Notes:
Solana - Cheap, fast, very popular and has a lot of trading volume, stablecoin volume, and institutional projects launching. Downside: Non-EVM, which means it could be more expensive to build on. It may be harder to find strong developers. It also may have downtime, due to its history.
Base - A layer 2 build by Coinbase, which is part of the Optimism Superchain stack. The advantages are that it has a big volume of DeFi and stablecoin volume. It’s easy to build on because of the EVM stack, which means there is a lot of open source code available. This also means that it will be easy to find good developers, which will bring down costs. Being incubated by Coinbase, which is a big, publicly-traded, US-based company, means that there will be an accent made on the quality of the product you will be building on. The downside of any L2 is much less decentralization and more questions around the centralization of the ecosystem.
Arbitrum - Another L2, which started as a fork of Optimism. It’s a very advanced ecosystem, with both modular blockchain options (for launching your own L2 or L3)—called Orbit—as well as a highly functional mainnet, with big stablecoin and DeFi trading volume. Being EVM, it will be easy to build on, as well as cheap. Arbitrum has even developed a developer framework called Stylus, which allows developers to code via rust, but have the end-product be converted to solidity. All of this, makes it a very attractive environment to build on.
Polygon - Cheap, advanced, containing within lots of dev tooling, this is a proven L2, that Polymarket (a Web3 prediction market unicorn) runs on. It’s a great environment to build if you don’t need a grant, and if your startup can bring its own liquidity, volume, and users to itself and does not need to piggyback off of the home blockchain.
Watch the video for more information.
