Blockchain101: Article Five: Why bridges are important to our future.
I have recently written about the changed narrative on Ethereum, going from one of a POS Savior one where layer two blockchains save the Ethereum community.
In fact, I heard Vitalic Buterin say during an interview that Ethereum was changing from a layer one centric community to a layer two centric community.
In fact in the interview V.B. goes as far as to say layer one, as in Ethereum blockchain will become devoid of humans, and instead be populated mostly by bots or whales. While humans will be found mostly on layer two blockchains.
This has been picked up by the Ethereum community and is now being termed The Great Migration as both humans and their projects pick a layer two and migrate there, leaving Ethereum behind.
Now while Ethereum will still serve as the settlement layer in this scheme of layer one and layer two interactions, with layer two blockchains providing scaleability with transactions occurring on cheaper, faster layer two solutions. I think the most important concept to come out of this interview is that the future is all about cross blockchain trading and interactions.
As I see it, the concept of one chain to rule them all, is on the face of it not what we came here for at all. In the metaphorical sense of why people are migrating into cryptocurrency.
I believe that in fact cross chain trading, cross chain asset mobility, cross chain movement of users and capitol is the natural outcome of decentralization. If we wanted to be limited in where we could go and in what we could do... we would have stuck with fiat currency. I believe we came here for freedom and choice, and that is supplied by cross blockchain trading.
If you think about it, it is the nature of commerce to grow by increasing connections, not limiting them. The ancient Egyptians, Greeks and Romans were all about building connections between their countries and others. These connections facilitated trade, and made the countries involved in this trade wealthy. In fact the Romans were so single minded about it that they literally built roads to every country they encountered and coined the saying All Roads Lead to Rome
I look out on the world of cryptocurrency from my perspective here on Hive. And I watched @aggroed reach out to other blockchains like Wax. I watched @khaleelkazi reach out with WLEO to Ethereum. I have seen @aggroed reach out to BSC with SPS and @khaleelkazi reach out to BSC with BLEO. I see that soon @khaleelkazi will reach out to Polygon with PLEO. I see how Splinterlands on Hive has reached out and tapped into a worldwide community of gamers and created one million accounts on Hive interested in Splinterlands.
I also see that the huge boom in decentralized finance of 2021 where DeFi grew from millions to billions, a 1000 fold increase in one year, because of cross chain or cross blockchain trading.
Now I see NFT trading as the next big explosion in activity and it clearly is cross blockchain in nature; Ethereum, Wax, Hive, BSC to name a few. Sure the largest are on Ethereum, but the growth is elsewhere for the same reasons the growth of DeFi is elsewhere...cost of transactions and transactional speed and capacity.
The writing isn't just on the wall, it is screaming in the hallways, roadways and highways of the worlds commerce. Cross blockchain commerce is the pathway to growth and adoption. And it is made possible right now by bridges. Those software constructs that use NFTs to transfer value from blockchain to blockchain. These bridges will dominate trade and commerce in our ecosystem, until something better comes along.
Thats why bridges like Leobridge are so important to the future of crypto. Thats why bridges like Leobridge are so important to the future of Hive. If you think about it, PanCakeSwap is more than an exchange, it's a transit point to every other financial platform on BSC. Metamask is more than a wallet, it's a transit point between one ecosystem and another. Metamask is doing millions of dollars a day providing inter-connectability. This inter-blockchain connectivity is the definition of utility, and bridges like Leobridge which provide connectivity between ecosystems like Ethereum, Binance Smart Chain and Polygon. Bridges are the connectivity utility of the virtual future.
Look at our major cities of the world, New York, London and Tokyo, all have bridges which are 100-200 years old. Connections never go out of style and never become obsolete. Commerce needs connections, and cryptocurrency bridges are the virtual connection of Defi, NFTs and perhaps the Metaverse.
Bridges are important, perhaps all roads no longer lead to Rome, but one day many of them may lead to Hive.
@shortsegments , penned by my hand, on the 27 of January, 2022.
