An article analyzing Ethereum’s mission and the multi-chain era

*Ethereum L1 will no longer be suitable for direct interaction by ordinary users; Ethereum L1 will mainly interact with various DAOs, cross-chain and cross-layer protocols.

*People will no longer focus on the expansion of Ethereum L1, nor will they fantasize about carrying tens of millions or even hundreds of millions of users on Ethereum L1. There is no need for that because this is not the mission of Ethereum L1.

*Ethereum will no longer be obsessed with the super scalability of its L1 in the future. This is not its true direction. Providing the most basic security for the crypto world is the essence of Ethereum’s existence.

*The multi-chain era has arrived and will continue to progress. Solana, BSC, Avalanche, Oasis, Polkadot, Cosmos, Fantom... L1 has its living space.

*Cross-layer is also part of the generalized cross-chain era. The future L2 will be a very important ecological network that carries a larger user group.

*The Ethereum ecosystem not only refers to Ethereum L1 and L1-based protocols, nor does it only refer to the L2 network, but also includes all EVM-compatible chains, and even BTC entering the Ethereum network.

*Ethereum provides the lowest level of security for the entire crypto space. L2 and EVM compatible chains will continue to develop, and in this process, Ethereum needs to provide security that matches them, and thus will continue to increase its value. With the advent of the era of tens of trillions of dollars, Ethereum is likely to become one of the most important infrastructures in the web3 era. As Ethereum transforms into POS, what does this mean for ETH? It has to carry ultra-large-scale security, and the size of its potential space will gradually match the scale of industry development.

*Non-Ethereum public chains do not have to worry about having no room for survival. After three years of evolution, non-Ethereum public chains have found their foothold, and the multi-chain era has taken shape. It is basically certain that they will play an important role in the future development of the industry.

*With the development of crypto games, the metaverse, DeFi, and Web3, the multi-chain pattern will be further strengthened. The characteristics of the blockchain itself determine that it will develop into a multi-chain pattern, and Ethereum cannot unify all chains. Having only one chain is also inconsistent with the trend of the blockchain itself.

*As the industry moves towards large-scale users, the multi-chain structure and Ethereum development become mutually beneficial, rather than competitive, because both need to cope with the rapid growth of the industry. As the industry pie grows, multi-chain will benefit, and Ethereum will also benefit.

*The arrival of Web3 will also accelerate the development of the multi-chain era. At the same time, new infrastructure will emerge, and its importance will be no less than that of today's public chain. The arrival of Web3 will promote more technological exploration, such as Truebit's exploration of off-chain computing and Teaproject's exploration of distributed computing, and realize the implementation of web3 applications while taking into account scalability, privacy and trustlessness. (For details, please refer to "web3: Exploration of the Scalability Road") In addition, in terms of storage and network, Arwearve, Filecoin, Helium, etc. are also continuing to explore, and more new explorations will appear in the future.

* The mainstream adoption of crypto applications will bring greater demand for privacy computing. The current transparency cannot meet future privacy requirements. For example, when medical data is used on blockchain, how can privacy be achieved while achieving the desired results? Whether it is the metaverse or other fields, there are needs in this regard. These are issues that need to be considered and resolved in the future. Protocols such as Oasis attempt to bring privacy to smart contracts. This will also be an important direction for future exploration.