How to view the current blockchain narrative and its future development

Author: cryptoHowe.eth, Web3Caff Researcher Source: X, @weihaoming

At this stage, the chain narrative or the narrative of mass adoption, we can find that they are all doing the same thing - wrapping various complex underlying operations layer by layer like an onion into something that is simple and easy for users to use.

From the chain narrative, we can find that its development process has the following stages:

1) Layer1: In the initial Layer1 competition, everyone optimized and improved in different infrastructure directions such as performance, transaction throughput, and composability, which also led to the emergence of Layer1 such as Solana, Polkadot, Cosmos, etc. after Ethereum.

The user experience and the performance improvement of the chain itself can attract users to interact in various ways (Mass adoption: let more users enter)

2) Layer2: Under the competition of this series of other Layer1 and the need for its own development, Ethereum, as the leader, also began to explore its expansion plan route. After that, the well-known Layer2 public chains such as Arbitrum, Optimism, and Polygon appeared.

Reduce costs and increase efficiency, so that users no longer need to worry about gas, and increase the activity on the chain (Mass adoption: maintain sufficient user activity)

3) Chain abstraction: After the development of the first two stages, we will find that there are not many overlaps between these different chains. For example, some of my assets on Polygon cannot be used on other chains such as Arbitrum and Ethereum. So is there a way to use an asset across different chains? This is how projects like ZetaChain, Particle Network, and AA Wallet came into being.

One ​​coin for multiple uses reduces cumbersome interaction steps, allowing users to easily perform various operations or manage various assets on different chains (Mass adoption: reducing the cost and threshold of interactive operations)

4) Chain aggregation: The development of the first three stages is mainly aimed at users, and I personally think that the development of chain aggregation is more biased towards project parties and developers, because the current various VMs use different technologies, so it is difficult for them to be compatible with each other. This requires project parties and developers who want to make multi-chain products to spend a lot of energy to use products in different programming languages.

Then the recently emerged projects such as Movement labs and Lumio are designed to achieve the effect of one-time deployment and multi-party availability, which allows project parties and developers to focus more on product research and optimization (Mass adoption: reduce development difficulty and cost, and accelerate the development of ecological projects)

Then this development process is actually very common. For example, in traditional Java development, it has developed from 1991 to the present, and has gone through Java, Java EE, SSM, SpringBoot, SpringCloud and other stages (don’t ask me why I know this, once you enter Java, it’s like a deep sea)

But at the same time, we need to realize that this Mass adoption approach is a double-edged sword. It allows users to complete a series of complex interactions with as few steps as possible, allowing developers to quickly develop Dapps.

But at the same time, it will make everyone form a chronic poison-like dependence. I believe that everyone is familiar with the term "use it or lose it". The Crypto world is a dark forest. Everyone needs to maintain enough awe. The knowledge that should be learned must still be learned, and the things that should be tried must still be tried. Don't be greedy for temporary convenience and abandon the real inner core.

In addition, for the chain ecology, lowering the development threshold is naturally a good thing, which can gather many ecological projects in a short period of time. But for Mass adoption, the real core is the quality of the project, not the quantity. For example, in the last cycle of DeFi Summer, what really attracted users and promoted the ecology were the emergence of projects such as Uniswap, Compound, and AAVE.

Therefore, we need to correctly understand the current chain narrative and its future development possibilities.