Canto Abandons Plan to Become Layer-2

The layer-1 blockchain Canto made a surprising turnaround when it decided to abandon its plan to become a layer-2 solution on the Ethereum network as previously announced.

The plan to switch to layer-2 was disclosed by Canto in September last year. At that time, Canto collaborated with Polygon to utilize the CDK toolkit of the Polygon blockchain. However, this decision has been scrapped. The latest announcement from the project stated:

In the past few months, we have closely collaborated with Polygon to explore integration and decided to use their Type-1 prover to maintain the essence of layer-1, instead of transitioning to layer-2 as initially planned. This decision has been unanimously agreed upon by the project team.

In the same announcement on March 15, Canto introduced a new update named the “Cyclone Stack,” aiming to expand the scale and enhance the performance of the blockchain. This update includes 3 main upgrades: Calristo, Kallichore, and Elara.

Canto stated that their Cyclone Stack will be fully compatible with all current EVM tools and applications. They assessed this comprehensive upgrade as a significant step towards achieving high performance and scalability for Canto.

Canto was launched in September 2022 with the goal of developing DeFi solutions. This layer-1 blockchain is built on the Cosmos infrastructure and has integrated EVM to seamlessly connect with the Ethereum network. The protocol peaked in early 2023 when the CANTO token saw significant price increases and entered the top 10 blockchains with the highest DEX trading volume.

CANTO chart after this announcement

Chart CANTO