Ethereum
Ethereum’s stacking model carries risks, warns Vitalik Buterin – DL News
- Ethereum’s decision to evolve via complementary blockchains has created a diverse community, writes co-founder Vitalik Buterin.
- But promoters risk echo chambers or a monoculture if they do not strive to protect this pluralism.
Ethereum’s highly controversial “rollup-centric roadmap” was the right decision, but comes with its own set of pitfalls, according to blockchain co-founder Vitalik Buterin.
Ethereum aims to serve as a “global computer” – the rails on which a new set of leaderless, user-owned businesses and organizations will operate.
But blockchain is slow and expensive.
In their quest to build a blockchain capable of serving billions of users reliably and affordably, the Ethereum developer team decided that the blockchain should expand across many complementary blockchains rather than across improvements to Ethereum itself.
Doubling down on these complementary blockchains – called layer 2s or rollups, in crypto-speak – was the right decision, Buterin argued in his influential blog last week.
“It’s powerful and it allows for a lot of creativity and independent innovation,” he said. wrote.
The cumulative model has created a diverse community that is still united by a set of shared values, he said.
“Layer 2s enable the emergence of subcultures armed with substantial resources and a feedback loop that requires them to learn and adapt in order to be effective in the real world,” Buterin wrote.
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“In general, each layer 2 of Ethereum has a unique “soul”: a combination of the culture of Ethereum, with its own special touch.
But this happy status quo should not be taken for granted, he added.
Coordination is difficult, and competing layer 2 blockchains have little incentive to collaborate, according to Buterin.
Danger of “monoculture”
Layer 2 blockchains and their communities could “start to act as separate universes, with little cross-pollination between them,” he wrote.
Alternatively, certain layer 2 blockchains could end up dominating, stifling Ethereum’s pluralistic ethos in favor of a “monoculture.”
“Whether due to shared human biases or shared economic incentives (or too strong a unified Ethereum culture), everyone ends up looking in similar places for what applications to build and perhaps even what technical choices to make “, he wrote.
Buterin suggested that layer 2 blockchains coordinate by subsidizing the development of shared infrastructure
“There’s a lot of value in trying to expand on these ideas and continuing to work to make the most of Ethereum’s unique advantage as a pluralistic ecosystem.”
Layer 2 in full swing
Layer 2 blockchains have boomed in recent years.
According to crypto research site L2BEAT, almost 100 Layers 2 are active or developing.
Existing layer 2 blockchains have processed almost twice as many transactions as Ethereum itself over the past year, according to data collected by Jack Gorman, data scientist at Variant Fund, a venture capital firm.
Aleks Gilbert is a DeFi correspondent at DL News. Do you have any advice? Send him an email to aleks@dlnews.com.