Sonic Labs founder argues L2s as appchains are not logical for builders

Andre Cronje, co-founder of Sonic Labs (previously Fantom), believes that builders ought to keep away from utilizing Layer 2 (L2) app chains. Appchains are customized L2 blockchains designed to fulfill the precise wants of an utility.

In an X-post, Cronje listed a number of disadvantages that hinder the expansion of app chains. These disadvantages embrace the excessive value of infrastructure, fragmented liquidity, and lack of developer help.

Cronje famous that appchains lack infrastructure for deploying stablecoins, oracles, and institutional custody. Extra importantly, Cronje mentioned the price of infrastructure is grossly underestimated.

In accordance with him, the prices of custody, exchanges, oracles, bridges, and many others. are fairly excessive. Cronje’s staff has already spent $14 million on such bills this 12 months, a lot of which incorporates recurring prices.

Nonetheless, Hilmar Orth, the founding father of Gelato Community, has a special opinion. In accordance with Orth, builders can simply entry the infrastructure by rollup-as-a-service suppliers (RaaS). Orth mentioned that RaaS suppliers and framework groups present lots of help to builders, opposite to Cronje’s claims.

Cronje additionally claimed that app chains result in fragmented liquidity that’s compelled onto susceptible bridges.

Marc Boiron, CEO of Polygon Labs, famous that the AggLayer (aggregation layer) may probably clear up the issue by creating an interoperable community of app chains. Polygon’s AggLayer allows sovereign blockchains to share liquidity.

Then again, Orth famous that every replace has its personal bridges and market makers. Due to this fact, liquidity is prone to accumulate in a small variety of chains with excessive whole worth (TVL). Which means the remaining chains will solely use that liquidity based mostly on demand.

Orth added that quicker zero-knowledge (zk) proofs will additional make shifting cash throughout rollups seamless.

Neighborhood and community results

In accordance with Cronje, app chains lack a group of builders and customers, which in flip “kills community results.” Nonetheless, Boiron acknowledged that community results can be “alive and nicely” on the AggLayer, which merges customers and liquidity. He wrote:

“There are such a lot of individuals contributing to the AggLayer they usually all need to assist develop the pie.”

Nonetheless, Orth believes that apps exist to compete with one another for customers and are subsequently not mates.