventually be tiring, so the focus will ultimately have to return to the users (community) and the products themselves.
Therefore, looking back at the public chain war in 2021, we may never return to that summer, but we can hope for a scene similar to the "Hundred Flowers Bloom" of the internet era, where the competition will be about users, operations, and real-world applications, as L2 can also be considered a form of public chain, and the competition may be even greater than we imagine.
Finally, from an investment perspective, some of the logic for selecting public chains still applies, such as Solana's MEME efforts, which other chains can also do, Sui's focus on games, which other chains can also explore, as the market is still large enough, and where there is a wealth effect, there will be users. Only in this way is there a probability of producing products with real-world applicability, as the market believes in the logic of price before product, and this trend is unlikely to change anytime soon, as summer is yet to come.
