What is a good mainnet expansion plan?

Author: AmyWang Source: @AmyWang2010

In a recent Space themed "Love leads to blame, what happened to Ethereum?", several investment research bloggers discussed Ethereum from the perspective of past and current problems. Crypto researcher AmyWang wrote an article to share her thoughts after listening to the discussion.

Thanks for participating in this discussion. The following is a review and summary of yesterday's content, sorting out the main concerns and discussion points about the Ethereum ecosystem:

Core controversial points

1. Liquidity fragmentation and stagnant main network experience

• Currently, the liquidity fragmentation and operation experience of the Ethereum main network are stagnant, making user loss a trend.

• The key to this issue is: Can dozens to hundreds of L2s really achieve expansion? When will L2 start to feed back to L1, and how to achieve it?

2. The disconnect between technological innovation and actual needs

• After the expansion, the technological innovation led by the foundation gradually deviated from the actual needs, and even caused the phenomenon of "feudal lords dividing the land"-style autonomy and the use of relatives, resulting in bad money driving out good money.

Current industry phenomena and limitations of the VC model

We have long discussed the current industry phenomena: what we oppose is not VC itself, but short-term, repetitive infrastructure construction and new concept stacking. These bubbles put users at a disadvantage under the guidance of rapid financing and listing. Users need to bear high gas fees, but ultimately cannot get the corresponding experience improvement, which leads to their gradual loss:

• Startups are oriented towards foundations and exchanges, with financing and listing as the orientation. Users become data supporters, pay handling fees and work hard for the project parties, and ultimately get the FDV pie that cannot be undertaken.

• The initial proposal of Ethereum inscriptions was widely questioned and ridiculed. Although from a technical point of view, the way of writing text content as a block annotation field is crude and simple, this attempt also reveals another possibility of blockchain: Do users need to pay for unnecessary on-chain calculations? Is there a better low-cost expansion path?

Question on the L2 model

In my opinion, some L2 models that require 24 hours to arrive or even contain backdoors, use the volume to create a false TVL boom, but lose the core advantages and original intention of blockchain. More importantly, the main network expansion relies on a large number of L2 couplings and is currently not sustainable:

• Relying on faith to maintain interests is difficult to sustain in the face of real interests.

How to judge the pros and cons of the main network expansion plan?

Borrowing the four evaluation criteria of Bitcoin ecology proposed by @weihaoming, we can define the basic requirements of Ethereum expansion plan:

1. Native technical innovation: including technical breakthroughs in mainnet asset issuance and expansion.

2. Inherit the security of the mainnet: no bridge, no backdoor, no multi-signature privileges, and cannot be closed.

3. Empower ETH economic model: bring deflationary effect to the mainnet ETH.

4. Lower the threshold for users: with low cost, seamless migration and universal interoperability interface.

Future expansion possibilities

Under the wave of inscriptions last year, the Ethereum eths community has experienced a year of accumulation and growth, supporting the founding team through direct donations and Gitcoin donations, and exploring the path of expansion without leaving the main network.

For example, the birth of the http://facet.org platform follows the above four standards: a public goods expansion plan without team issuance, airdrops, and reservations, and is launched only with community support. Can such an expansion plan bring new possibilities to the current Ethereum? Let's wait and see.