Why Layer N
With the increased adoption of blockchain solutions, we've seen an increase in new L1 and L2 blockchains emerge. However, we still have yet to see a blockchain network truly solve the gap between web2 and web3 scalability across throughput, latency, and compute.
Restricted throughput
Existing solutions like Polygon and Arbitrum One are currently only able to achieve ~7mgas/s. A simple ETH transfer costs 21k gas. This translates to ~300tps. Even opBNB with 100mgas/s would only be able to achieve ~4,700 ETH transfer tps. ETH transfers are also relatively 'cheap' transactions. If we were to include more complicated transactions like smart contract calls, we would further decrease the total tps (for ex: a Uniswap swap can take up anywhere from 50k-150k gas).
These metrics pale in comparison to modern financial networks like Visa that is actively processing over 60k+ transactions per second, and is presumably able to process much more at peak. And at internet-scale, the volume of transactions easily exceeds what any single server alone would be able to process.
Restricted latency
Many modern applications require ultra-low latency to support better user experiences (no one wants to wait a few seconds for a transaction to go through), as well for high frequency financial use cases (market makers need sub-millisecond latencies to provide competitive pricing and spreads compared to centralized trading venues). The current blockchain model is incapable of supporting such low latencies due to longer block times (in the seconds), as well as block congestion issues in periods of high transaction volume.
Restricted compute
Finally, the topic of restricted compute is one that most scaling solutions don't talk about, let alone address. Think about compute as how complex an app can be. The more complex an app, the higher its compute requirements. Current blockchains are able to execute at best ~7mgas/s of compute per second, and because this compute bandwith is shared between all application developers, they need to fight for that compute, leading to high gas fees, congestions, and dropped transactions.
The compute constraint presents many problems. For one, developers wanting to build computationally complex and intensive apps will face significant congestion problems. In a block, the validator is incentivized to collect as much fee as they can. This means that they will look towards maximizing the function number of transactions * tips. Since a computationally intensive application takes up more gas, the validator will not be able to include as many transactions into the block, meaning the gas tips will need to increase to offset the loss from non-included transactions. This can become prohibitively expensive for users.
To illustrate another perspective on the problem, imagine a defi protocol that depends on many market making orders a second, and a gaming app, both co-existing on the same blockchain. In a period of high usage, per block, gas fees will be driven up by the defi protocol usage, and people using the gaming app will be unable to put through their transactions unless they specify a very high gas tip. Therefore, the gaming app's UX, despite not being the cause of high usage, suffers the consequences of high usage from its neighboring apps.
Now imagine a bad actor who builds a program that consumes the entirety of the compute bandwith and makes a call to this program. This could easily become a DOS vector, and lead to network wide congestion (https://hal.science/hal-04518061/document (opens in a new tab)).
Towards an unrestricted scale future
The Layer N blockchain solves the throughput, latency and compute problem by introducing key innovations across dedicated computing environments, concurrent sequencers and single-shot message channels.
There's a reason why modern web2 applications don't share a single database server, and that's because they wouldn't scale. Similarly, many existing blockchains are now encoutering this shared environment bottleneck. Layer N solves this by enabling applications to leverage dedicated compute, and hyper-optimized sequencers to vertically scale without being bottlenecked and congested by other applications.
At a high level, Layer N is one hyper-scaled blockchain that allows for certain applications to scale independently in dedicated compute environments, while maintaining the same level of composability developers are familiar with in shared computing environments. This is how Layer N is able to achieve 100k+ tps, sub-ms latencies, and maximize compute for applications.
Layer N enables developers to build with unrestricted throughput, latency, and compute.
Layer N was designed with a vision to be a foundational network for the trustless internet, as such, many networking concepts were inspired directly from how the internet itself works.
Core Principles
Security: Crypto was built to become a more secure form of money. As such, the infrastructure and systems that enable it must be held to the highest standards of security.
Censorship Resistance: Crypto was built on the principle of censorship resistance to enable a fair and unopinionated playing field for all. As such, crypto systems must process transactions judgement-free.
Innovation: Crypto moves forward when builders focus on novel innovative approaches to existing problems. Layer N's goal is to increase the innovation surface area.