Ten years since the #Ethereum co-founders went to Switzerland to launch the OG smart contract platform, the two of them reconvened for a rare joint public appearance at recent EthPrague event. Due to the early split between Gavin Wood and the Ethereum project, he then went on to found Polkadot ($DOT ) , which is always a fascinating meeting. There has certainly been enough evidence of competition between projects over the years. Yet the EthPrague meeting is fascinating, not because of any visible relationship between the pair but because of what it reveals about where both men came from as human beings. #blockchain founder and thought leader.
It's worth remembering that Polkadot was conceived to fix what Wood saw as problems with Ethereum. These range from the practical – scalability and fees – to the more complex aspects, around the challenges of decentralized governance. However, much of what Wood shares in his conversation with Buterin alludes to the development of his thinking on these topics.
Wood opened the talk with an unusually candid statement from a founder – that his thinking had changed. Polkadot's multi-chain architecture is designed for greater scalability by separating application operations from security and consensus using a sharded structure. However, Wood believes that this model has led to what he calls “persistent state fragmentation” across the entire system because each parachain or rollup does not necessarily communicate with any other parachain, except except through the security layer.
A newly launched Polkadot initiative , called #JAM , brings aggregate scalability to the consensus layer, effectively minimizing fragmentation and consolidating operations within a single chain. However, the technical elements are perhaps less striking than the fact that Wood is quite open about the journey he's been on as a developer and founder. This talk also showed that while public blockchain projects are systems that directly support billions of dollars worth of assets, the processes and operations behind them often remain at a cutting edge. pioneering technologies.
The conversation was no less introspective. At this point, it's worth praising moderator $ETH Praha for keeping the line of questioning high because this is when both are at their best, debating difficult issues the most difficult of blockchain. One question focused on the challenges of building a community, situating the idea that conflict is a necessary part of blockchain progress and citing examples such as the Ethereum hard fork leading to Ethereum Classic.
On the subject, Wood humbly admits that Ethereum's relatively benign approach to governance has been a key factor in building its large and vibrant community. However, the main challenge is that the large community hinders flexible decision-making – a challenge he always wanted to avoid when designing Polkadot.
This discussion is as old as the technology itself, and the debate often focuses heavily on the concepts of on-chain and off-chain governance. Proponents of the former approach claim that while the “code is law” approach may be limited, it is less messy than off-chain voting, which can lead to factions and Finally, branching.
In this respect, the two men appear to have become more comfortable with the idea that neither approach is necessarily superior to the other.
For his part, Wood declared himself less concerned about the base layer needing to upgrade itself automatically, while Buterin expressed interest in having more formal public signaling methods to manage Ethereum – a development that may become more urgent based on recent findings from Galaxy Digital about the potential. Centralization of Etheruem decision-making.
This advancement in thinking reflects a more mature, relaxed and democratic approach than the polarized, binary arguments that often characterized blockchain's earlier years. If these two thought leaders at the forefront of technology development can unite around previously controversial topics, it bodes well for the future of the industry.
