Author: Macauley Peterson, translated by Shan Ou Ba and LianGuai
Many of the most important blockchain technologies today point to a future of expansion that blurs the boundaries between ecosystems, which was a key theme of this year’s Permissionless II conference. On the main stage in Austin, the co-founders of Cosmos, Solana, and Ethereum Optimism rollup discussed whether blockchain is evolving towards “convergent evolution”.
Ethan Buchman co-founded Cosmos early development company Tendermint, Inc. with Jae Kwon in 2014, and he defines the core values of Cosmos as “sovereignty and interoperability”. When asked by Blockworks co-founder Michael Ippoloito about the “endgame” of Cosmos, Buchman joked, “Solana and Optimism are my two favorite Cosmos chains.”
The consensus and interoperability of Cosmos technology – its key advantages – have been applied to application chains outside the core network in the form of Tendermint/CometBFT consensus and IBC, and Buchman is eager to see further expansion of the standards he advocates. The vision of Cosmos has always been to provide a new political and economic expression tool that allows communities to have more control and sovereignty over digital and monetary life.
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Anatoly Yakovenko said he believes Solana is the best choice to achieve his own practical vision for blockchain – countering information asymmetry – but he remains open to the applicability of future competitive technologies. Yakovenko said their goal is to create a “fair, open, and fast” system that ensures these attributes are “guaranteed” for as many participants around the world as possible.
“That is the ultimate goal, and it doesn’t really matter how it is achieved – it’s just a group of engineers, and Solana is just one design,” he said. “If we come up with a better design tomorrow, based on a mix of Optimism, Cosmos, and Danksharding, then that’s what we should do.”
Ben Jones of Optimism said the common goal is to create a scalable blockchain, and he pointed out that there may be many different technological approaches to achieve this goal. For him, it is important to recognize that the most popular use case today – financial applications – is “just a starting point”, and the more important long-term goal is to “reclaim the internet”.
Jones said that current applications are a reflection of the limitations of today’s scalability.
“Once we create an environment where those chains can scale, there will be a lot of internet infrastructure, from social media to gaming and other fields, that we need to reclaim and give back to the people, because the current internet is essentially controlled by a few,” he said.
The core of the “convergence” concept is to overcome the fundamental limitations faced by blockchain. The expert group unanimously agreed that this process is proceeding smoothly.
Solana’s approach relies on the continuous enhancement of Moore’s Law and computing technology to ensure that applications can benefit from concurrent execution in the future.
“Maybe in 20 years… Solana will be running on your home router,” Yakovenko said. But he believes that the network has achieved a “decentralized foundational level” that puts it on par with Bitcoin and Ethereum networks.
Jones said that certain trade-offs are still inevitable. Ethereum’s aggregation-centric roadmap focuses on “pushing innovation to the edges.”
“As a whole, Ethereum no longer needs to make significant changes in order to continue scaling and innovating.” Jones and Buchman each emphasized the goal of extending the security of existing on-chain block space to dapp developers – in the case of Optimism, it is Ethereum’s mainnet, and in the case of the Cosmos chain, it is the Cosmos Hub, leveraging replicated security.
The group noted that the execution environment, including virtual machines and programming language choices, is becoming increasingly flexible in the field.
Buchman said that Cosmos will likely be able to run the Solana virtual machine, while Jones believes that the future Cosmos SDK will be compatible with Optimism’s OP stack. For any dapp, it will ultimately lead to an application-specific chain. He cited the example of the trading platform dYdX, which is transitioning from Ethereum’s StarkEx aggregation to its own independent Cosmos chain.
For entrepreneurs, his advice is: “Start with Solana, once you reach the limit of what you can do there – before Anatoly figures out how to scale for you – then you can transition to your own Cosmos chain.”
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