April 15, 2025
Blockscout Founder and CEO Igor Barinov responded to questions regarding real world asset tokenization and Layer 2 landscape with Blockwind Editor-in-Chief Tsering Namgyal.
Q: As real-world asset tokenization and institutional adoption increase, explorers will be critical for tracking, verifying, and interacting with RWA smart contracts.
Please provide insights into how infrastructure must evolve to support this shift.
A: As the RWA narrative plays out, open-source block explorers like Blockscout will be fundamental to the transparency, integrity and usability of RWAs on-chain. As institutions tokenize trillions in real-world assets, the explorer infrastructure must evolve in three key ways.
- Cross-Chain Interoperability & Visibility: RWAs won’t exist on a single chain; we already see fragmentation (e.g., different assets or projects favouring Ethereum, Polygon, Avalanche, specific L2s, etc.). These assets shouldn’t live in silos. Therefore, block explorers need robust, native capabilities to track RWA governance, provenance, and activity consistently across diverse blockchain ecosystems. This necessitates broad network support, which is why Blockscout’s availability across all EVM-based chains and being live on over 1000 networks – including major players and ecosystems like Base, Optimism, Polygon, Avalanche, and specific chains like Kraken’s Ink Chain, Worldcoin’s World Chain, and Sony’s Soneium – is crucial for providing that unified view.
- Integration for Verifiable Trust: Basic transparency isn’t sufficient for assets tied to real-world value. Explorers must move towards enabling verifiable trust. This requires tight integration with critical external systems – identity protocols, oracle networks providing reliable off-chain data, and potentially compliance modules or attestation services. These integrations are essential to help users confidently verify the link between the onchain token and the specific off-chain asset or claim it represents.
- Richer Metadata & Standardization: We need to move beyond displaying just transaction hashes and balances. Explorers must be able to ingest and clearly display richer, standardized metadata specific to RWAs – think asset descriptions, unique identifiers, links to legal documentation, compliance status, etc. Crucially, this involves actively supporting emerging token standards like ERC-3643, ensuring that RWA information is presented consistently and understandably across different assets and chains, making the data truly usable for everyone from institutions to individual users.
With these evolutions, the RWA sector will be able to achieve the level of trust and usability required from mainstream institutional adoption.
Q: Navigating the New L2 Landscape & Clustering. Please comment on the trend of L2s forming distinct “tech/chain clusters”, the resulting user/developer friction, and the implications of declining native bridging in favour of third-party solutions.
A: This trend of “technical clustering” is something we’ve researched and actively track at Blockscout; it’s a defining characteristic of the current L2 landscape. Our observations confirm that L2s are increasingly coalescing around dominant technology stacks, with Optimism’s OP Stack and Arbitrum’s Orbit stack being prominent examples in the optimistic rollup space, while various ZK-rollup ecosystems are also rapidly gaining traction. While leveraging a shared stack offers advantages like easier interoperability within that specific cluster, it simultaneously leads to greater fragmentation across the broader L2 ecosystem.
This fragmentation creates tangible user and developer friction. Major L2 players often develop proprietary interoperability solutions tailored to their own stack, rather than contributing to universal standards. This makes navigating and transferring assets between different clusters – say, from an OP Stack chain to a ZK-rollup chain – increasingly complex for users. Developers also face challenges with tooling variations and achieving seamless composability across these distinct technological silos.
Perhaps the clearest indicator of this friction is what we call the “Bridging Paradox.” Our data shows that while overall L2 activity has surged – take Base, for example, where monthly transactions grew nearly threefold to around 80 million recently – the use of native L1<->L2 bridges has dramatically declined, dropping by approximately 80% since the beginning of 2024 based on our tracking of deposit and withdrawal statistics.
This stark decline clearly signals that users are prioritizing third-party bridging solutions and aggregators. They’re seeking faster, cheaper, and simpler user experiences, often leveraging recent advancements like Account Abstraction, intents frameworks, specific technologies like Circle’s CCTP for USDC, or protocols like LayerZero. Users are voting with their feet for better UX, even if it means relying on non-native solutions.
From our position at Blockscout, where we have a dominant presence exploring over 55% of the L2 landscape and support chains across all major clusters (OP Stack, Orbit, ZK, etc.), we have unique visibility into these dynamics. We track native bridge usage, overall transaction volumes, contract deployments, and user activity across key L2s like Optimism, Base, Worldchain, Inkchain, and hundreds more.
Our critical role in this environment is to provide a consistent, reliable, and transparent view across this fragmented landscape. Despite the underlying technical differences between clusters, Blockscout offers a familiar interface and open APIs, helping to mitigate the fragmentation for users and developers. We serve as that essential, unifying layer of observability, allowing everyone to track assets, verify activity, and build with greater clarity in this increasingly complex, multi-cluster L2 world.
