Ethereum is a flawed chain, and just not suitable for global scale DeFi. But people continue building on it.
Even many Solidity devs refuse to move on to other chains. Maybe it's the sunk cost fallacy.
It is 100% a sunk cost fallacy. Can't blame them, though, if you had 10-100M in virtual money, gimmick or not, would you let it go? Of course, not.
Indeed it is. It is precisely a sunken cost fallacy for Ethereum holders and the chain itself to be useful for anything if one has to spend $150k in fees just to send $300, which is hilariously inefficient and has been so for years after promising for a reduction in fees since the problems first surfaced.
Like the creators of CryptoKittes which is one of the first NFT projects on Ethereum have complained about this and built their own blockchain, now the creators of Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC) has also realised that Ethereum cannot globally scale and are considering building their own blockchain.
Ethereum after all these years hasn't improved, and is still unsuitable for even for basic payments. Everyone was hyping for 'The Merge' to happen next month or so, but was delayed again.
Why would anyone tell businesses, clients and partners to 'Wait 7+ years for the bugs to be fixed and optimised first' only for it to be delayed again? They'll just give up and look elsewhere.
Crypto momentum OTOH seems crazy, not least because people appear to be cheerleading extortionate gas fees as the solution to avaricious banks charging $7/mo for a checking account.
The story may be different on Solana but it’s not really my area of expertise. My guess is many ethereum devs haven’t moved to solana because of its lesser decentralization.
Anecdotally I know a lot of ethereum devs are excited about building on layer 2s like zksync / arbitrum but there’s a learning curve and relatively little liquidity there too
L2s are like a last-ditch effort. If they are the main scaling mechanism, the chain is done.
zkEVM and Starknet liquidity sharing between dozens of L2s is what will end up changing the game.
Letting people provide liquidity to each other, all individually transacting with a decentralized app, such as buying a Disney Princess NFT, or notorizing a deed to a property, or trading a gun on a first person shooter on GameStop's network.
Even so. If the service is not on a layer 2, then you have go through the bridging process of moving your ETH to and from layers which is more complicated than directly using a layer 1 blockchain.
These 'solutions' are telling everyone that Ethereum is never going to fix these issues and the duck-taped layer 2 contraptions are now making it even harder for 'normies' to just 'use it'.
That's a lie people tell themselves to justify Ethereum's platform.
The reality is that I can build scalable L1 dapps on Algorand that "normal" users can use at extremely low cost.
As a dev however, that sounds foolish to me.
Also, chains like Algorand or Cosmos don't have "nobody else on the network".
Looking at the top L1s, you either have centralized chain and thus no integrity (e.g. Solana), or chains that are cheap now just because of lower usage and lower token price (e.g. Fantom).
And also, decentralization is not achieved by technology. It's achieved by adoption.
You're never gonna find a new chain with strong decentralization. You have the wrong premise. Strong decentralization is the goal of DLTs, and we should select DLTs that have the best conditions to get us to that point.
It helps if the backing organization has integrity, which the Algorand foundation has shown many times.
Every chain can scale until it can't. And then it's either high gas fees or centralization. If you solved this problem, adoption would not be your concern. But that's a tall order.
This capacity is more than enough to power the entire world's financial infrastructure. They are also working on state proofs and side chains, making it suitable for CBDCs.
> If you solved this problem, adoption would not be your concern
I disagree. Because for decentralized projects, adoption and success go hand in hand. It's a chicken and egg problem.
And even if the tech is superior, it doesn't influence decision making of normal people. They are influenced by tons of misinformation from grifters, scammers and even mainstream media.
In this space, solving the problem is not enough. We need to educate people as well, which is arguably the biggest challenge of modern society.
But how many has it done?
Please explain what momentum in the current financial industry is and why it's a problem.