Welcome to the March 2024 edition of “Pheasant Bird’s-Eye Recap.” In this series, we reflect on our progress over the past month, highlighting key figures and metrics. From recent deployments and network usage statistics to trends in the Layer 2 scene, our monthly reports cover all notable events, ensuring you’re up-to-date with the latest advancements and prepared for upcoming developments.

Monthly Overview

March was an eventful month for both Pheasant Network and the wider Ethereum ecosystem, which underwent one of its most significant upgrades since the Merge—the Dencun upgrade. This eagerly awaited upgrade, which implemented EIP-4844 also known as Proto-Danksharding aimed at improving efficiency and scalability, has dramatically reduced transaction fees across Layer 2 networks. The benefit of this improvement extends beyond rollups; our own Pheasant Network bridges have also experienced a noticeable decrease in gas fees for transactions involving Layer 2 networks.

Boosting the momentum generated by the Dencun upgrade, we launched a large-scale marketing campaign in March, titled “Pheasant Voyage.” In collaboration with the Linea ecosystem, the campaign’s first round, “Flight to Linea,” successfully drew thousands of participants, marking a promising beginning.

The positive sentiment across the Layer 2 ecosystem is mirrored in network metrics. As reported by DeFi Llama, by the end of March, the TVL across all Layer 2 networks has seen an increase, despite a minor drop in the Ethereum mainnet’s TVL. A particularly noteworthy change in the chart since last month is the emergence of Blast, a newly rising optimistic rollup. Since its mainnet launch last month, Blast has quickly attracted a substantial user base and asset pool, securing its position as the second-largest Layer 2 network by TVL, just behind Arbitrum, which has maintained the lead for several months.

• Ethereum: 57.02%

• Arbitrum: 3.55%

• Blast：1.45%

• Base：1.24%

• Polygon: 1.15%

• Optimism: 1.08%

For further details, visit our official channels:

Website | GitHub | Docs | Blog | Mirror | Twitter | Discord | Telegram | Galxe | L2 Learn

March’s Key Focus

SDK Development Progress

We made improvements to the alpha version of the SDK released in February, achieving steady progress throughout March. The SDK now supports Ethers.js, expanding beyond its initial compatibility with Web3.js. It is also now implemented on Pheasant Network’s canonical website.

Rebalance Script Improvement

Another important technical update in March was the improvement to the rebalance script. As a platform featuring liquidity-based bridges, Pheasant Network requires relayers to periodically rebalance their assets deposited in the contracts to avoid a heavy imbalance between two networks and ensure smooth transfers. The process is automated within Pheasant’s protocol, and we’ve enhanced its script to increase efficiency.

Optimism Demo Day

On the business front, Tomo, our CEO, participated in Optimism’s Demo Day, their weekly event held on Discord where projects built on Optimism have the opportunity to present their work to the community. During the March 14th session, Tomo discussed the general mechanism and benefits of optimistic bridges and introduced our newly launched learning platform, L2 Learn, as part of our contribution to creating public goods in the Optimism ecosystem. The demo has been archived on our official YouTube channel.

Homepage Development

Although we have always been a product-first team, the maturation of product development has allowed us to begin developing our homepage. Planned for release in a few months, this homepage will serve as the face of our project and a hub for all information related to our products and services.

Gas Fee Reduction Due to the Dencun Update

The Ethereum mainnet completed the Dencun upgrade on March 13th, implementing EIP-4844, also known as Proto-Danksharding. This upgrade introduced “blobs”—cheap and temporary storage units for transaction data—with the primary aim of reducing the cost of transactions related to Layer 2 networks. The impact of this upgrade was immediate and significant, reducing the cost of Pheasant bridges from Optimism to other L2 networks to as little as 0.000004 ETH (about $0.015).

Pheasant Voyage—Flight to Linea

Last month marked the successful launch of our new initiative, Pheasant Voyage, a major-scale marketing campaign series across the Ethereum ecosystem, collaborating with a different Layer 2 ecosystem in each round. In its first season, we partnered with Linea’s ecosystem, inviting projects built on it to participate. While still ongoing, the initiative’s first weeks have attracted thousands of participants from both Pheasant and Linea ecosystems and have encouraged dozens of projects on Linea to join us.

Development Updates

Our latest progress includes the following:

• Released v2 of L2 Learn on the testnet

• Recruited additional Discord moderators to support the network’s expansion

• Developed a demo website for testing the SDK

• Conducted research on emerging networks and projects

Product Metrics

• Number of Monthly Transactions: 4,208

• Value of Monthly Transactions: 394.54

• Number of Active Wallets: 2,887

• Community Member Count (across X, Discord, and Galxe combined): 128,173

Network Share

CEO’s Comment

Last month, Pheasant network and the broader Layer 2 ecosystem experienced several pivotal events, among which the successful completion of the Dencun upgrade stands out as a significant achievement we’d like to celebrate with our community. We believe the substantial decrease in gas fees on Layer 2, brought about by this upgrade, will lead to increased asset inflow to Layer 2. This bodes well for bridges like Pheasant that support Layer 2 networks. As always, our commitment is to provide an open and seamless gateway to the Layer 2 ecosystem, which is now better equipped to serve the next billion users thanks to this promising upgrade.

Shifting focus to our own efforts, our project achieved a number of important milestones in development, such as the release of the SDK and the launch of Pheasant Voyage. Although we focus some initiatives on business and community engagement, our core has always been product development, aimed at building robust technology.