Author: Rickey; Translated by: TechFlow
Recently, I have heard too many people complain about Ethereum's infrastructure, accusing venture capital firms of investing in a lot of meaningless infrastructure, arguing that excess infrastructure has caused difficulties in the industry, and trying to create conflicts between application developers and infrastructure organizations. They seem to portray the Ethereum ecosystem as a "Niflheim" that is not suitable for application development (Niflheim is a cold, dark, foggy world in Norse mythology. It is usually described as an unsuitable place to live).
This statement is very unfriendly and hard to believe.
We need to clear up some misunderstandings: What is infrastructure really?
Does it have a grand narrative? Is it backed by top VCs? Is it creating a lot of bubbles? Is it full of nihilism? Did you lose your investment? EBOLA?
The actual infrastructure includes:
Protocols, EIPs (Ethereum Improvement Proposals), frameworks, tool stacks, and non-application layer blockchain services.
Used to solve specific problems and improve the efficiency, user experience, decentralization, security and privacy of applications.
The code is open source and subject to community contribution and review.
Provide free solutions or even complete public products to application developers.
Built by a group of truly idealistic and optimistic people.
Development of blockchain infrastructure
I prefer to describe the development of blockchain infrastructure in terms of git branches.
The blockchain is similar to a new git branch. In the first phase of this branch, infrastructure such as cryptography, P2P networks, and consensus algorithms are added. These infrastructures can be used to build Bitcoin, Ethereum, and other L1 networks.
In the second phase, various Ethereum-based tools, facilities, and services have emerged, which developers can use to build various wallets, DeFi applications, and Layer2 networks. Interestingly, after this submission, an on-chain branch was created. The ultimate goal of this branch is to store user data completely on the chain and implement the logic of the application through smart contracts. Developers can implement truly verifiable, composable, and interoperable on-chain applications. At present, we are in the on-chain infrastructure construction stage of this branch, and I think we are on the right track.
What does infrastructure bring us?
1. Reduce monopoly
In a specific area, developers have more choices. Suppose you are the founder of a startup and want to provide transaction data query services for your network. Are you willing to pay a high fee to purchase 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. This is how my application technology stack has changed in 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 Wallet → Coinbase Smart Wallet / AA
3. Enriching application diversity
Provide developers with enough infrastructure so that they can create interesting applications. A few years ago, we mainly built DeFi and NFT-related applications in the Ethereum ecosystem. Now, you can use a variety of infrastructure to build more interesting products and applications:
Cloud Platform: Fleek
Authentication: Privy
Games: MUD, Dojo, Paima
Wallet toolkit: Onchain Kit, rainbowkit
Open source reward: tea
Full-stack ZK proof service: polyhedra
Ethereum’s Trustless AI: Oracle
IP: StoryProtocol
4. Reduce application startup costs
In fact, you only need to pay the gas fee for deploying the contract. Since the infrastructure is complete enough, even a small development team can quickly integrate infrastructure services and realize the expected functions. Almost all infrastructure service providers will provide free plans for developers, which are enough to support and verify your early ideas.
5. Accelerating mass adoption
This depends on the changes that infrastructure brings to non-financialized applications and user experience. I think this is also the reason why many developers have shifted from developing consumer crypto applications to developing infrastructure. It’s not that developers are too focused on technology, but they must first solve the friction between efficiency and user experience, and then build applications to verify their feasibility.
We may need to go through several stages to achieve true mass adoptionInfrastructure explosion period: multiple different solutions appear in the same field, similar to Layer2's OP, ZK, ZKEVM and Plasma. Infrastructure elimination period: the market will eliminate those infrastructures that have no practical significance and rely only on tokens. Infrastructure stabilization period: some truly valuable infrastructures 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 the same user experience to consumers as Web2 services. Users do not need to understand how blockchain works to use various applications, which can bring users better distribution of benefits, ownership of digital resources, privacy, and anti-censorship capabilities.
6. Reduce the impact of centralization
Imagine if all our applications use the same infrastructure service, until one day, a country's government shuts it down, or even arrests its core code contributors or CEO, making it impossible to provide services to applications. But our infrastructure services are sufficient, and there are other alternative solutions, so applications will not stop running due to the paralysis of a certain infrastructure.
Continue to build infrastructure
"Do you want to sell sugar water for the rest of your life, or do you want to come with me and change the world?" These are the words Steve Jobs told PepsiCo executive John Sculley in an effort to entice him to join Apple.
Now I want to ask you a question:
“Do you want to make and trade Memecoin your whole life, or do you want to build infrastructure and change the crypto world?”
Infrastructure is the driving force of the industry, it 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 believe in crypto? Why believe in chain? Become the one who builds the cathedral. If you don't think you are building a cathedral, change your job.
