Revealing the secrets of Syndicate, the 'operator' of multiple L3 projects: transforming from an investment-based DAO to an infrastructure service provider

Layer3 is becoming a popular track that more and more protocols are competing to bet on. In recent months, DAO infrastructure service provider Syndicate has attracted market attention due to the "high productivity" of its Layer 3 project, especially the rapid popularity of Degen Chain.

The "operator" of multiple L3 projects, aiming at Layer3 development services

Since this year, Syndicate has officially announced the cooperation to launch multiple Layer3 projects. To put it simply, Layer 3 is a more customized design based on Layer 2. It is essentially an expansion solution designed to provide enhanced scalability and enable developers to create customized application-specific blockchains according to their needs. .

In February this year, Syndicate announced the launch of Syndicate Frame Chain, an L3 blockchain based on OP Stack, aiming to unlock high throughput and extremely low Gas costs for Farcaster framework developers. Data from Blockscout and L2beat respectively show that as of June 5, Syndicate Frame Chain had approximately 5.217 million transactions, nearly 13,000 addresses, 36 tokens circulating on the network, and a TVL of only $24,000. ;

At the end of March, Syndicate announced the launch of Degen Chain, an ultra-low-cost Layer3 chain built on Arbitrum Orbit and AnyTrust, to provide settlement services for the Degen community of the Base blockchain MEME project. Degen Chain has attracted much market attention after its launch, especially the surge in the price of the token $Degen, which has also driven the growth of Degen Chain's multiple data. Degen Chain browser data shows that as of June 5, its total number of accounts has exceeded 15.95 million, the total number of addresses has exceeded 18.71 million, and more than 62,000 contracts and 35,000 tokens have been circulating on the network. It is worth mentioning that in mid-May this year, the downtime incident of Degen Chain also attracted community attention, and it was unable to produce a block for more than 24 hours.

On June 6, the decentralized social company Ham announced that it would cooperate with Syndicate to launch the Layer3 blockchain Ham Chain. The L3 is built based on OP Stack and Celestia on Base. Equipped with new features such as on-chain social data and social reward functions.

In addition, Syndicate also revealed in its blog that it has also cooperated to launch Gold Chain and is developing L3 chains such as PengChain and HAM Chain.

According to the official website, Syndicate helps customers build EVM L3 chains, which have many advantages such as almost zero gas fees, smart gas subsidies, native gas tokens, data oracles and pre-compilation. In terms of charging standards, Syndicate is divided into three types: free, US$299/month and customized charging according to different needs such as quantity and functions.

Syndicate believes that “L3 will grow exponentially in the coming years and will play a key role in scaling Ethereum, empowering the on-chain community and its applications, and attracting hundreds of millions It plays an important role in attracting new users to Web3.”

However, L3 is also currently facing controversy. For example, Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin pointed out that although L3 can reduce some fixed costs of batch publishing and deposits/withdrawals, it will not magically further improve throughput. There are more lightweight upgrade methods that can achieve something similar to The cost savings that L3 can achieve; Polygon Labs CEO Marc Boiron also said that Layer3 will only capture value to Layer2 and will not be beneficial to the development of Ethereum. If all Layer 3 is built on a certain Layer 2, then Ethereum will basically not gain any value, but will instead expose Ethereum to security risks.

Obtained financing from more than 100 investors before the transformation, and now focuses on Web3 infrastructure

Syndicate was originally a decentralized investment agreement established in 2020, aiming to allow people to build decentralized Autonomous Organization (DAO) to democratize investment.

Syndicate has received multiple rounds of financing and received investment from more than 100 participating institutions. In March 2021, Syndicate received a US$1 million seed round of financing led by IDEO CoLab Ventures; in August of the same year, Syndicate announced the completion of a US$20 million Series A financing led by a16z. There were 150 VCs and angel investors in this round of financing. and founders, including Ashton Kutcher, Alexis Ohanian and Snoop Dogg; in May 2022, Syndicate once again officially announced the completion of a 6 million investment from 50 investors including a16z, South Park Commons, Carta Ledger, OpenSea, Circle Ventures, Polygon, etc. U.S. dollar financing.

During this period, Syndicate also launched multiple products, including the Web3 social NFT casting function Collectives, which allows anyone to use modular ERC-721M NFTs to create on-chain social networks, soul-bound tokens, and Reward contributors, encrypted investment tools Web3 Investment Clubs to achieve one-click establishment of an investment community in the form of a DAO, and ETH deposit functions to support on-chain investments or transactions. These functions have also attracted a lot of user participation. For example, Syndicate users once created 450 DAO organizations through the platform within 3 weeks, once accounting for 10% of the total number of DAOs on the entire network.

However, Syndicate suddenly announced in May 2023 that it would stop developing investment platform products due to changes in strategy, transform into a DAO infrastructure service provider, and is committed to "realizing communities, organizations and economies on the chain." full potential".

Currently, in addition to L3 development services, Syndicate's products also include transaction cloud services. This function allows developers to build on-chain applications and experiences on any EVM chain on a large scale, with transaction broadcasting, automatic expansion of transaction wallets & management of gas fees. , real-time transaction alerts and cryptographic signatures, among other features. In addition, Syndicate can also provide a simple transaction API and automatic Gas fee service for any EVM chain, helping Web2 applications to be easily integrated with L3. To date, this API has processed more than 350,000 transactions.

According to the official website, Syndicate has currently achieved a transaction volume of over 40 million US dollars, the number of NFT minted exceeds 1.1 million, the number of users exceeds 350,000, and the number of contract deployments exceeds 50,000. Syndicate's clients include NIKE, IYK, Degen, Optimism, FWB and Decrypt, among others.

"Syndicate is building infrastructure to improve developer and user experience, making Web3-based products easier to build, scale and use at scale." Syndicate once revealed in a blog.

The above is the detailed content of Revealing the secrets of Syndicate, the 'operator' of multiple L3 projects: transforming from an investment-based DAO to an infrastructure service provider. For more information, please follow other related articles on the PHP Chinese website!