For far too long, the narrative has been dominated by short-term solutions with unsustainable designs. It’s never too late to fight back and define what makes this industry sustainable and worthwhile. I have written mostly about rollups, and mostly in 2021 — but you’d have caught the subtext being social…

I have expressed regret multiple times this year for helping propagate the “modular blockchain” meme. There are two significant problems with this: firstly, “modular” is a pretty generic term that has been used by multiple projects to define very different things. …

I have been guilty of shilling the “modular blockchains” meme last year, of course alongside more influential players like Bankless, Celestia, The Daily Gwei and others who brought it to mainstream attention. This year, I have not really used the term “modular blockchains”. To be very clear, modularizing absolutely remains…

You may have read about how execution layer can be separated from settlement & data availability. But an interesting trend is unfolding where the execution layer itself can be further modularized. With Arbitrum Nitro and Optimism Cannon, you have an “EVM sandwich” with an intermediate — WASM for Nitro; MIPS…

Currently, there’s a clear bottleneck at play with monolithic blockchains: state growth. The direct solutions to this are statelessness, validity proofs, state expiry and PBS. We’ll see rollups adopt similar solutions, with the unique advantage of having high-frequency state expiry as they can simply reconstruct state from the base layer…

I have never written a post about “ORs vs ZKRs”. They are both great. My writing has been all about being against cripplingly inefficient, unscalable, insecure and irresilient monolithic L1s that we have seen grotesque misallocation of capital towards. My only aim is to see blockchains scale to global ubiquity…

In short: Ethereum scales with rollups & data availability sampling. But what does that mean? Firstly, I’ll note that the Ethereum roadmap is evolving, so whatever you may have read is already out of date. Especially all the 2018/19 articles about sharding and “Ethereum 2.0” — yeah, those are obsolete…

Alright, I’m compelled to do this. I don’t have much time, so this will be an oversimplified introduction to danksharding (featuring PBS + crLists). Danksharding turns Ethereum into a unified settlement and data availability layer. Neither settlement, nor data availability sampling, are new concepts. What is brilliant is unifying them…

Trust is a powerful feature, not a bug. It’s one of the fundamental tenets behind our species’ wild success. Some crypto utopians may argue for a 100% trustless future, but there are two significant issues with this: a) there’s always weak trust involved, even in Bitcoin; and b) trust is…