Lately , I’ve heard too many people complaining about Ethereum’s infrastructure, blaming VCs for investing in a lot of meaningless infrastructure, arguing that excess infrastructure is causing the industry’s difficulties, and trying to drive a wedge between application developers and infrastructure organizations. Create conflicts.
They seem to portray the Ethereum ecosystem as a "Niflheim" unsuitable for application development. (Niflheim is a cold, dark, misty world in Norse mythology. It is often described as an inhospitable place to live. ).
This statement is very unkind and unconvincing.
Clearing up misconceptions: What is real infrastructure?
Does it have a huge narrative? 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), frameworks, 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 use the form of git branches to describe the development of blockchain infrastructure.
The 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 L1 networks.
In the second stage, 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?
reduce monopoly
In a specific area, developers have more choices. Suppose you are the founder of a start-up company 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?
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: Extension Kit Wallet → Coinbase Smart Wallet/AA
Enrich application diversity
Provide developers with sufficient infrastructure to build 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 certification service: polyhedra
Trustless AI for Ethereum: ora
IP: StoryProtocol
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, which are enough to support and validate your early ideas.
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 resolve the friction between efficiency and user experience before building an app to prove its feasibility.
We may need to go through several stages before we can achieve a real mass adoption of infrastructure explosion period : multiple different solutions appear in the same field, similar to Layer 2'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 users better benefit distribution, ownership of digital resources, privacy and anti-censorship capabilities.
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 executing 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 PepsiCo executive John Sculley to attract him to join Apple.
Now I want to ask you a question:
“Do you want to spend your life making and trading Memecoin, 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's 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.
