The future of the industry and public chains remains undecided.
Looking back at the previous market trend, the biggest gameplay can be summarized as PVP. PVP here, PVP there, PVP on any chain with some heat and narrative.
As time enters 2025, these chains have already entered the stage of stock competition - from the battle for the "Ethereum killer" title a few years ago to most chains now being labeled as "not even worth using by dogs", the remaining ones are also struggling to solve their survival issues.
Not only are the P warriors engaged in PVP, these chains are also PVPing. It seems that each chain wants to replicate Solana's excitement, but no matter how they try, they can't reproduce Solana's MEME landscape.
Different environments nurture different people; a public chain might only be able to do one thing. Each surviving public chain has been silently labeled with a purpose.
Recently, an overseas news and research institution Syndica (@Syndica_io) released a March L1/L2 data insight report, which made this sense of destiny more concrete through numbers:
· 72% of Solana's transactions are related to decentralized exchange platforms (DEX), which obviously matches your impression.
· Base has 51% of transactions for token transfers;
· ETH has nearly 40% of transactions for cross-chain transfers (purple column in the image)
Delphi Digital's research director @ceterispar1bus directly pointed out the essence when facing this data:
Solana is for trading, Base is for Coinbase's USDC accounting, Ethereum is for cross-chain asset transfer
At this stage of the industry, projects are no longer simply technical competitions, but finding their own "anchor point" - a natural and reasonable purpose positioning.
It's an identity label, and more of a destiny
On the surface, the purpose of public chains seems to be chosen by users and the market; but thinking deeper, this is more like a result "secretly priced" by resource endowments and backgrounds.
To summarize the identity labels of these three public chains:
Solana is a trading hotspot, Base has become Coinbase's "accountant", Ethereum is hijacked by bridges, with assets accelerating outflow. Behind the current state of each chain, there are both technical and non-technical driving forces.
[The translation continues in the same manner for the rest of the text...]Accepting Fate, Finding Anchors
The public chain competition in 2025 is no longer the heated battle of a hundred chains, but a calm game of existing resources. The survival path of public chains ultimately boils down to "accepting fate and finding anchors". Transactions can be anchors, the circulation of stablecoins can be anchors, and even cross-chain can be. However, the solidification of "anchors" also means that the imaginative space of public chains is being compressed.
Can Solana shed the label of a "MEME casino"? Can Base break out of the "bookkeeper" framework? Can Ethereum break through from being a "transit station"? These questions have no answers. More ironically, most young players do not care about these questions.
They go to whichever chain has heat to "beat the dog", and whichever chain has arbitrage opportunities to "fleece the sheep". The public chain competition is actually just the background board behind every passerby eager to cash out and dreaming of hundredfold returns. Perhaps, only the arrival of the next cycle will truly answer—who can bring in incremental users, who can find a new "anchor".
The future of the industry, the future of public chains, remains undecided.
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