Blockchain Scalability
Why the blockchain scalability curse is actually a blessing
What have we learned from the short history of blockchain economy (merely a decade has passed)? That it is rife with misconceptions and misunderstandings, mainly surrounding one key concept: decentralization. Systemic decentralization, especially implemented with blockchain, is a new species of socioeconomic existence. One pitfall to trap decentralized system designers is applying centralized conceptualization and mechanism unto decentralized systems, such as we witnessed in the scale-out vs scale-up struggle at solving the blockchain scalability problem. Fortunately the right solution won the day. But that is far from the end of the story.
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¹⁸ The "Whys"s of Optimistic Rollup.
¹⁹ "Dynamic Heterogeneous Sharding", from Scaling Ethereum with Rollups
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We see that oftentimes the solution to a conundrum in the blockchain space is about mechanism design, or incentive design, which is an economics problem – in reality, it is inseparable from building a blockchain economy – because a blockchain economy is made up of many incentive games on different scales. This is a key revelation in the pursuit of building a vibrant and diverse blockchain economy, as such quest does not stop at the layer 2 scale-up solution to the blockchain scalability challenge.
Rollups are scale-up’s path to ultimate triumph in breaking the blockchain scalability curse. But it is only the beginning in building an economy. We want to go all the way in building a vibrant and diverse blockchain economy – we must build more mechanisms on top of the fundamental decentralization axioms, on top of layer 2 Rollups – the Metis DAO project goes beyond layer 2 to add massive decentralized functionalities and inject new behaviors into a new blockchain economy – the DAC economy.
A new future is upon us. If history ever taught us anything, it is that you never get what you wished for – you get double what you wished for. Such is the temperament of destiny in our quest for a decentralized future – the double edged curse became a double blessing – gone the worries about scalability, come the excitement of a new breed of blockchain economy.
The era of DAC economy is here.
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