Is it worth it to build on ETHEREUM in 2022?
Every creator knows that the tools, materials, and medium you use for your creation are as defining as the creative intention when you build something.
When you develop Dapps (decentralized applications) such as Wallkanda in the tech world we live in, you have to choose the right blockchain to paint on.
Our vision from the start was to unlock sources of income for street artists that did not exist before. Web3 was the way to go.
We initially started to develop our solution on Polygon in November 2020 (https://polygonscan.com/address/0x486e4ccd2970c1971f41aa16eeff078f821f3e9a ). But during the NFT boom of 2021, we quickly realized that capital and trust are the two significant aspects of any market that are not ready for layer two solutions.
Although gas fees were already starting to look expensive, we took our chance. We decided to build on Ethereum despite the lack of ability to solve some serious scalability issues in short/medium term.
So, why choose a blockchain that is slow and expensive?
The Ethereum galaxy
Ethereum is a second-gen blockchain launched in 2015 with almost half a trillion $ market cap at writing. It is widely famous for being trustless, decentralized, censorship-resistant, and open source. It also has a fantastic community of researchers, developers, and contributors.
In other words, Ethereum is the ultimate R&D open network. It pushes the door of the internet of value, creating a network of digital assets with NFT, enabling a fairer financial system through DeFi.
This burgeoning ecosystem still constraint a slow but secured technical cocoon that is a victim of its success. Users pay more fees because of the congestion, making it unsuitable for everyday use. Thus, making ETH 2.0 urgent.
Flying away from Ethereum
Minting NFT on layer one makes it somehow valuable because of the high security and gas fee (cost of creation) associated with minting.
Yet, the transaction fees costing hundreds of dollars, a low TPS (transaction-per-second rate), and increased concerns for green IT have forced many people to move to other blockchains (such as Solana; Binance Chain, Avalanche, Near), layer twos or side chains of Ethereum (such as Polygon, Arbitrum, Opimism).
It might still last months before any significant changes happen. For specific use cases such as gaming where assets have low value and need fast transactions, Ethereum is unusable without a layer two solution.
As there is no exponential scaling solution, it might not make sense to stay on Ethereum layer one as the demand for NFT will keep increasing and will always congest the network.
HODLing on
Transitioning to Eth 2.0 means changing the engine while flying. It’s laborious and slow, especially when you hold a few hundred billion on your protocol.
With the current lack of clarity on which best alternative there is, we decided to stay on layer one and expose our users to:
- A strong network and community
- Durable — stored in the blocks of the second blockchain in market cap, established in 2015
- DeFi-ready
- Interoperable and composable with other NFTs, DAOs, and web3 tools
The next step is “The Merge,” moving from Proof-of-Work to the greener Proof-of-Stake. And preceding the rollout of shard chains will increase transaction throughput to 1000s of transactions per second.
Staying on Ethereum is still a bet. A risky one. But there are reasons to remain optimistic.
The solution being built.
The Ethereum community and researchers have been working on this problem for years with the next major version ETH 2.0. And maintaining the same levels of security and decentralization which are the critical parts of a public blockchain, while making it:
- More scalable
- More secure
- More sustainable
A post on the ethereum.org blog suggested that the merge to Proof-of-Stake could result in a 99.95% reduction in total energy use, with Proof-of-Stake being ~2000x more efficient than Proof-of-Work.
You can find more info here https://ethereum.org/en/energy-consumption/
Currently, miners tend to prefer green energy (report on bitcoin miners), and many Dapps (including ourselves) consider compensating for our carbon footprint through Toucan.
ETH 2.0 will be released in 2022. It will solve most of the current hot debates.
In our humble capabilities, we are bringing new solutions to help transition faster:
- With mint-on-demand: where an NFT is only minted if sold (artists don’t have to pay to create on a blockchain)
- Collab-splitter: in giving part of the NFT revenues & royalties to NGOs
- And more to come
Every good thing takes time.
The web3 ecosystem is still young and evolves at a swift pace. The future will be multichain and full of NFT.
We choose to focus on improving creatives’ lives. We can only handle the technicalities within our resources until there is a consensus on the best solution for our specific use cases.
Pivoting for the benefit of the community will be done, if necessary. For now, we focus on our strength and our vision.
We will pave the path along the way with the genius of the community and the wisdom of those who dare dream with us.
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Social links:
Twitter: https://twitter.com/wallkanda
Website: https://wallkanda.art/
Discord: https://discord.gg/VW5YZdmpGH
