Why Ethereum’s Growing Pains Are Transitory

TL;DR

• The Ethereum person/developer/investor expertise is excessive friction proper now, however the ecosystem has sufficient inertia to not solely get previous it, however to repair it.

Full Story

Up till the Ethereum ETF’s had been authorised, the ETH worth had been copping plenty of flack for being sluggish.

We’re not about to leap on that band wagon.

However we’ve been attempting to make sense of why ETH has had such a gradual begin to this bull run, when in comparison with different initiatives…

Right here’s the place we ended up:

All crypto initiatives succeed based mostly on their enchantment to buyers, customers, and builders.

Over the previous yr or two ETH has seen some huge upgrades — however with that has come rising pains which have affected its ‘three pillars of enchantment.’

Buyers

A number of transaction exercise has moved over to the ten+ main Ethereum layer 2 chains (suppose: apps on the iPhone, the place Ethereum is the iPhone, and these layer 2’s are the apps).

It is a good factor! It means the Ethereum ecosystem can deal with far more customers, with out issues getting gradual and costly.

The issue is, most of those L2’s are quietly preventing it out to develop the most important person base amongst them, and every of them have their very own tokens.

This makes the choice making course of tougher for buyers…

(“Do I spend money on Polygon? Optimism? Arbitrum? Which one will recognize essentially the most over the following few years? Which of them will die?”)

And with that, investing in competing top-tier initiatives like Bitcoin and Solana turns into the simpler choice from a choice making perspective.

Customers

These L2’s are making issues sooner and cheaper — however they’re additionally splintering the compatibility. Again when every part was constructed on the Ethereum layer 1 — in the event you owned ETH, you could possibly discover any ETH based mostly utility or platform.

However now, this compatibility is siloed to the L2 it’s constructed upon. In case you have your ETH on the Base L2, and wish to discover an Arbitrum app/platform — it’s good to bridge your tokens over (which isn’t essentially fast or simple to do).

Crypto die hards will work by way of this friction, however it pushes the crypto curious to label ETH as ‘too arduous to make use of.’

Builders

Devs wish to construct in a coding language they know (or can be taught shortly), on a sequence that is filled with passionate customers, with in depth tooling and sources.

Proper now, the dominant, easy-to-build-on, user-chosen L2 is but to be topped.

So the choice on the place devs ought to make investments their time, cash, blood, sweat, and tears comes (once more) with a bit additional friction, and splintering focus.

Right here’s the excellent news:

Ethereum has sufficient inertia to roll proper on by way of these rising pains, and onto making ‘account abstraction’ a factor.

Account abstraction will imply customers can discover any apps/platforms throughout all the Ethereum layer 1/2 ecosystem, with out even understanding they’re shifting between chains (all of it simply occurs fast n’ low cost within the background).

We will’t wait!