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polynyaCrypto's broken moral compass
I’ll begin by saying - obviously, there’s good in crypto. Indeed, I have written over 150 blog posts over the last 3 years about them (and plenty more with previous pseudonyms), and making the best of crypto and related tech. But none of that matters right now - things have swung too far away to the bad side. (Addendum: just for more clarity,FarcasterA decentralized social networkhttps://farcaster.xyzOver the years, crypto has declined into ever more predatory and evil territory. In 2010, the...
polynyaA Vision of Ethereum - 2025
Please consider this as a work of hard science fiction. I had written present tense prose (from 2025’s perspective), but had to rework this post to add in some future tense (i.e. 2021 perspective) for context so it has turned out to be a total mess! So, it’s a terrible work of fiction, but certainly more informative than it was before. — Ethereum is the global settlement layer. Or more technically, the global security and data availability layer. There’s a flourishing ecosystem of external ex...
polynyaThe horrific inefficiencies of monolithic blockchains
Nothing here is new, and indeed, I’ve repeated all of this ad nauseum in 2021. Moreover, it’s completely absurd the industry is mostly obsessing over infrastructure in this day and age, when there are dozens, if not hundreds, of L1s and L2s alike which have barely any non-spam utilization after years of being live. Not to mention exponential growth of blockspace supply incoming in 2024, 2025 and beyond with basically an infinite supply of data availability (with different properties). The ove...
polynyaCrypto's broken moral compass
I’ll begin by saying - obviously, there’s good in crypto. Indeed, I have written over 150 blog posts over the last 3 years about them (and plenty more with previous pseudonyms), and making the best of crypto and related tech. But none of that matters right now - things have swung too far away to the bad side. (Addendum: just for more clarity,FarcasterA decentralized social networkhttps://farcaster.xyzOver the years, crypto has declined into ever more predatory and evil territory. In 2010, the...
polynyaA Vision of Ethereum - 2025
Please consider this as a work of hard science fiction. I had written present tense prose (from 2025’s perspective), but had to rework this post to add in some future tense (i.e. 2021 perspective) for context so it has turned out to be a total mess! So, it’s a terrible work of fiction, but certainly more informative than it was before. — Ethereum is the global settlement layer. Or more technically, the global security and data availability layer. There’s a flourishing ecosystem of external ex...
polynyaThe horrific inefficiencies of monolithic blockchains
Nothing here is new, and indeed, I’ve repeated all of this ad nauseum in 2021. Moreover, it’s completely absurd the industry is mostly obsessing over infrastructure in this day and age, when there are dozens, if not hundreds, of L1s and L2s alike which have barely any non-spam utilization after years of being live. Not to mention exponential growth of blockspace supply incoming in 2024, 2025 and beyond with basically an infinite supply of data availability (with different properties). The ove...
Share Dialog
Share Dialog
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, economic, and technical sustainability. While the catastrophic failure of the Terra blockchain (aside from UST meltdown) was an extreme case, the cold hard reality is that almost all L1s today are faced with a similar outcome - just on a much longer timeframe. A lot of this will also apply to applications and rollups, but I’m focusing on L1s/settlement layers here.
Economic
Low inflation, <1%
Predictable security budget over the long term (note: hard caps may be dangerous)
Strong value accrual to the base asset, preferably canceling out most of the inflation (note: high deflation is an anomaly that implies undervaluation, and will be corrected by the markets in the long term)
Solutions like PBS (proposer-builder separation) necessary so most MEV is captured by the base asset
Do the above, and it’ll gain monetary premium
Monetary premium → higher economic security, more stable settlement layer and base asset → more demand and monetary premium virtuous cycle
Validity proofs, statelessness, and fraud proofs for the execution layers; data availability proofs for the data layer. This may not sound economic, but to scale to millions of nodes this may be necessary for economic sustainability.
Social
Very wide token distribution
Easy to verify transactions (statelessness, validity proofs)
Very wide network of nodes, unsubsidized by centralized entities, with geographic, software (incl. clients) and hardware diversity
Robust and well-coordinated social layer with concrete plans for emergency situations like social forks
Reasonable transaction fees (~$0.01)
Not too difficult to produce blocks, with a long tail of dozens of thousands of indie stakers
Permissionless block building with PBS
[Addendum] Enshrined staking derivative
[Addendum] Harmful MEV protection (suggested by @bezzenberger)
Technical
Multiple robust client implementations
Validity and fraud proofs, statelessness, data availability proofs - these are critical ingredients where the social, economic, and technical collide
State expiry and history expiry
Multiple solutions for accessing expired state and history (also social)
Ossified settlement layer
Parallel transaction execution
It is 100% impossible for a monolithic chain to achieve any of these. So, as mentioned above, validity, fraud and da proofs become the critically essential tools to get us there.
With the above proofs, materializing in rollups and data layers, maximal sustainability is theoretically possible. To date, not a single settlement layer is anywhere close to satisfying this checklist, and it’ll be a herculean effort to get there. I expect only one, maybe two at most, to ever achieve all of this to any reasonable degree. Right now, maybe one or two are even attempting it.
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, economic, and technical sustainability. While the catastrophic failure of the Terra blockchain (aside from UST meltdown) was an extreme case, the cold hard reality is that almost all L1s today are faced with a similar outcome - just on a much longer timeframe. A lot of this will also apply to applications and rollups, but I’m focusing on L1s/settlement layers here.
Economic
Low inflation, <1%
Predictable security budget over the long term (note: hard caps may be dangerous)
Strong value accrual to the base asset, preferably canceling out most of the inflation (note: high deflation is an anomaly that implies undervaluation, and will be corrected by the markets in the long term)
Solutions like PBS (proposer-builder separation) necessary so most MEV is captured by the base asset
Do the above, and it’ll gain monetary premium
Monetary premium → higher economic security, more stable settlement layer and base asset → more demand and monetary premium virtuous cycle
Validity proofs, statelessness, and fraud proofs for the execution layers; data availability proofs for the data layer. This may not sound economic, but to scale to millions of nodes this may be necessary for economic sustainability.
Social
Very wide token distribution
Easy to verify transactions (statelessness, validity proofs)
Very wide network of nodes, unsubsidized by centralized entities, with geographic, software (incl. clients) and hardware diversity
Robust and well-coordinated social layer with concrete plans for emergency situations like social forks
Reasonable transaction fees (~$0.01)
Not too difficult to produce blocks, with a long tail of dozens of thousands of indie stakers
Permissionless block building with PBS
[Addendum] Enshrined staking derivative
[Addendum] Harmful MEV protection (suggested by @bezzenberger)
Technical
Multiple robust client implementations
Validity and fraud proofs, statelessness, data availability proofs - these are critical ingredients where the social, economic, and technical collide
State expiry and history expiry
Multiple solutions for accessing expired state and history (also social)
Ossified settlement layer
Parallel transaction execution
It is 100% impossible for a monolithic chain to achieve any of these. So, as mentioned above, validity, fraud and da proofs become the critically essential tools to get us there.
With the above proofs, materializing in rollups and data layers, maximal sustainability is theoretically possible. To date, not a single settlement layer is anywhere close to satisfying this checklist, and it’ll be a herculean effort to get there. I expect only one, maybe two at most, to ever achieve all of this to any reasonable degree. Right now, maybe one or two are even attempting it.
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