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Ethereum has come under fire this year over scaling issues and longevity of the project. There will always be the detractors which support rival crypto platforms and the phalanxes of Bitcoin maximalists believing that BTC is the only fruit. One prominent VC investor sees no reasons to be concerned with ETH scaling issues.
Ethereum Scaling Not a Problem
There is a lot of work going on under the hood on the Ethereum network at the moment. The project has more developers than any other competing platform yet serial detractors continue to bash it. VC investors and former project manager at Coinbase, Linda Xie, is not worried as she recently explained.
People often say they're concerned about Ethereum scaling. My thoughts: 1) Eth 2.0 progress is coming along nicely 2) Great teams working on other promising solutions e.g. Optimistic & ZK Rollups 3) Certain use cases can take off that don’t require significant scaling e.g. DeFi
— Linda Xie (@ljxie) November 26, 2019
The first reason is that all scaling issues are likely to be solved with ETH 2.0. The development work on Serenity is progressing as planned Xie pointed out. The first step to the next iteration of the network will be Phase 0, Beacon Chain implementation.
Version 0.9.2 of the Phase 0 spec was released a few days ago with further tweaks to the system. Testnets such as the one from Prysmatic Labs continue to put Beacon Chain through its paces to ensure a smooth rollout to mainnet later next year. Istanbul must come first though and that hard fork has been scheduled for December 8 or thereabouts.
Phase 1 will be sharding implementation which will follow once Phase 0 has been successfully deployed. This will split the data processing responsibility of the blockchain among many nodes, allowing parallel transaction, storing, and processing of information which eases the load on the Ethereum mainchain and permits scaling.
Phase 2 which is even further down the roadmap includes the introduction of a new Virtual Machine – Ethereum-flavored Web Assembly (eWASM). This would allow web standard (W3C) smart contracts written in any language to be executed on Ethereum.
Xie added that there are great teams working on other promising solutions such as Optimistic and ZK Rollups. Optimistic is a promising technology for scaling general-purpose smart contracts on Ethereum in the near term while ZK Rollup is a more sophisticated technology which can be used for token transfers and specialized applications today.
Thirdly the Scalar Capital co-founder added;
“Certain use cases can take off that don’t require significant scaling e.g. DeFi”
DeFi has been touted as the future of decentralized finance and a system that is long overdue in a world where banks are drowning in their own debts. Even with the Ethereum price dump, DeFi markets continue to grow.
.@InstaDApp is having a good week! Over 63K ETH locked (+28%) today alone pic.twitter.com/FdHdDVYKee
— DeFi Pulse (@defipulse) November 26, 2019
With all of Ethereum’s scaling solutions and a healthy decentralized finance market there really is nothing to be concerned about. Price on the other hand is a little hard to swallow at the moment, but with ETH wallowing around the $150 level and a bright future ahead, it can only go one way in the long term.
Image from Shutterstock
