Lately, I’ve heard too many people complaining about Ethereum’s infrastructure, blaming venture capital firms for investing in a lot of meaningless infrastructure, arguing that excess infrastructure is causing industry difficulties, and trying to build a relationship between application developers and infrastructure organizations. create conflicts between them. They seem to portray the Ethereum ecosystem as a "Niflheim" unsuitable for application development (Niflheim is a cold, dark, foggy world in Norse mythology. It is often described as an unfit place for survival) .
This statement is very unkind and unconvincing.
We need to clear up some misconceptions: What is real infrastructure?
Does it have a grand statement? Is it backed by top venture capital? Is there a lot of foam produced? Is it full of nihilism? Lost your investment? EBOLA (EVM Logic Absence Disorder)?
Real infrastructure includes:
Protocols, EIPs (Ethereum Improvement Proposals), architecture, tool stacks, and non-application layer blockchain services.
Used to solve specific problems and improve application efficiency, user experience, decentralization, security and privacy.
The code is open source, open to community contributions and review.
Provide free solutions for application developers, or even complete public products.
Built by a group of truly idealistic and optimistic people.
Development of Blockchain Infrastructure
I tend to describe the development of blockchain infrastructure in the form of git branches.
Image source: Web3rickey
A blockchain is similar to a new git branch. In the first stage of this branch, infrastructure such as cryptography, P2P networks, and consensus algorithms were added. These infrastructures can be used to build Bitcoin, Ethereum, and other Layer 1 networks.
In the second phase, various Ethereum-based tools, facilities and services have emerged, and developers can use them to build various wallets, DeFi applications and Layer 2 networks. Interestingly, after this commit, an on-chain branch was created. The ultimate goal of this branch is to completely store user data on the chain and implement application logic through smart contracts. Developers can implement on-chain applications that are truly verifiable, composable, and interoperable. Currently, we are in the construction phase of the on-chain infrastructure for this fork, and I think we are on the right path.
What does infrastructure bring us?
1. Reduce monopoly
In a given industry, developers have more choices. Suppose you are the founder of a new startup and want to provide transaction data query services for your network. Are you willing to pay a high fee for a company's block scanning service, or choose to deploy a free Blockscout?
2. Improve efficiency
Developers will migrate to more efficient tools and infrastructure. Here’s how my application tech stack has changed over the past year:
Chain: Tendermint → OP Stack
Development tools: Truffle/Hardhat → Foundry
Contract interaction: Web3.js / Ether.js → Viem
Storage: IPFS → BNB Greenfield
Block explorer: Etherscan → Blockscout
Wallet: Extended Function Wallet → Coinbase Smart Wallet / AA
3. Enrich the diversity of applications
Provide developers with sufficient infrastructure to create interesting applications. A few years ago, we mainly built DeFi and NFT-related applications in the Ethereum ecosystem. Now you can leverage various infrastructure to build more interesting products and applications:
Cloud platform: Fleek
Authentication: Privy
Games: MUD, Dojo, Paima
Wallet Kit: Onchain Kit, rainbowkit
Open source reward: tea
Full stack ZK proof service: polyhedra
Trustless AI for Ethereum: ora
IP：StoryProtocol
4. Reduce application startup costs
In fact, you only pay the gas fee for deploying the contract. Because the infrastructure is complete enough, even small development teams can quickly integrate infrastructure services to achieve expected functions. Almost all infrastructure service providers offer free plans for developers that are sufficient to support and validate your early ideas.
5. Accelerate mass adoption
This depends on the changes that the infrastructure brings to non-financial applications and user experience. I think this is also the reason why many developers are switching from developing consumer crypto applications to developing infrastructure. It’s not that developers focus too much on technology, but they must first solve the friction between efficiency and user experience before building an application to prove its viability.
We may need to go through several stages before we achieve a true mass adoption infrastructure explosion period: multiple different solutions appearing in the same industry, similar to Layer2's OP, ZK, ZKEVM and Plasma.
Infrastructure obsolescence period: The market will eliminate infrastructure that has no practical significance and relies only on tokens.
Infrastructure stabilization period: Some truly valuable infrastructure will survive, and developers will begin to build various categories of consumer applications based on these infrastructures.
Mass Adoption: The blockchain infrastructure at this stage provides consumers with the same user experience as Web2 services. Users do not need to understand how blockchain works to use various applications, which can bring better benefit distribution, ownership of digital resources, privacy and anti-censorship capabilities to users.
6. Reduce the impact of centralization
Imagine if all our applications were using the same infrastructure services, until one day, the government of a certain country shut it down or even arrested its core code contributors or CEOs, making it impossible to provide services to the applications. But our infrastructure services are sufficient and alternative solutions are available, so applications will not stop running due to a piece of infrastructure being down.
Continue to build infrastructure
"Do you want to sell sugar water for the rest of your life, or do you want to change the world with me?" This is what Steve Jobs said to John Sculley, a senior executive at Pepsi-Cola, to attract him to join Apple.
Now I want to ask you a question:
“Do you want to spend your life making and trading meme coins, or do you want to build infrastructure and change the crypto world?”
Infrastructure is the engine of the industry and brings new narratives and visions, even if it is just a new standard, a proposal or an SDK. Countless builders need stories to strengthen their beliefs and maintain their enthusiasm. Why do we trust encryption? Why trust the chain? Be the one who builds the cathedral. If you don't see yourself building cathedrals, get another job.
[Disclaimer] There are risks in the market, so investment needs to be cautious. This article does not constitute investment advice, and users should consider whether any opinions, views or conclusions contained in this article are appropriate for their particular circumstances. Invest accordingly and do so at your own risk.
This article is reproduced with permission from: "Deep Wave TechFlow"
Original author: Rickey
