For years, crypto skeptics and believers alike have criticized the lack of mainstream use cases for blockchain technology. Thousands of decentralized applications have been deployed, but mainstream use cases are few and far between. That might change.
It is theorized that a singularity, a point of infinitely dense matter, caused the Big Bang when such a point exploded, spreading matter throughout the universe. I think we are at an analogous moment in the history of crypto.
Over the past year, developers have been delivering fast, cheap blockspace to builders.
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The “majors” have made tremendous progress, with Ethereum (ETH) is rolling out its Dencun upgrade in March, lowering transaction fees for users of layer 2 blockchains to less than $0.01. Solana (SOL) has (largely) resolved the downtime issues it suffered from until last year, leading to a massive increase in the protocol’s economic value.
More and more new participants are also coming in. New layer-1 blockchains such as Sui, Sei, Aptos (APT) and others have launched in the past 18 months, promising unprecedented levels of throughput. This process is far from complete, with another cohort of new and announced blockchains expected to hit the market with new design elements in 2024 and beyond:
The experiment phase begins
Chris Dixon, in his new book “Read Write Own,” predicts that “a key moment will be when the infrastructure gets so good that application developers no longer have to think about infrastructure.”
Since the beginning of crypto, application developers only had to think about the infrastructure. Even if you had a new idea for a crypto use case, infrastructure limitations likely prevented you from implementing it.
Now that multiple blockchains of varying designs can function reliably, at scale, and at low cost, developers can focus on what they can do, rather than what they can’t.
The figure below illustrates how much technology can be experimented with:
Recently we’ve seen new ideas for decentralized social media and social finance; DePIN networks that use high-throughput blockchain solutions to enable real-world utility services; and AI-adjacent tools such as decentralized computer networks and AI agent platforms.
Over time, new applications will only become more popular and performant as they figure out which infrastructure best suits their needs. Perhaps this process will end with scaled applications running on modular solutions re-establishing themselves in Ethereum, or perhaps the monolithic vision will win and Solana, Monad, Aptos or Sui will become the preferred blockchain of the masses. Ultimately, the market will decide which solutions work best once they can be tested on a large scale.
Read the rest of the article on our website: The Blockspace Singularity – Runa Digital Assets.Note: The views expressed in this column are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of CoinDesk, Inc. or its owners and affiliates.
