The post Solana-based Neon EVM adopts ‘network extension’ title appeared on BitcoinEthereumNews.com.

Today, enjoy the Lightspeed newsletter on Blockworks.co. Tomorrow, get the news delivered directly to your inbox. Subscribe to the Lightspeed newsletter.  Narratives move quickly in crypto.  A month and a half ago, Solana Foundation head of strategy Austin Federa wrote on X that “​​Most of the L2-ish things on Solana are better thought of as Network Extensions.” The basic rationale is that while layer-2s are meant to scale Ethereum by running smart contracts more cheaply on different software, Solana is meant to scale at the base layer, and many Solana-centric networks are meant to do different things than the layer-1. This kicked off an online debate mainly between Solana fans who agreed with Federa and Ethereum boosters who argued that Solana was simply rebranding the concept of layer-2s, which are a frequent topic of Solana ire.  Today, Neon EVM, a platform for deploying Ethereum-centric apps on Solana, formally adopted the “network extension” title. The move comes just a month and a half after the term made its public debut. “Unlike an L2, Neon EVM doesn’t add an extra layer on top of Solana,” Neon EVM chief commercial officer Davide Menegaldo told me in a text. “L2s are built on top of a base Layer 1 blockchain to enhance scalability, they batch transactions before settling on the main chain, and they [fragment] liquidity as well as user experience.” Neon EVM doesn’t do any of these things, Menegaldo argues, so it’s better thought of as a network extension.  When I asked Federa about his term, he said network extensions are meant to be a big-tent term that ditch the Ethereum-centric assumptions about what L2s are. “Neon EVM is not an L2 on Solana, it’s a ‘L1.5’ because it’s its own VM but it can atomically compose with SVM stuff. What do we call…

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Filed under: News - @ October 16, 2024 6:21 pm