BLOCKCHAIN BAKE-OFF! In July, when the smart-contracts blockchain Celo proposed to ditch its unbiased “layer-1” standing in favor of turning into a layer 2 community atop Ethereum, the folks behind the mission might have had little inkling of simply how in style they’d change into. Now there’s abruptly a burst of competitors amongst veteran layer-2 groups to provide the expertise for Celo’s new system. The migration initially was imagined to depend on Optimism’s OP Stack software program package, which served because the template not just for Coinbase’s new Base blockchain but additionally the Binance-incubated BNB Chain’s new opBNB community. Then final month, Polygon injected itself into the combo, providing up its Polygon Chain Growth Package, often called Polygon CDK, as an various. As of final week, there’s yet one more suitor to host Celo: Matter Labs, the creators of one other rollup, zkSync, in addition to the ZK Stack open-source software program, which can be utilized to create new “hyperchains” on Ethereum. “The modular and open-sourced ZK Stack is the optimum L2 stack for Celo’s transition to Ethereum,” in accordance with the Matter Labs proposal. “We hope to set off an trustworthy, open dialogue amongst the Celo and zkSync communities concerning the tradeoffs between the ZK Stack, the OP Stack, Polygon CDK and different choices.” Coming within the depths of crypto winter, the episode affords a reminder of the depth of the consolidation development, with the assorted networks scrambling to search out recent enterprise.