Starting from the "blockchain is a city" model, discuss how the public chain will evolve in the future

Original translation: Block unicorn

Original translation: Block unicorn

Will we live in a multi-chain world, or will there be "one chain to rule it all"?It depends on your mental model of blockchain.

People often describe L1 blockchains as networks, eg Ethereum network, Solana network. This means that the blockchain can scale infinitely like the internet, Telegram or Facebook. If blockchains were the network, network effects would dominate and one blockchain would win.

But the web is the wrong analogy for the blockchain, the blockchain is subject to physical limitations. Blockchains cannot scale to an infinite block space because blockchains require many independent small validators; if blocks were arbitrarily large, blockchains would no longer be decentralized.

Smart contract chains are more like cities. If you accept this mental model, the dynamics surrounding L1 blockchains become less mysterious.

Everyone loves to complain about Ethereum.

It's expensive. It's crowded, it's slow, it was built a long time ago, nothing works like it should, and nothing seems to improve. It's so stupidly expensive that only rich people can afford to trade there.

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New York

Of course, New York is a happening place! It has all the biggest banks, most billionaires, hottest brands and celebrities. Likewise, Ethereum has all the largest DeFi protocols, most TVL, hottest DAOs and NFTs.

But it's expensive, and if you're an up-and-comer, your price is knocked out. Maybe if you bought the property early on, you could get rich. But today, the price will eat you, and there's not enough room for everyone. Billionaires may be fine, but the next generation will have to look elsewhere.

first level title

Three ways to expand your city:

Path #1:Build, land may be limited, but you can always be vertical. By building higher and higher cities, you can accommodate more people on the same land.

But building up isn't the complete answer, there's a limit to how tall a skyscraper can be, and even a skyscraper can't escape the congestion of the underlying city. If I live on an upper floor in Manhattan and you live on a different upper floor, if I want to visit you I have to go down to the ground floor, hail an expensive cab, and fight Manhattan traffic, we don't get rid of the basics Constraints - Manhattan is crowded.

L2 and Rollup are the blockchain equivalent of skyscrapers. Each rollup is like a vertical blockchain extending from the ground L1. Lots of space in the rollup! But to access one aggregate from another, you have to exit to the underlying Ethereum and handle its underlying traffic.

Building up helps—it gets more people into cities—but it's not the complete answer. If Ethereum is crowded now, it will be crowded after rollup (billionaires can afford to stay in L1 and pay fees). So how else can you scale a blockchain?

yesyes"Interoperability Network", such as Polkadot or Cosmos, Polkadot and Cosmos provide developers with SDKs to launch application-specific blockchains — small blockchains dedicated to a single application. All of these blockchains are connected through a routing system — Polkadot’s Relay Chain, Cosmos’ Cosmos Hub.

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a factory town in xincheng

This works, and some places will be built this way. Factory towns and farm towns are one thing, but they're not where the lion's share of people live and do business. You need more than a handful of small towns to absorb a growing population.

Path #3:The last remaining method on how to expand a city: build another city. That's what Solana, Avalanche, and NEAR each do.

When you build a new city, you have to first duplicate a lot of infrastructure. Seems redundant. Every new city needs another road, another police station, a school, a hospital. Likewise, every new L1 requires another block explorer, another fiat onramp, a native AMM, an NFT marketplace. This is redundant, but every L1 needs these basics to get started.

But the nice thing about building a new city is that each city can be built differently.

Take Solana as an example - Solana is LA.image description

certainly,

certainly,Solana is not the most decentralized.But games and NFTs don't need as much decentralization to begin with. The weather is great, the fees are low, and no one takes themselves too seriously.

So what is an avalanche? I'd say Avalanche is Chicago:image description

chicago

NEAR is San Franciscoimage description

San Francisco

The important thing about these cities is not only that they are large and open to business, everyone has a different idea of ​​what a city should be and how it should be governed. They each accept different tradeoffs, employ unique values, and appeal to different industries.

So will we live in a multi-chain world, or will there be "one chain to rule it all"? Here's the question of reframing: Will we live in a multi-city world, or will weWill there be one city to rule them all?

The answer is obvious, city domination has a power law (another interpretation: the Matthew effect) distribution, but there are many cities that matter and no metaphor is perfect. But I find this mental model useful for predicting how L1 will evolve.

I'll leave you with six things this model predicts:

1.The future will be multi-chain.

2.Ethereum is probably the most valuable chain because to quote a famous bank robber: that's where the money is.

3.Other L1s are also valuable, but they will continue to differentiate. New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, and Houston are enduring cities because their institutions and cultures are different from each other.

4.L2s are important - skyscraper tech is essential to expanding any city - but they're not the end of the story. L2 is "and", not "or".

5.Application-specific blockchains will remain a niche market.

6.In the real world, transportation accounts for almost half of housing GDP. If we see something similar in cryptocurrencies, cross-chain bridges will become very valuable.