DeBank Chain

DeBank, most well-known for its crypto portfolio tracker product, recently announced its entrance into the Ethereum L2 rollup space. Like many others, DeBank has chosen to leverage the OP Stack for its L2 framework. The announcement states the testnet is now live, with the mainnet release slated for 2024.

Two of the immediately apparent benefits of DeBank launching its own L2 are the revenue potential and the ability to customize the user experience (UX) directly within the protocol.

Optimism mainnet YTD has generated over 3,000 ETH in net onchain revenue. Upcoming Ethereum upgrades, such as EIP-4844, should decrease the costs for L2s by orders of magnitude, creating the potential for larger value capture for L2s.

From the UX perspective, L2s have the flexibility to experiment with features and customizations at the protocol level. In DeBank’s announcement, the team notes they’ve tweaked the consensus mechanism to reduce “the gas cost of individual transactions by 100 to 400 times” — this lowers the unit costs of high-volume transactions such as NFT mints and social interactions. DeBank will also have account abstraction (AA) features built directly into the protocol, whereas to-date AA functionality (e.g., batching multiple transactions together) on Ethereum Mainnet has largely been opt-in with changes occurring only at the application level. App developers benefit from incorporating AA into the protocol itself, since, to some extent, this reduces the number of external integrations that would be required for that same functionality on Ethereum Mainnet.

However, to realize the benefits noted above, users will still need to bridge to the DeBank chain, and developers will need to create applications. Some of the more recent OP Stack chains, such as Zora and Base, have fared well so far against both of these challenges. Since its launch in late June 2023, Zora has had over 210,000 unique addresses bridge over more than 2,100 ETH. Base has seen nearly 80,000 ETH and $59 million in stablecoins bridged. Moreover, it is approaching daily transacting address parity (using a 7-day moving average) with Arbitrum and Optimism mainnet, initially driven by social apps such as friendtech and meme coin mania. If DeBank can tap into some of this developer mindshare and properly incentivize users to bridge over, it could mean another (short-term, at least) successful OP Stack chain launch.

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