Ethereum 2.0 is coming, what should other public chains do?

On December 1, the beacon chain of Ethereum 2.0 Phase 0 was officially launched. This moment marks the official start of Ethereum 2.0. Most people have infinite expectations for this behemoth. However, all this is just the beginning, and Ethereum 2.0 still has a long way to go.

The main reason why Ethereum 2.0 has attracted so much attention is actually the bottleneck currently faced by blockchain. Many people believe that it is the impossible triangle problem. Of course, to be more specific, we can also think of it as a problem with the current blockchain transaction confirmation speed. This is also the reason why the blockchain system cannot be used on a larger scale.

As for the existing public chains, EOS is a typical representative with a relatively fast speed. When the EOS network is busy, according to the design, users still face the problem of insufficient resources. Often, sending a transaction will occupy more than one hundred yuan of EOS resources. This is also where the EOS system is criticized, and it may often form a dead loop.

As for other public chains, many people may have experienced them and feel that they are pretty good. On the one hand, there is no congestion, and on the other hand, the transaction fees are super low, so they think that this public chain is very powerful. In fact, this is just an illusion. That is, when you feel that a public chain has a good experience, in fact, many times it is because not too many people are using this public chain, so it will naturally be very smooth. When the number of users or the number of transactions suddenly increases, many public chains cannot hold on.

At this time, many factions proposed multiple solutions, which can be roughly divided into several categories. The first category is capacity expansion, the second category is the second-layer network layer2, and the third category is a combination of technologies such as sharding technology that most people are familiar with.

That is to say, from 2014 to the present, in fact, on the technical level, we have basically been discussing countermeasures for the transaction speed and transaction confirmation time of the blockchain. Decentralization is naturally the current consensus of blockchain projects and a point of view that is difficult to change. Therefore, we can only try our best to improve the transaction speed of the blockchain under the existing conditions. This is the core task of the development of the blockchain.

Of course, at present, both capacity expansion and layer 2 networks have their limitations, which is why people have turned their attention to technical aspects such as sharding. Ethereum has long ago determined in its roadmap that it will eventually switch to POS, in fact, in order to cope with the contradiction between network transaction needs and the current network load.

In other words, if Ethereum 2.0 can be fully realized, it will mean that the future development of blockchain technology will be based on Ethereum, and other public chains will eventually run on the Ethereum network in some form. In this way, Ethereum may really become the "world computer" in everyone's eyes.

Since the goal is too ambitious, the development of Ethereum 2.0 certainly faces great challenges. However, despite this, with the current market value of Ethereum and the strength of the Ethereum Foundation, they basically have no worries about not having enough money to do this. Therefore, generally speaking, for Ethereum to achieve its goals, it will inevitably require a bull market to set new highs. Otherwise, the huge expenses may put the Ethereum project into trouble. Therefore, from a certain perspective, everyone should not worry about the price of Ethereum.

It should be noted here that although there is no need to worry about the development of Ethereum 2.0, what will happen to other public chains in the future? This is what the public needs to pay attention to, after all, many people still hold a lot of altcoins.

As mentioned above, in the past few years, the blockchain technology has always been aimed at improving transaction speed. Because of this, major public chains have been exploring their own technologies, and finally formed the current situation of flourishing. In other words, no one knows the future direction of technological development, so we can only explore from multiple angles.

Exploration from multiple angles is just like brainstorming. Different people stand at different angles and propose their own solutions to the same problem. Then they use practical actions to prove whether what they do is right or wrong. This is why we see so many public chain projects in the currency circle and they are booming. But once Ethereum 2.0 comes up, these projects will face a direct problem, which is what to do with their own public chains?

Simply put, Ethereum 2.0 will take away the jobs of other public chains, making them useless. The simplest example is that most people in a community have shopping needs, so someone opens a lot of small stores to provide shopping convenience for everyone. But suddenly one day a small store becomes rich and expands its territory to a large shopping mall. Then, naturally, the business of those small stores will be much worse.

In this case, the natural public chain needs to seek its own development rather than sit and wait for death. Although there may be fewer ways out at this time, there are still solutions. At present, there may be two possible strategies.

The first is to join the Ethereum ecosystem, become a part of it, and then enable yourself to survive.

This is easy to understand. It's like if your small store cannot compete with a large shopping mall that sells cheap and affordable goods with a wide range of products, then you can contract a counter in the mall and sell the goods yourself, so that you can survive.

It is not a fantasy for other public chains to join the Ethereum ecosystem. At least it is possible from a technical perspective, because the current cross-chain technology is already very good. Therefore, by connecting their own public chains with Ethereum and providing cross-chain channels, their own ecosystems can be integrated with Ethereum. Naturally, they will not become Ethereum's competitors, but as a part of the development of the Ethereum ecosystem, they will expand the Ethereum ecosystem and survive. It is naturally a win-win situation.

The second is to unite with other potential public chains to share the market and form another ecosystem different from Ethereum.

This possibility naturally exists. For example, cross-chain representatives such as Polkadot and Cosmos can actually combine different public chains. The problem of slow transaction speed we mentioned earlier can actually be solved to a large extent by using cross-chain.

The core of cross-chain is to create tokens of another public chain on one public chain, and then use smart contracts to connect them. The effect is actually to build many layer 2 on the previous public chain. If this public chain reaches congestion, you can use smart contracts to exchange your own coins for coins on other public chains, and then complete related transactions on other public chains, and finally exchange them back through cross-chain, thus completing the transaction.

Although this method theoretically has no upper limit on its use, it is actually similar to the sharding of Ethereum 2.0. Sharding can actually be seen as different public chains combined together, except that Ethereum has a beacon chain to manage it. If other public chains are combined, then it will be like a distributed network. There is no unified management level and no unified rules. The cooperation between different public chains can only be constrained through cross-chain technology and related rules, which is a method with higher freedom.

Summarize

In any case, the emergence of Ethereum 2.0 will bring great opportunities for the development of the blockchain industry. At present, Ethereum 2.0 is the best solution to solve the bottleneck of transaction speed, and it is also a solution with great expectations. However, for other public chains, once Ethereum 2.0 succeeds, they may face the risk of being abandoned by users. Therefore, for other public chains, if they see this crisis earlier and lay out countermeasures earlier, they will not face the risk of being eliminated. This is also what most public chain project parties need to think about and face.