Ethereum’s best scaling idea might be hiding in the app layer. @z0r0zzz, dev behind BentoBox, NANI, and KALI, just laid out a vision for singleton contracts—one contract, many uses—that could slash gas and shrink state across Ethereum. Here’s why the app layer deserves a closer look.👇 ~~ Analysis by @wmpeaster ~~ 🧮 I am become singletons, destroyer of state At the core of the singletons approach is ERC-6909, a new multi-token standard that drastically cuts state usage while maximizing design flexibility. With it, you can integrate hundreds of thousands of assets in a single contract—without the gas overhead or bloat of today’s token factories. Imagine all ERC-20s and 1/1 NFTs unified into a clean, gas-optimized schema. Put simply, instead of deploying new contracts for every token, DAO, or exchange, Ross proposes using single contracts—Coins for tokens, ZAMM for swaps, Dagon for governance—to cover these use cases. The idea? Minimize code duplication and dramatically reduce onchain state growth—i.e. the data Ethereum nodes must store. Ross notes Ethereum hosts over 330,000 ERC-20 contracts today, most nearly identical. His research suggests the Coins singleton could support the same number of tokens using the state space of just two ERC-20s. That’s a 99.99% reduction. Gas efficiency is another win. Ross’s benchmarks show a single ZAMM swap offers 49–63% gas savings vs. Uniswap V2, V3, and V4. 🪙 Enter the Coinchan To see it in action, check out Coinchan, Ross’s WIP app built on the ZAMM singleton. It’s a DEX for ERC-6909 coins, and a minimalist coin launcher showing what a super-optimized DeFi experience could feel like on L1. ZAMM is unaudited, so best to treat Coinchan as an onchain testbed. Still, ZAMM is a minimalist take on Uniswap V2, so it’s not unfamiliar. Coinchan previews what a singleton-native future could feel like—and it’s worth exploring. Visit coin (dot) nani (dot) ooo and you’ll land on a basic swap and liquidity interface. The most liquid tokens are $ZAMM and $DAGON, good options if you want to try a test swap. It’s cheap, single-transaction, no token approvals needed. Switch to the “Liquidity” tab if you want to try LPing and earning fees. I ran into a failed transaction when testing this—unclear why—but like I said, it’s a testbed, and kinks can be smoothed. You can also try the coin launcher. Click “View all coins,” then “Read the Coinpaper,” then “I want to coin it!” Each coin launched is a fixed-supply fair-launch: 21M ERC-6909 tokens seeded directly into a ZAMM LP. Pool creators earn 1% swap fees, but can’t rug—their LP tokens vest linearly over 6 months. 🧠 Food for thought Are singletons a panacea for Ethereum scaling? No. But they offer a real way to move the needle—at the protocol level. As Ross puts it: Nobody has to use these deployments or similar singleton architecture. Coins, Dagon, and ZAMM are heuristics—symbolic overtures to help convince Ethereum’s social layer of their merit. I’d be happy to see them fail fast in the market of ideas and protocol design that makes Ethereum interesting as a canvas. […] Going forward, we should be more clear and concise. Ethereum has incubated many diverse use cases that could be serviced by convergent protocol design. This would improve ETH price, UX, and above all else, the state of the chain itself. All without new breaking changes or hardfork headaches. This is how I would like to scale the L1 and help Ethereum win. Bottom line—Ethereum benefits when protocols do more with less. And singletons are one of the best tools we’ve got to make that happen. Keep an eye on this work.