MEV, Oracle, ZK and other popular narratives are all-encompassing. How to evaluate the "sewing" project Marlin?

Author: Haotian

How to view @MarlinProtocol, which seems to be sweeping through hot narrative directions such as MEV, Oracle, ZK, and even AI? There are many stories of old chains sprouting new shoots in this round, and Marlin was originally positioned to provide "decentralized node enhancement services" upstream. The new narrative of Ethereum's AVS nodes tells us that when the operational capabilities of upstream nodes are "commodified" and packaged, many narrative modes will emerge. Next, let me briefly discuss my observations:

1. The essence of the commercialization of the Ethereum AVS node network is to enhance the capabilities of the Ethereum Validators Operator. Therefore, AVS can undertake various extended businesses such as decentralized Oracle, Sequencer, etc. Marlin is positioned as a trusted co-processor, supporting TEE (Trusted Execution Environment), ZK (Zero-Knowledge Proof), and other technologies, and providing decentralized computing solutions for developers based on SDK and API.

Simply put: Marlin is a decentralized distributed node network system that supports TEE and ZK. It can provide node computing power and storage resources for Oracle machine, ZK Prover system, AI artificial intelligence, and other application scenarios.

Due to the fact that the technical core of Marlin is a trusted and operationally strong node network with a wide range of business loads, various services can be encapsulated and output externally through SDK and API. The operational service scope of the node itself is to some extent equivalent to its business coverage.

2. What business service scenarios can be expanded? As shown below, Marlin listed several directions in its introduction of Oyster network services in tweets.

1. Secure ZK proof generation: With the Oyster system, ZK applications and users can delegate the proof generation work to Marlin's secure enclaves using Marlin's distributed nodes with TEE executable environment, thus isolating enclave space to generate ZK proofs within the execution environment.

2. Web3 getaway: It can serve as a secure gateway from web2 to web3, providing a reliable web3 access entry for traditional web2 applications, lowering the user entry barrier, and compensating for deficiencies in browsers themselves, such as storage, RPC interfaces, indexer indexing, Relay services, identity authentication and authorization, etc.

3、Decentralized Frontends: Provide decentralized frontend services based on distributed storage for web3 applications, avoiding the "service" interruption and failure caused by centralized AWS cloud service downtime, thus ensuring the service capability of the product.

4. Oracles: The distributed node system of the Oyster system can collect information from multiple data sources and utilize the Enclave secure environment within the nodes for fast price calculation and updating, providing competitive Oracle services.

5. Decentralized AI: In the current context where large-scale AI model training is increasingly important, based on the TEE trusted execution environment coprocessor, it can provide a secure and private model training and computing environment for AI model training. At the same time, it can also build a decentralized, transparent and verifiable incentive environment, transforming the distributed node network into a decentralized cloud mining "leasing" service network.

3. It is not difficult to see that Marlin's enhanced scope based on distributed nodes can serve a wide range, mainly due to the relatively high threshold when building the node network:

On the one hand, each node operation and maintenance is equipped with TEE. Having TEE means that the hardware performance is outstanding. At the same time, a secure isolated enclave environment can be built in the storage system, with a rigorous shielded transaction environment and an Access management system to ensure that information is not eavesdropped or tampered with during computation and storage of data. The enclave environment is an absolute privacy and isolated environment without a built-in network in the storage system, with high security attributes.

On the other hand, each Node has strong interoperable communication capabilities Protocol based on ZK, through the ZK protocol, Node can prove the correctness of its calculation results to other Nodes without leaking the original data. This greatly improves the efficiency and trustworthiness of the interaction between Nodes. Therefore, its entire distributed Node network can realize flexible service construction that can be plugged and unplugged at any time, and zkVM can efficiently carry out information communication and computing between Node PoW verification and incentives, which is also another technical support of its strong Node service capabilities.

In general, it is difficult to concretely visualize the things Marlin does and can do in a single scenario, because it is essentially a foundational infrastructure protocol layer of the Zero layer, based on TEE high-performance node-enhanced networks and ZK verifiable communication networks, which can be applied to many popular narrative scenarios to create corresponding practical value.

In my opinion, the strong node service capability in the current highly interactive and composable public chain network environment can indeed extend various narrative directions.

However, personally I believe that aside from other applications that can expand the scene, in the future wave of AI+DePIN narrative, Marlin is expected to develop a main line business:

1. AI large model training has a great demand for computing power, and Marlin nodes already have GPU computing power reserves, giving them a first-mover advantage;

2）The advantages of Marlin's distributed node data privacy processing, computation, efficient task allocation, and scheduling mechanisms are very suitable for AI large-scale model training, small and medium model fine-tuning, and other AI training scenarios.

I think this is also a key reason why Marlin, an old project, is able to ride the wave of AI and set sail again. AI will also be its main core narrative direction in the future.