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New Blockchain Tech Promises To Ease Ethereum's Growing Pains (bloomberg.com) 17

New technology promising to solve Ethereum's growing pains is gaining traction, increasing bets that some day most of the network's transactions might not actually take place on its own blockchain. From a report: For years slow speeds and high transaction fees have plagued the network underpinning the $550 billion cryptocurrency Ether -- home to the most popular blockchain applications. Its weaknesses have allowed new competitors such as Solana and Avalanche to gain ground. However, help from so-called Layer 2 technologies, or rollups, could be a solution. Digital ledgers like Ethereum are designed to slow down and become more expensive as their popularity increases. But these Layer 2 projects, many of which have only recently debuted, can effectively take transaction data off Ethereum, compress it and post it back onto the original chain for a fraction of the time and cost. So far the the user base is relatively small. But rapid growth is raising expectations that Ethereum will not only be able to ward off competition but that other blockchains might adopt similar scaling solutions. If the technology takes off, networks like Ethereum might only be directly used for very large transactions in the future, with the bulk of activity happening on Layer 2 networks.
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New Blockchain Tech Promises To Ease Ethereum's Growing Pains

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  • Interesting that Bloomberg has an article on layer 2 chains, without mentioning a single one of them. Chainlink, Polkadot, Polygon and Uniswap are four of the bigger layer 2 projects, if anyone is interested. Together they have a combined market cap of around $80 billion USD as of current date.
    • Wut?
      AFAIK only Polygon is a layer 2 for Ethereum.
      Polkadot is its own layer 1 blockchain network.
      Chainlink is an oracle for blockchains.
      Uniswap is a governance token for the Uniswap ecosystem of decentralized apps (Dapps).

      • I stand corrected!
      • Polygon is not a true layer 2 either. It is it's own separate blockchain with it's own security. What happens on Polygon stays on Polygon. Assets need to be bridged.

        For true layer 2, you need to be looking at rollups, Optimism, Arbitrum, Boba, Cartesi, Loopring, Starkware.

        These allow transaction execution to take place off of the main layer 1 chain but post data to the main chain. This gives the security and robustness off the main Ethereum chain but the speed and low cost of transaction on a side chain.

    • Let's not leave out Loopring which is a zkRolup with a counterfactual wallet coming out shortly and a likely partnership with GameStop on NFTs. Specifics are not yet released.
  • ...designed to slow down and become more expensive as their popularity increases... But... take transaction data off Ethereum, compress it and post it back onto the original chain for a fraction of the time and cost.

    Soo... Defective by design artificial deflation is being fought by artificially created external system which is designed to speed up and make cheaper the cost of spending the "currency".
    Thus promoting spending i.e. pumping the money into the system.
    Not by decreasing prices of purchased items through efficiencies in production and sales, but by decreasing artificial price of transactions.
    Pulling the "money" out of the system in order to pump it back in, to reign in that defective by design artificial defla

    • And no actual value will be added or created.

      CO2 and the heat produced in "mining" doesn't count as value.

    • by Anonymous Coward

      Agreed. All the 'chain systems seem to be designed to increase monetary friction the more folks use them. At some point the entire chain will freeze up and no one can use it. When that occurs the entire value proposition ceases to exist making all of it worthless.

      The creation of 'currency' was done to provide a standard rate of exchange and convenience for the buying and selling of goods and services. It reduced friction.

      At one point, Visa, MC, AMEX, Diners Club Int., Discover, etc. were created to redu

      • I agree with a poster from another thread... DeFi is not Decentralized Finance - it's Deregulated Finance. There's a reason that this stuff is and should continue to be regulated. By definition, currency===money===value. And as one of the oldest professions, thieves will thieve, and scammers will scam.

        Let tell you this one weird trick to avoid being scammed by bitcoiners. Try it and you'll see! Just one step you have to take and you'll be safe from the horribleness of deregulation, scammers and so on! Billions have tried that and confirm it works!

        Ready? Here it is, how to avoid using bitcoin in one easy step:
        1. Do not use bitcon.

        Not that fing hard, is it?

  • ...so, we're now reinventing banks.

    It's sad to watch this all unfold in real time.

  • A long Twitter thread on Ethereum, mostly centred on the PoS switch:

    https://twitter.com/hugohanoi/... [twitter.com]

    You could say a lot more.

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