In a momentous milestone for the blockchain community, Canto, an original Layer 1 blockchain launched in 2022, has officially announced its migration to Ethereum’s Layer 2.
This strategic migration will empower Canto to access the unified Polygon ecosystem seamlessly, opening doors to Ethereum’s vast capabilities. User security remains a top priority, as Canto will adopt a state-of-the-art Zero-Knowledge (ZK) prover, inheriting the impeccable cryptographic security offered by Ethereum. Importantly, this transition eliminates the necessity for socio-economic incentives related to fraud proofs, significantly bolstering trust and decentralization within the ecosystem.
The migration decision comes following an agreement within the Canto Commons framework. Canto Commons serves as a space where contributors collaboratively devise ideas and solutions for the protocol. Under this agreement, Canto’s core developers will embark on the development of a ZK rollup on Ethereum’s Layer 2. This signifies that in the event of a consensus within Canto Commons, the core developers will forge a ZK Layer 2 solution that embodies the community’s core principles of permissionless sovereignty and public liquidity.
In the pursuit of realizing the neofinance vision on a large scale, deep liquidity plays a pivotal role. This is where Canto’s transition to Ethereum’s ZK-powered Layer 2 takes center stage. Canto will leverage a Plonky2 ZK proving implementation and will continue to maintain its proof-of-stake validator set, ensuring decentralized sequencing. Importantly, this approach guarantees no disruptions for Canto’s existing validators or stakers.
Canto’s move aligns with a broader industry trend of protocols gravitating toward Ethereum’s ecosystem. Earlier this year, Celo and Fantom also unveiled their intentions to transform into Ethereum Layer 2 solutions, underlining the growing industry sentiment favoring Ethereum. Canto now stands shoulder-to-shoulder with other ZK-based Layer 2 projects within the Polygon network, such as Astar, Immutable, IDEX (NYSE: IEX), and Palm Network.
On September 13th, the Astar team revealed their plans to develop their Ethereum Layer 2 scaling solution, known as the Astar ZK-Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM), also utilizing Polygon’s CDK. This ZK-powered chain is poised to empower businesses in Japan, where Astar is headquartered, and worldwide, by facilitating the implementation of Web3 solutions with enhanced speed, scalability, and security.
However, Ethereum is witnessing some of its native protocols branching out. Decentralized exchange dYdX, for instance, recently declared its intentions to construct a “purely decentralized” order book exchange on Cosmos, part of a larger move away from Ethereum initiated in early September. Additionally, Maker, another Ethereum-native protocol, has signaled its intentions to sever ties with Ethereum and forge a more “efficient” chain based on Solana’s codebase.
