What Is Happening Post Merge?
Discover more from The Blockchain Sector With James Bachini
What Is Happening Post Merge?
The Blockchain Sector @ 2022-10-06
The Blockchain Sector provides information relating to emerging financial technologies. It should not be considered financial advice. Disclaimer below.
What Is Happening Post Merge?
Ethereum's core development team doesn't get a pat on the back for long. With the merge successfully completed, work has started on the next update, the surge. This is equally, if not more important as it will expand the capacity of the Ethereum network, bringing down transaction fees and opening up to much wider variety of applications.
Currently blockchains can only handle tiny amounts of data, and it's very expensive and slow to manipulate that data. The combination of sharding rolled out during the surge update with layer 2 optimistic and ZK roll-ups means that on-chain data is going to become cheap, fast and efficient.
Vitalik Buterin, Ethereum’s co-founder, recently collaborated on a paper about SBT’s soulbound tokens. I think this is a good example of where the technology might be going. A soulbound token is non-transferable the token which can be thought of as a datastore for user information. The concept is compelling because it could enable users to manage their personal data in a open, transparent way. The user ultimately has control and authority over the data that can be stored on them.
Most web 2 applications implement a user database which stores information like name, email, credentials, characteristics and site specific data. In the future it could become just as easy to store that data on-chain as it is to store it in an AWS database. This is when we really might see a strong migration of web2 developers to web3 standards.
Blockchain will emerge from a quirky niche to a mainstream tool which is part of every web developers toolkit.
There is more information about the surge and future updates which form the rollout of Ethereum 2.0 here: https://jamesbachini.com/ethereum-v2/
Progressing Tooling For Blockchain Developers
For developers over the next few years I expect to see improvements in tooling. The 3 main frameworks to build smart contracts on currently are:
Hardhat - Mature Javascript npm library for testing and deploying
Remix - Online IDE with local and remote deployment
Foundry - Solidity based testing framework and tool kit
Hardhat uses Javascript and if you don’t hate JS, it is probably the most developed and easiest platform to build production ready applications. It has a simple scripting interface for writing unit tests and deployment scripts.
Foundry is much newer and is built in rust but for the end user you’ll be working primarily in Solidity. You can write your unit tests and your deployment scripts in the same solidity code that you write your contracts. This is very powerful because it means you're not switching between languages which is somewhat of a challenge and an annoyance for developers. The speed at which Foundry executes local tests enables devs to do things like fuzzing where you throw various potentially malicious data at function input variables. Because it's newer it's a little bit raw around the edges. It might be harder to work with for new users, but over time it could mature to become the first choice above hardhat at some point in the future.
Remix is an online IDE (integrated development environment). You can visit it at https://remix.ethereum.org
It's where most people learn to code their first “Hello World” smart contracts but I have found I have been using it more and more to test things, check things, compile code and grab ABIs when knocking up quick little Solidity scripts. It's simple and elegant as a very pleasant development environment to interact with. Because of the ease of setup it's where I would suggest everyone starts. But before you start thinking about developing to deploy code to the mainnet, it's probably worth migrating your code base across to something like hardhat or foundry so you can get more involved with unit and system testing
It gives me great pleasure to say all three of these projects are currently being actively developed and improving all the time.
One of the areas I think Solidity as a language could improve is with error reporting. Currently the errors that you get back when there isn't a custom revert code can be quite tricky to debug, especially if your code is as bad as mine.
There are also rumours of a floating point library being integrated in the future. I feel this will cause as many problems as it solves but it is going to make the language a lot more user-friendly to be able to multiply and divide using decimal places.
In other tooling, some of the foundations of the Ethereum network include Etherscan, Metamask & Infura.
And these projects don't seem to be developed at the same pace as other parts of the ecosystem. In many ways, I don't want Etherscan to ever change. I'm happy with it just the way it is. An incredible tool, that's very reliable and useful for countless tasks in blockchain development.
Metamask has a 70% market dominance over digital asset wallet space. Their swap mechanism which charges 0.8% per transaction is doing well. Hopefully some of those funds get redirected back to the development of the wallet, improving the user experience, particularly as a mobile application.
Infura was, at one point, the only real viable option as an RPC node which connects your front end to the Ethereum network. We have seen a viable competitor emerge in Alchemy and I now use their nodes more than infura’s. A duopoly is much better than a monopoly but more could be done to create anti-fragile censorship resilient access points to the network.
So with these changes in architecture and the tools we use as developers where should our focus lie and what should we be building?
In my opinion devs should always follow what they are passionate about, where the areas you have the most knowledge in intersect with the growth areas in the industry. Whether that be NFTs, or DeFi, or stablecoins, or whatever technology you find compelling and there could be future demand for. If you have an idea for an application which isn't currently viable, maybe the technology we build upon is changing fast enough that it will be possible in the near future.
If block space becomes exponentially scalable, fast and affordable, there will be many projects which are impossible now but become very viable to run on-chain. That technology is coming.
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Disclaimer: Not a financial advisor, not financial advice. The content I create is to document my journey and for educational and entertainment purposes only. It is not under any circumstances investment advice. I am not an investment or trading professional and am learning myself while still making plenty of mistakes along the way. Any code published is experimental and not production ready to be used for financial transactions. Do your own research and do not play with funds you do not want to lose.