Privacy is the headline addition, and ETHBEAT has already reviewed 16 projects in the category.
The privacy numbers on the new site are worth a look. ETHBEAT lists $983 million in value locked across privacy protocols, a 19.1% year-on-year increase.
Deposits tell a stronger story. The site reports $3.94 billion in deposits across 16 protocols, up 50.1% year-on-year.
Beyond privacy, ETHBEAT points to existing coverage of interoperability, tokens, zero-knowledge (ZK) components, and blobs. Blobs are the cheaper data storage lanes Ethereum added so rollups could post their transaction data without paying premium rates.
Liquid staking research is expected soon, according to the research findings. That would extend the site’s lens to one of the largest categories of capital on Ethereum, though nothing has shipped on that front yet.
The CROPS guide and the bigger mission
Alongside the rebrand, ETHBEAT launched what it calls the CROPS guide. The framework assesses projects on four criteria: censorship resistance, openness, privacy, and security.
The broader goal is to measure whether projects deliver on Ethereum’s core guarantees. ETHBEAT frames those as security inheritance, permissionlessness, and reduced reliance on intermediaries.
ETHBEAT also plans to cover base-layer changes. So the site will no longer just watch what gets built on top of Ethereum, but also how the foundation itself shifts.
From TVL leaderboard to risk auditor
L2BEAT launched in 2021, more than five years ago, to track Ethereum Layer 2 metrics. In its early days, the main yardstick was Total Value Locked, or TVL, the amount of crypto deposited in each network.
Over time, the site leaned harder into risk analysis rather than pure size rankings. Its staging and risk frameworks became a common reference point when people debated whether a given rollup was decentralized or just marketed that way.
The ETHBEAT rebrand formalizes that evolution. Rather than aggregating Layer 2 data, the stated aim is to bring transparency and detail to assessing on-chain projects across the ecosystem.