Winning - The Daily Gwei #236
Ethereum just keeps doing it.
Many things in the Ethereum ecosystem take a while to get shipped - from core protocol upgrades on eth1 and eth2 to layer 2 deployments to major DeFi upgrades. This is just a consequence of the Ethereum ecosystem choosing to focus on the right things and do them the right way.
Doing things the “right way” means not taking shortcuts, it means spending countless hours researching and developing bleeding edge tech that you’re not even sure will work and it means having a (very) long-term outlook. Very few people can actually commit to this kind of work so the talent pool here is very small - though Ethereum’s advantage is that it has a near-monopoly on attracting this talent.
All of the critical upgrades that have come to Ethereum have taken years of painstaking research and development to get right. The eth2 Beacon Chain’s proof of stake consensus mechanism was first thought up by Vitalik in the very early days of Ethereum and even extremely popular upgrades like EIP-1559 took 2 years since the EIP was first published to get a go-live date. On top of this, pretty much all layer 2 research that has been done since 2014/15 has finally resulted in what we now know as rollups - but this still took 6-7 years to get right! But because we focused on doing it the right way, everyone gets to enjoy the benefits of this work.
I don’t think this long development cycle has necessarily been a bad thing up to this point but these days I don’t think the Ethereum ecosystem has the luxury of taking our time anymore. Competitors are at the gates and gaining some market-share, users are pouring in faster than they ever have and the bull market is raging. The good thing is that Ethereum developments at every level are happening faster than any time in history with even core protocol upgrades shipping much more often than they used to. Think about it, it was almost 18 months between Ethereum’s last network upgrade (Muir Glacier) and Berlin but now Ethereum is on track to potentially have 5 upgrades in 2021 alone - Berlin, London, Altair, Shanghai and The Merge.
All of this isn’t even to mention the insane innovation going on at the app layer (especially with DeFi) and on the infrastructure/middleware layer with things like Chainlink 2.0 announced recently and The Graph starting to onboard apps to its mainnet. Wherever you look on Ethereum, innovation is happening - and that my friends, is a major part of my bull case for Ethereum.
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.