What do you think of dYdX leaving Ethereum to build its own public chain?
Original editor: Colin Wu
Original editor: Colin Wu
The failure of the Luna price does not mean the failure of the Terra chain. Users who often use the Terra chain must have experienced the smooth interactive experience brought by Terra. It can even be said that among the public chains with a TVL of more than 10 billion US dollars, Terra is the only one that has not experienced downtime or lag. This is not because the technology of the Terra chain is superior, but because the ecology on the chain is closed, just like the IOS system is smoother than the Android system. Compared with other mainstream public chains with hundreds of apps, Terra had only three native apps before this year: Anchor, Mirror and Terraswap. These three APPs have built the ecology of the entire public chain. And the whole ecology is serving UST.
Regardless of the success or failure of Luna and UST, we can at least be sure that the ecologically independent public chain can indeed obtain an extremely smooth interactive experience. Nothing cares more about fluency than futures trading. I think this is the biggest significance of rebuilding dYdX as an independent blockchain (games also pursue fluency, so some game developers are also considering creating a new one for their games blockchain).
At present, the trading experience of dYdX is second to none in the DEX field, but compared with those leading CEXs, there is still a lot of gap, all of which is due to the lack of performance. Indeed, technically speaking, Rollup can meet the needs of dYdX in the future, but how long do we have to wait for this future? And, even if the Rollup function can be used, compared with competing for a block space with hundreds of APPs, can enjoying a dedicated blockchain alone make the transaction experience worse?
Of course, the security of dYdX will definitely decrease after leaving Starkware. At present, dYdX has not encountered the situation of funds being stolen, and the probability of this situation will increase significantly after independence. However, since the entire public chain is serving dYdX, as long as the blockchain is rolled back (soft fork), the bug can be fixed.
For the future vision, you can refer to Thorchain (RUNE). The entire chain has only one APP, Thorchain DEX. When users add liquidity on DEX, they must add Rune of equivalent value as a transaction pair, and nodes need to pledge 2 times the value of RUNE, that is, $100 million in liquidity assets will correspond to locked-up $300 million in RUNE assets. If dYdX does the same, it will undoubtedly greatly enhance the value capture ability of DYDX tokens.
As for why Cosmos was chosen instead of others, the official did not explain clearly, but said that Cosmos is currently the best choice. In fact, this is not difficult to understand.
Since we choose to develop an APP in the form of a chain, the chain must have cross-chain functionality and interoperability. The "cross-chain" referred to here is not a third-party cross-chain bridge, but a blockchain like Polkadot that allows all parallel chains to be compatible with each other. In this field, apart from Polkadot, only Cosmos and Avalanche have formed a strong consensus.
Polkadot is similar to Cosmos, one is developed using the Sustrate SDK, and the other is developed using the Cosmos SDK. The developed public chain can choose to connect to Polkadot and Cosmos, or choose to be independent. Avalanche's P-chain is similar, and sub-chains can also be freely created on it, but so far Avalanche has not yet realized the function of intercommunication between sub-chains. The difference between Polkadot and Cosmos is that Polkadot can achieve global security, but lacks flexibility, so the development progress is slow; while the security of each chain of the Cosmos network can only be independently responsible for, but the advantage is that it is more flexible. Therefore, for dYdX, which plans to rebuild at the end of the year, Avalanche can't count on it. Polkadot has too high security requirements and cannot realize it in the short term. In the end, it can only choose Cosmos.
Personally, I think this is a good start (in fact, Luna is a good start, but unfortunately it was destroyed for other reasons), and more and more APPs will choose to independently develop a public chain in the future. They can choose Rollup to connect to Ethereum, or choose Sustrate SDK to connect to Polkadot, or choose Cosmos SDK to connect to Cosmos like dYdX. Cosmos SDK is the least difficult to develop, Sustrate SDK can balance development difficulty and network security, Rollup has good security, but is the most difficult (I haven't heard of any APP that intends to develop a Rollup alone).
In the past, Ethereum, which had a prosperous ecology, could develop Rollup at a slow speed without any worries, but once those app development teams with strong funds lost their patience (from Antonio’s speech, we can see his disappointment with Rollup), then leave it to Ethereum Time is running out for the team.
