Ethereum Two Dot Oh!

Zero-Knowledge proofing and graph integrations are already happening. The question now is: How far can we go from here?

Everyone in crypto - developers, enthusiasts, investors, et al - have been waiting for Layer 2 of the Ethereum POS (proof-of-stake) blockchain.

Under the Ethereum PoS model, users, called validator nodes, can lock ETH cryptocurrency in a smart contract, which then would earn rewards for solving computations needed to add new blocks to the blockchain.

Well, truth is, this has been going on since the spring of last year (2020).

Groups such as Arbitrum, StarkWare, zkSync and others have been leading the charge.

While this is a vast improvement to the Ethereum developer network and cryptographic protocols as a whole, Zero-Knowledge Proofs are good for polynomial commitment schemes, but not necessarily good for node-level commitments which would account for far more autonomous cryptographic hashing mechanisms.

This warrants an exploration for another time, which involves our own development with holomorphic hashing schemes.

Technical jargon aside, I believe this advancement to ETH 2.0 will nevertheless transform the crypto ecosystem as a whole, and lead us down many paths which explore decentralized variants to both compute algorithms (processing), computational efficiency (math), as well as network level bridging and forking for NFTs (non-fungible tokens), as in the case of my own startup.

The net-net: We are still in the first inning with decentralized economics, and our self-sovereign future looks very bright.