Tearing Down Walls - The Daily Gwei #200
Ethereum builders won't let some pesky walls stop them from changing the world.
Lukáš’ tweet below really got my brain turning today because I thought to myself: how many times have builders hit walls in Ethereum but just kept going? How many times have people said something was impossible but builders made it possible? How many times has the Ethereum ecosystem defied the odds? Well, it turns out, we’ve done it lots of times.
The Ethereum network has many superpowers at its disposable - composability, permissionless building, open source development and more - these superpowers enable builders to essentially tear down any wall that’s put up in front of them. A perfect example of this is layer 2 scaling on Ethereum as it took many years of trial and error for researchers and developers to create optimistic and zk rollups (quite possibly the best scaling technology we have for blockchains). During these years, I’m sure the builders hit wall after wall after wall and could’ve easily given up and gone to work on something else - but they didn’t - and that’s why Ethereum now has a viable scaling path.
To use Lukáš’ analogy, there isn’t just 1 singular direction that builders take either as we have plenty of times working on different solutions to the same problem. Scaling alone has zkRollups, optimistic rollups, state channels, plasma, sharding and many variations/flavors of these technologies all being researched and built by world-class teams. On top of this, pretty much all of this work is open source and able to be freely used by other builders in the community which allows for rapid experimentation, iteration, adoption and even education!
Outside of scaling, other critical Ethereum building blocks like eth2 itself have taken countless hours of research and development to get to the stage that it is now. The Beacon Chain is a marvel of engineering and uses a novel Proof of Stake consensus mechanism that has never existed before and has been live for over 3 months now with no issues - this is a testament to all the years of hard work from hundreds if not thousands of people. It doesn’t just stop there either - we still have the eth1 <> eth2 merge, sharding and a bunch of other improvements coming to eth1 and eth2 - the innovation never stops.
I believe that what makes all of the above possible really is the permissionless nature of Ethereum as most of the code is open source and you can build whatever you want on the Ethereum network. This means that the people can come from everywhere & anywhere to jump into solving real problems and make an immediate impact on potentially millions of people lives - how amazing is that?
Have a great day everyone,
Anthony Sassano
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All information presented above is for educational purposes only and should not be taken as investment advice.