Vitalik has officially identified six Ethereum infrastructures, and Orbiter will be a big part of them.
A few years later, Vitalik will look back on 2021 as the most crucial year because Ethereum achieved several landmark victories as the world’s computer:
- DeFi’s popularity proves the practicality of Ethereum.
- Some rollups have been launched on the mainnet, proving the feasibility of the hierarchical structure.
- Implementing POS has prepared a new structure for future development.
Vitalik has published two articles titled Roadmap and End with all this success. He describes some of the upcoming things in Ethereum.
In the coming world of Ethereum, there are three basic infrastructures:
- Rollups
- Ethereum base layer
- Optimistic bridging protocols
Why are Optimistic bridging protocols?
In this arbitrage chain, the asset needs to cross the environment twice. The first time is to transfer Ethereum from Polygon to mainnet. The second time is to transfer the profitable USDT from the mainnet to Polygon to continue the arbitrage. Although arbitrageurs’ profit is $300, they lose their profit by high gas fees when crossing the environment. In the future, only those protocols that rely less on contracts and go through Ethereum mainnet will save users more gas fees. In the security model of optimistic bridging protocols, only transfers between EOA addresses in regular business flows will minimize gas fees. Vitalik pointed out in the infrastructure that the bridge protocol must be optimistic.
The future world is not only cross-rollups but also cross-domain. We are focusing on cross-domain issues also poses new challenges to the performance and function of the bridge.
Unity is Strength: A Formalization of Cross-Domain Maximal Extractable Value
The multi-chain future is upon us. Modular architectures are coming to maturity across the ecosystem to scale bandwidth and throughput of cryptocurrency. One example of such is the Ethereum modular architecture, with its beacon chain, its execution chain, its Layer 2s, and soon its shards. These can all be thought as separate blockchains, heavily inter-connected with one another, and together forming an ecosystem.
Endgame
In general, the development end of Ethereum is centralized production, decentralized verification, and strong anti-censorship protection. To get to that point, we cannot predict what future rollups will look like, possibly one rollup scale and standardization. It could also be many rollups flourish and cross-domain MEV ecosystem. Furthermore, it will develop into the big blockchain, so the block production should be centralized. Block validation is trustless and highly decentralized, and censorship is still dynamic. So anti-fraud and anti-censorship armor is also a must.
One interpretation is that we no longer need a bridge between the one rollup scale and dominates in the case above. Let us look at the whole thing from the perspective of development differently. In historical experience, technology development has always been a simultaneous development of multi-heads. The occasional clustering of technology lines is also the result of many rollups’ competition, which may be long-term and uninterrupted. Looking at rollups already running, dydx and ZKSync are good examples of how a specialized rollup can save money. In a word, bridges have continuous vitality. Keeping many rollups around for a long time can the community compete to improve infrastructure performance and provide specialized solutions for specialized scenarios.
In the next five years, the blockchain world will consist of the following six infrastructures:
- Rollups
- Ethereum base layer
- Optimistic bridging protocols
- Cross-domain MEV ecosystem
- Producers who produce large blocks
- Anti-fraud and anti-censorship armor
These points are distilled from Vitalik’s description, and I am optimistic about them because we are “Optimistic.”
See the future in advance
An interconnected multi-domain era replaces the split side-chain era and the single-chain era just as alternating current replaces direct current.
A remote village in a developing country can now see electric lights lighting up, proving that the alternating current won the power war. However, humanity saw EndGame in the power industry long before the rural lights came on.
It is also possible now to think 10 or 20 years in advance in Vitalik’s description:
What is the value of an infrastructure that will carry hundreds of billions of assets and house most of the activities of human life? How valuable should the pieces that make up this infrastructure be? What are the great opportunities for innovation that benefit humanity?
