Is the public chain's expansion path陷入 a new round of confusion?
Innovation and storytelling have almost come to a halt. The previously frantic competition for high TPS and low fees now seems uninteresting and meaningless. So where do we go from here?The New Wave Triggered by Major Congestion
For those who entered the Web3 industry a few years ago, the "century congestion" on-chain is certainly memorable. One instance was the rise of DeFi applications led by Compound, which triggered the "DeFi Summer." Due to the surge in on-chain activities, the popular Ethereum network became extremely congested, and users had to wait a long time to complete a transaction. This congestion was fatal for specific businesses like lending and liquidation.
The second instance was the explosive popularity of blockchain cat games, which led to the NFT FOMO. The side effect was a skyrocketing of on-chain transaction fees, making it difficult for other on-chain applications to operate normally.
These instances of major congestion prompted developers like Vitalik Buterin to focus on scalability, while more people began to pay attention to the public chain scalability track.
Temporarily Lost in Scalability
The current scalability battle led by Ethereum has actually gone through a considerable amount of time, with extensive exploration, attempts, and debates in the early stages. From sidechains, state channels, and sharding, to the now absolutely mainstream Rollup Layer2 solutions, along with the unexpected emergence of "catfish" Solana, users can clearly feel that issues like congestion and high transaction fees have been significantly addressed.
However, everyone suddenly realized that innovation and storytelling have almost come to a halt. The previously frantic competition for high TPS and low fees now seems to lack highlights and significance. So where do we go next?
Complex Calculations on Blockchain Will Become the Next Milestone
In fact, the overall direction of blockchain technology development has not changed, which is to enable blockchain to "go out," allowing more businesses and organizations to be built on blockchain.
Now we can see that traditional industries and Web3 are in a state of mutual proximity and embrace. The "Web3 frenzy" triggered by the last bull market has allowed more people from traditional industries to see blockchain and Web3, and they have begun to use blockchain technology to transform key aspects of traditional businesses, such as building a massive AI computing power resource pool based on decentralized networks to break the monopoly of industry giants.
On the other hand, the direction of effort is to enable blockchain to do more things, specifically complex calculations on public chains. Compared to solving congestion and high fees, complex calculations on public chains represent an excellent opportunity to tap into new market increments. Research shows that this market is expected to reach $1.81 trillion by the end of 2036, with a compound annual growth rate of 72.9%. However, this part of the market is currently dominated by traditional internet service providers, and the value of public chains has not been fully realized.
Public chains cannot merely serve as vehicles for simple transactions; in the future, they will be required to handle more complex logic and data, which will also become an important indicator of public chain competitiveness. Of course, the innovation space for complex calculations on public chains is also highly imaginative. For example, distributed supercomputing public chains can provide efficient computing services through off-chain computing nodes to meet the needs of AI model training and big data processing.
Complex calculations on public chains represent a massive systemic project, involving high-performance computing, distributed cloud, distributed hardware, and more. Although there are certain difficulties, we still see that some emerging public chains have already begun exploring this field. For instance, the PandoraChain project has been dedicated to integrating subsystems, resources, and interfaces related to complex calculations into a single system under one framework, enabling public chains to undertake a broader range of business scenarios. Once Pandora's system is established, it will possess dominant competitiveness in the public chain field.
