The following is a guest post by Marc Boiron, CEO of Polygon Labs.
In a world of fake news, wrong information and decreasing belief in traditional institutions, Blockchain has to bridge the gap by bringing something incredibly powerful and completely unique to the table: confidentiality. Or, at least, it should.
Unfortunately, Blockchain has always suffered under his own division, which have prevented the decentralization revolution from fulfilling its potential. In 2024 things started to change. We saw incredible technical progress to unite the broken blockchain ecosystem. This year we will finally see decentralization starting his promises to bridge the gap.
The inevitability of fragmented ecosystems
If Crypto, Defi and Web3 were fully formed and with a uniform, interoperable set of standards, you would rightly be suspicious. A real decentralized ecosystem – one that is not monopolized by a single entity – will be fragmented by its nature.
But decentralization came for an initial costs. New technologies and platforms developed organically and with little reference to (or interoperability with) each other. This was recorded in discrete silos, which brought serious limitations to the possibilities and ambitions of individual chains.
And now for the good news. Some of the smartest spirits and most innovative companies have worked on this problem, and especially in the past 12 months we have made spectacular progress. Together we build infrastructure that connects chains, daps and communities, and we are coordinated incentives and design systems that can endure the test of time.
The most important thing is that we do this without betraying the underlying principles of decentralization.
A world without considerations: to an aggregated future
Layer -2 (L2) networks would be the silver bullet that solved the interoperability and liquidity shortage of Blockchain, but they created as many problems as they were solved. It is true that L2’s have stimulated the transaction capacity, but they remain silent – even among rollups that claim to be interoperable.
As Vitalik Buterin recently pointed out: “Ethereum should feel like an ecosystem, not 34 different block chains.“ And that is a very conservative number; Unfortunately, there are more like hundreds of block chains.
In the meantime, alternatives such as Solana and other Alt L1s want to be so fast and integrated that individual networks are not necessary. But here is the reality: no chain, no matter how powerful, can handle the full weight of a blockchain-driven internet. There is always a ceiling.
We recently saw great progress in the direction of unification, led by the agglayer. The agglayer uses zero knowledge (ZK) to share chains-l1s, L2S, EVM, SVM, SVM and everything else they can share liquidity, state and users in a seamless, low-latency and safe way.
If 2024 was the year of the agglayer, then 2025 they will start transforming the ecosystem, which brings a large number of new possibilities and services to a global market. Because Rollup clusters can connect to the agglayer and still be able to work with each other, it creates a system with maximum security, sovereignty and unity.
It brings crypto, web3, Defi and more together in a single “Ecosystem of Equals”, where the unique possibilities of each chain go together to create something much bigger than the sum of its parts.
Through the use of ZKEVM or ZKVM-driven unification layers, developers can build with lower costs and faster speeds, while they remain anchored for the unparalleled security and censorship resistance of Ethereum. At the same time, these protocols break down the ‘walled gardens’ from Web3, allowing ecosystems to share liquidity and work seamlessly together.
This mutual connection does not only help to help developers – it comes for everyone in web3. It creates stronger network effects, making the space more fairly, including and more accessible. It brings back the feeling of the internet, one that feels united almost everywhere in the world. And when we start 2025, this momentum grows alone.
But what does a uniform experience actually do Garlic like it?
Casestudy: How to define Stablecoins USD-Pegers again
One of the most important examples of community -oriented trends that have seen explosive growth this year is the rapid rise of revenue stablecoins, such as Ausd and Susde.
In contrast to traditional USD-PEG inkens such as USDT or USDC, which are supported by funds invested in assets with a low risk, their revenue counterparts share the profit with each holder, so that everyone can benefit from them only the issue.
By generating the yield native in Defi and by crypto derivatives and traditional finances (Tradfi), this new type of stablecoins not only coordinates the stimuli of all network participants, but also benefits from an aggregated approach to blockchain, which guarantees seamless interoperability between blockchains.
Once native aggregated, an active is available in all block chains that are connected to the aggregated network – such as the agglayer. When yielding stablecoins are beaten in this way, they can effectively help to further expand crypto and evolve in a fairer and more inclusive way, which stimulates the long -term participation in Defi and Web3 as a whole. Similarly attractive for professional investors and regular users, these assets represent a new dimension of Community-First Finance, promoting financial inclusion and democratization of access to investment options that are rather limited to Tradfi.
They offer a unique opportunity to earn yield while retaining exposure to stable assets, making them an attractive option for both seasoned investors and those new in the crypto space. By offering a safe and consistent yield, these stablecoins promote financial inclusion and democratize access to investment options that are rather limited to traditional finances.
Blockchain’s beautiful future starts in 2025
Trust in everything, from politics to institutions, has been steadily eroded for years. Thanks to a large part of the digital revolution of the past 30 years, the world is already hopelessly divided. Blockchain offers a compelling alternative future in fields that are as diverse as finances and digital identity. Until recently, fragmentation threatened to rob us of this profit
Timited by the paradigm shift from the blockchain industry to unification in 2024, these trends are ready to accelerate the mass acceptance enormously by making Web3 financially and interoperable than never before. The bright future of Blockchain therefore starts again in 2025, when we will see more innovations that bring together historically decentralized ecosystems as ‘the internet of the future’.
