WillPapper

I'm betting on a multi-chain world with specialized use cases rather than multiple general-purpose chains competing for the same developers and users. Chains will be differentiated by more than vibes.

Ethereum mainnet had a massive advantage in 2021: everything was in one place. But because everything was in one place, it wasn’t able to scale.

It was presented with a choice: Scale horizontally (many chains) or scale vertically (one big chain). It chose the former with a rollup-centric roadmap, and avoided solutions like sharding that would split the difference between these approaches.

This created fragmentation, opening an opportunity for Solana. Solana enjoyed the same advantage for many years as the only SVM chain.

But will this advantage persist as Solana network extensions (i.e. rollups) gain adoption? Or will Solana become as fragmented as Ethereum?

Spinning up your own appchain is 10x easier than a year ago. All of the tooling has gotten simpler to deploy. Account abstraction went from 8 weeks + upfront payments to nearly instant deployment.

Wallets that are multi-chain by default are essential to the future of crypto.

Most wallets were created in a one-chain or few-chain world. Even Coinbase Wallet, which is more natively multi-chain than most, has you worry about various ETH and USDC versions on different chains and forces you to bridge between them.

It’s interesting to look at the advantages of being a first mover in a new VM architecture. Ethereum was the only EVM chain for many years. Solana was the only SVM chain for many years. Both created strong network effects as a result, which are gradually weakening as more EVM and SVM chains come online.

Compare that to the MoveVM ecosystem, where Aptos, Sui, and Movement are all competing for mindshare among the limited supply of Move builders.

Monad, MegaETH, Rise all promise "EVM chain but faster", but when there are three launched simultaneously, which gets critical mass?

The biggest advantage of vertical scaling is avoiding fragmentation, but having many chains pursue vertical scaling on the same VM creates the very same fragmentation.

Good to be back @EdgeEsmeralda to see how everyone deeply cares about making crypto and emerging tech a better place

I am consistently disappointed by the vulnerability communications from major zkVMs.

One buried a critical vulnerability by refusing to share on socials, instead quietly dropped it on their blog until pressured to post on socials.

Another one posted the critical vulnerability on socials, but in highly technical terms with zero description of user-facing impact. (i.e. That it seems to break the majority of proofs.)

These are two of the most respected zkVMs. We use them in our stack. But they are not communicating openly and clearly about critical bugs that break their proof systems.

As a team using zkVMs for critical functions for our upcoming mainnet, it hurts our trust in these systems and damages zkVM adoption as a whole.

With @eth_proofs coordinating initiatives across the two dozen zkVMs in development, I hope that we can get to better standards soon.

Is anyone using CrosschainERC20 from @DeFi_Wonderland?

Looks like the best of both worlds by combining SuperchainERC20 standards and xERC20 standards into one token. Curious about people's experiences with it

Most people don't realize how many EVM chains exist. @Dune supports 100+ chains, with 30+ of those EVM. @Alchemy has dozens. @l2beat lists a total of 157 L2s/L3s. DefiLlama lists 264 EVM chains

Adding one more chain isn't as big a hurdle when everything is going multi-chain.

Snapchain provides an elegant solution to one of the core problems in crypto infrastructure: the tradeoff between data availability and data storage. (With more time I may write up a dive deeper on how it works under the hood).

The TLDR of Data Availability vs Data Storage: systems great at publishing data (Celestia, EigenDA) are not so great at storing it. Systems great at storing data (Arweave, IPFS) are typically not so great at publishing it.
Snapchain sits elegantly between these extremes with a few key innovations:

Committee Structure: Snapchain proposes an elected committee of nodes responsible for both making data available AND storing it. This addresses the core issue where previous systems only handled either one or the other. (Though this part is the most likely to change, and was drawn from some earlier drafts.)

State Rent: Instead of paying once for permanent storage (expensive) or only ensuring short-term availability (limited), Snapchain implements "state rent", a concept Ethereum has discussed since 2018 but never implemented. Users buy credits for specific storage capacity (e.g., 10,000 posts) for one year. Want to extend? Pay the state rent again. Don't want to? Your data expires.

Overwrite Mechanics: If you exceed your post limit, Snapchain simply overwrites your oldest content. No additional payment required, just a natural cycle that works perfectly for social data (though it wouldn't work for blockchains that need complete history).

It’s not as hard to deploy your own chain as you think (and it’s getting easier). Article incoming.

Early infrastructure providers literally copy-pasted their stacks to new chains:

- You'd see "ethereum.dapp.example" and "polygon.dapp.example" - endpoints
- No shared cloud infrastructure between chains
- Adding each new chain required massive infrastructure overhead

In a multi-chain world, app frontends and backends are getting redesigned to accommodate this and have one service that supports many chains. . Low usage on one chain saves resources for high usage on another. Copy-paste era is over.

Snapchain provides an elegant solution to one of the core problems in crypto infrastructure: the tradeoff between data availability and data storage. (With more time I may write up a dive deeper on how it works under the hood).

The TLDR of Data Availability vs Data Storage: systems great at publishing data (Celestia, EigenDA) are not so great at storing it. Systems great at storing data (Arweave, IPFS) are typically not so great at publishing it.
Snapchain sits elegantly between these extremes with a few key innovations:

Committee Structure: Snapchain proposes an elected committee of nodes responsible for both making data available AND storing it. This addresses the core issue where previous systems only handled either one or the other. (Though this part is the most likely to change, and was drawn from some earlier drafts.)

State Rent: Instead of paying once for permanent storage (expensive) or only ensuring short-term availability (limited), Snapchain implements "state rent", a concept Ethereum has discussed since 2018 but never implemented. Users buy credits for specific storage capacity (e.g., 10,000 posts) for one year. Want to extend? Pay the state rent again. Don't want to? Your data expires.

Overwrite Mechanics: If you exceed your post limit, Snapchain simply overwrites your oldest content. No additional payment required, just a natural cycle that works perfectly for social data (though it wouldn't work for blockchains that need complete history).

Preserving decentralization requires transparent ordering rules and community control over chain parameters, not just "trust us" from centralized operators.

Quick insight: you can choose less costly infrastructure alternatives for running your own chain. BlockScout APIs are substantially cheaper than Etherscan APIs and quite nice to use.

7-fig rollup or $1 rollup. Which is true?

While innovation is philosophically central to the Ethereum ecosystem, we’ve become too inward-facing, too focused on incremental technical differences between very similar products, and possibly too invested in specific tech over what users actually care about.

We can't keep talking about incremental innovations thanks to our specific architecture choices or consensus stacks. Solana has successfully focused on the innovations that resonate with users, that is: is this fast, is this cheap, and is this easy?

Whenever I talk to people outside of crypto, they flat out do not understand why rollups exist. It's like asking an average person to know which cloud provider a website is using. Unfortunately, Ethereum puts that choice front and center.

When you're the majority user, EIP-1559 mechanics make you bid against yourself continuously. This isn’t theoretical. We tested it out. We built a clicker game that burned through 35 Base Sepolia ETH when we became the majority of the transactions on the chain.

Why you need your own chain a lot sooner than you think:

When blocks are over 50% full, your app will start bidding against itself at an increasing rate of up to 12.5% every block.

If your app is successful, blocks will fill up. Gas fees get expensive fast.