Cryptocurrencies are facilitating the rise of Web3, the Internet of the future built on decentralized blockchain networks.
Web3, as envisioned by the Web3 Foundation, will be a public internet where data and content are registered on blockchains, tokenized, or managed and accessed on peer-to-peer distributed networks.
Co-founder of NEAR Protocol, Illia Polosukhin, lays out his vision for Web3 and explains why Ethereum may not play a prominent role in its foundation.
Credit: Cointelegraph YouTube channel
Illia Polosukhin the co-founder of NEAR protocol, thinks Ethereum development has a focus problem. He says engineers should be fixing crucial issues that will enable Web3 to scale to billions of users.
“We need simplicity of usage. We need easy programmability. We need composability that is natural to the applications. I don’t see the current Ethereum evolutions targeting any of those goals,” Polosukhin said in an exclusive interview with Cointelegraph.
Polosukhin envisions a new version of the internet, or Web3, in which the user will retain full ownership of their own data and assets. He believes this new iteration of the internet won’t be based on a single “killer app” but instead a combination of different apps.
“Our goal is that users [are] in control of their data. They’re in control of their money and assets. They are able to govern these platforms, which means there is no need to build an everything-fulfilling platform,” he said.
Thus, improving both blockchain technology’s scalability and interoperability is key to building the foundations of Web3. According to Polosukhin, while Ethereum remains the dominant smart-contract platform, it lacks NEAR’s focus on achieving those goals.
Specifically, he thinks Ethereum’s reliance on layer 2 solutions or rollups to solve its scalability problem could lead to tradeoffs in terms of composability.
“Rollups naturally will kind of create less compatibility and create more sub-spaces in which things are happening,” he said.
As a layer-1 solution alternative to Ethereum, NEAR aims to solve the scalability issue by leveraging sharding technology, a process that splits the protocol’s infrastructure into several segments, without sacrificing composability.
“By actually scaling up the composable structure, we allow to have a lot more applications running closely with each other with the same financial models,” explains Polosukhin.
A core component of NEAR’s composibility feature is the Rainbow Bridge, a protocol that allows a free transfer of assets from the Ethereum blockchain and vice-versa.
“That allows not just to send tokens around, but it actually allows to read the state of each chain from the other chain so you can actually pass any generic messages between them and execute contracts.” he explained.
NEAR was one of the fastest-growing development communities in 2021. According to Polosukhin, one of the protocol’s main attractivity consists in offering popular and easy-to-use programming languages such as Java and Rust. Another factor was the $800 million fund announced last year for developers to build on the NEAR protocol.
“Buiding development of core components and then other people can build on their own companies and projects have been very powerful”, he said.
Natalie Kandaurova, Marketing Manager at 4ire Labs stated in her publication on Medium: “The greatest benefit of NEAR is the sharded nature of the platform. The problem for Bitcoin and Ethereum is the low scalability and computational bottlenecks arising from the major philosophy of blockchain. Thousands (and even millions) of redundant, identical operations are undertaken by every node in these blockchains, reducing the number of transactions per second and imposing severe limits on the blockchain’s functionality.”
However, NEAR is not the only “game in town”, there are many other promising Web3 crypto and blockchain projects that are leading the transformation including:
- Cirus which is bringing data and Web3 together by enabling users to turn their data into cryptocurrency, and use it as the onramp to the new digital economy.
- Frontier which makes it easy for users to access DeFi and NFTs using its mobile app.
- Telos, a third-generation blockchain platform that’s fast, scalable, accessible, fully decentralized with feeless transactions, making it the ideal EVM for real world use Web3 projects and Dapps. Last year, Telos partnered with Hive to focus on Web3 projects. Telos is the only blockchain to support both leading industry protocols (EOSIO C++ and Solidity EVM). This opens the network up to an extremely large pool of developers, which boasts already over 100 dApps and integrations.
Summary
The era of Web3 is arriving fast, and the sheer breadth of new technologies rolled out to recreate and improve the troubled Web2 experience in a decentralized environment ought to shock anyone who hasn’t been watching the latest developments.
Decentralised app platform Ethereum still has the most Web3 developers, but it’s all to play for with rivals growing faster. NEAR is one of the competitors to Ethereum 2.0. NEAR offers scalability, striking user-friendliness, and flexibility. It is also much faster than Ethereum, the world’s most used blockchain.
A variety of alternative crypto projects look promising and are approaching the Web3 applications and services space powered by blockchains, crypto-assets (fungible and non-fungible), artificial intelligence, and metaverses fast.
Source via this site: Ethereum failing to target core Web3 issues, says NEAR co-founder
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