The new battle of Layer2, the new approach of the star project Metis

This article is an original piece by Chain Catcher, authored by Echo and edited by Gu Yu.

1. The Popularity of Layer 2 Testnets

Layer 2 is one of the most notable tracks in this year's DeFi market, and its development landscape has already taken shape, with Layer 2 protocols like Polygon and Arbitrum recognized as leaders in the field.

However, the ecosystem based on Layer 2 still has significant room for explosive growth, with many vertical tracks in the development of Layer 2 still in their infancy, especially in the DAO direction. DAO organizations often have high performance requirements for blockchain, and the congestion on Ethereum leads to high operational costs for DAO organizations. Layer 2 can effectively address this issue, pushing DAO organizations towards broader development opportunities.

Recently, the Layer 2 DAO foundational protocol Metis announced the launch of its alpha test network, along with a proof-of-concept DApp called Prologue developed by community members based on Metis Rollup.

On April 21, the Metis community held its first NFT artwork event "Rebuilding Babel Tower," completed collaboratively by community members. Participants could qualify for this NFT airdrop by claiming blind boxes and registering with the community, with a limited airdrop of 2,000 NFTs available for claiming once the quota was reached. The NFT will later be auctioned on OpenSea. Users who missed this airdrop can fill out a form on its official Twitter to become a backup member for the airdrop. The Metis official blog announced that they are trying to schedule the new minting event for the Tower of Babel before April 25.

From the data perspective, as of April 20, the number of registered users on the Metis testnet reached 2,648, with 1,088 DACs established. The next day, the number of registered users quickly doubled to 4,300, establishing 2,334 DACs. Furthermore, the first NFT airdrop event exceeded expectations, with the Metis official stating that the event was originally planned for five days, but due to high demand, it was completed in just over 90 minutes. Weibo users also reported that by the time they prepared to participate in the Metis NFT minting event that evening, they had already become backup members.

Previously, the number of sign-ups for the Metis global ambassador program far exceeded the official limit of 30. The Metis official website has not yet announced the launch date, but the Metis project team previously stated that the alpha testnet will serve as the final "rehearsal" before the mainnet launch. The success of the NFT airdrop event and the smooth launch of the testnet have clearly garnered enthusiastic feedback from the market, and following the testnet, the Metis mainnet is expected to take over the heat and launch soon.

2. Innovations of Metis

Metis is an open framework built on Layer 2 protocols for the creation, management, and development of decentralized autonomous companies (DACs). Metis enables current centralized organizations, such as internet projects and communities, to build their DACs on the blockchain, quickly launch DApps, and manage collaboration among community members and data computation layers using blockchain-based tools.

Metis CEO Elena pointed out that emerging DApps are not suitable for development, management, and popularization under traditional company organizational structures; a decentralized collaborative management approach must be adopted. The current DAO format, which is still limited to proposals and voting, clearly cannot meet the needs for effective collaboration and operational development of decentralized applications in a trust-deficient decentralized environment. This is her profound realization after years of leading global community activities for CryptoChicks, the world's largest female blockchain community. In simple terms, DAOs urgently need innovation to meet the broader market demands of the future.

DAOs are decentralized autonomous organizations that operate on the blockchain and grant decision-making power to stakeholders. DAOs use smart contracts to achieve autonomy, differing from traditional top-down power structures. They utilize Web 3.0 technology and rapidly evolving governance and incentive systems to allocate decision-making power and rewards, typically by issuing tokens based on participation, contribution, and investment. Token holders then have the ability to submit proposals, vote, and share in profits.

DACs, on the other hand, represent Metis's innovation on the DAO concept, referring to decentralized companies. Each DApp is a decentralized company DAC composed of community members and stakeholders who collaborate across domains in a distributed manner to achieve specific missions. DACs are a subset of DAOs, but unlike DAOs, DACs care not only about governance but also about management. The introduction of DACs is an upgrade and optimization of the existing DAO model; currently, most DAOs are only responsible for proposals and voting, which can also be achieved through certain operations within projects, without the need to establish a separate DAO.

If technology is merely a means to change existing business practices, then effectively addressing past legacy issues and building a new landscape based on Layer 2 concepts to promote structural changes in Layer 2+DAO, thereby driving ecological transformation through innovation, is precisely what Metis aims to achieve.

Users can use Metis to build a DAC-structured community, not for voting, but to coordinate and manage community members to achieve business objectives. Community members can receive incentives based on their contributions and accumulate reputation points that benefit them in the long run.

3. Future Imagination Space

The Metis Layer 2 protocol is based on the concept of Optimistic Rollup (OR) and the game-theoretic mechanism of OR sidechain staking withdrawal, known as Optimistic Governance. In line with this game-theoretic mechanism, Metis has hard-forked Optimistic Rollup to construct the Metis Virtual Machine (MVM), managing business and data layers and complex computations through a management framework called ComCo deployed on the sidechain.

"We studied many highly scalable solutions and ultimately chose Optimistic Rollup (OR)," said Metis founder Elena. "We like the mechanism design of OR, where the staked collateral serves as a commitment, and if one party makes a mistake, their collateral will be withdrawn. We believe this approach is very simple and effective, easy to adopt on a large scale, and particularly suitable as a trust-building mechanism in decentralized collaboration."

Optimistic Governance is used to address how parties lacking a trust foundation can establish trust, determine collaborative relationships, and ensure the authenticity of the computation process and results of business logic in DApps within decentralized scenarios. To build a trust foundation, parties lacking trust must stake collateral into the Metis protocol as a commitment before establishing collaborative relationships. Once the staking is completed, the collaborative relationship among the parties is confirmed.

During the execution of collaboration, Metis assumes that all parties are honest and trustworthy (which is indeed the case in the vast majority of instances). Therefore, if no party raises an objection, the collateral will be automatically returned after a period once the collaborative transaction is completed, in which case governance intervention is unnecessary, ensuring maximum efficiency throughout the process. However, if a malicious party appears (for example, if a collaborating party fails to submit computation results or deliverables on time and with quality), the staked collateral will be frozen by the protocol, and an arbitration and punishment system will be initiated to govern and protect the interests of the compliant parties.

Elena also stated that when we built the framework to serve decentralized applications, we found that many parts were not well-designed. To serve the complex logic of decentralized operations, we made many innovations. Metis can support multiple virtual machines running simultaneously to avoid potential throughput bottlenecks; it supports a microservices architecture to facilitate the expansion of toolsets, allowing developers to easily plug and unplug microservice tools to build their applications; Metis also uses IPFS to protect sensitive data; and Metis's Layer 2 Rangers can significantly shorten the time required for verification.

Additionally, Metis's virtual machine is EVM-compatible, so developers do not need to learn a new language to develop. For non-blockchain users, the guidance and interface will also be very simple, allowing them to launch their decentralized companies or applications just like opening other web applications. We believe that Web 3.0 is an entire economy, so each DAC should have self-sustainability, which is why we support DApps or communities to issue their own tokens to incentivize internal economic activities.

Metis provides a brand new, highly scalable, high-performance, low-cost Layer 2 protocol, allowing developers to quickly implement decentralized applications through Metis's open-source microservices software framework, selecting existing services, modules, and UI to achieve "one-click DApp deployment," or calling various interfaces and protocols of Metis for in-depth development, enabling the creation of decentralized wikis, chat rooms, open-source communities, event organizations, task distribution platforms, community games, DeFi, and other DApps.

With the excellent performance of the Metis testnet, the Metis mainnet is also opening up an increasingly large imagination space for the market, potentially becoming a competitive dark horse in the Layer 2 track this year.