The new wave of congestion
For those who entered the Web3 industry a few years ago, they must remember the "century congestion" on the chain. One was the "Summer of DeFi" caused by the rise of DeFi applications led by Compound. Due to the surge in on-chain activities, the popular Ethereum network became extremely congested, and users had to wait a long time to complete a transaction. This congestion is fatal to certain businesses such as lending and clearing.
The second is that the blockchain cat-raising game that was popular that year triggered NFT FMO. The side effect was a surge in on-chain transaction fees. This popularity once made it impossible for other on-chain applications to operate normally.
Several major congestion incidents have made developers such as Vitalik Buterin determined to focus on capacity expansion, and more people have begun to pay attention to the public chain expansion track.
Temporarily in a state of confusion
This expansion battle led by Ethereum has actually gone through a long time. It has gone through a lot of exploration, attempts and debates in the early stage, from side chains, state channels, sharding, and now the Rollup Layer 2 solution that has become absolutely mainstream. Coupled with the "catfish" Solana that emerged halfway, users can clearly feel that the problems of congestion and high handling fees have been significantly resolved.
But everyone suddenly realized that innovation and stories have almost stopped. The previous crazy high TPS and low transaction fee competition now seems to have no highlights and meaning. So where should we go next?
Blockchain complex computing will become the next milestone
In fact, the general direction of the development of blockchain technology has not changed, which is to allow blockchain to "go global" and allow more businesses and organizations to be established based on blockchain.
Now we can see that tradition and Web3 are approaching and embracing each other. The "Web3 craze" triggered by the previous bull market has made more people in traditional industries see blockchain and Web3, and they have begun to use blockchain technology to transform some key links of traditional business, such as building a huge AI computing resource pool based on a decentralized network to break the monopoly of industry giants.
On the other hand, the direction of efforts is to enable blockchain to do more things, that is, complex computing of public chains. Compared with capacity expansion to solve congestion and high fees, complex computing of public chains is a great opportunity to tap new market growth. Research shows that it is expected to reach 1.81 trillion US dollars by the end of 2036, with a compound annual growth rate of 72.9%. However, this part of the market is currently dominated by traditional Internet service providers, and the value of public chains has not been fully reflected.
Public chains cannot just be a carrier of simple transactions. In the future, public chains will be required to handle more complex logic and data, which will also become an important indicator for measuring the competitiveness of public chains. Of course, the innovation space for complex computing services on public chains is also very imaginative. For example, distributed supercomputing public chains can provide efficient computing services through off-chain computing nodes to meet the needs of AI model training and big data processing.
Complex computing on public chains is a huge systematic project, involving high-performance computing, distributed cloud, distributed hardware, etc. Although it is difficult, we still see that some emerging public chains have begun to explore this field. For example, the PandoraChain project has been committed to integrating the subsystems, resources, and interfaces involved in complex computing into one system under one framework, so that the public chain can undertake a wider range of business scenarios. Once Pandora's system is built, it will have dominant competitiveness in the public chain field.
