The blockchain is a revolutionary expertise in some ways and one which guarantees groundbreaking advantages for a number of industries, however that may solely occur if it’s in a position to overcome probably the most urgent drawback affecting it proper now.
Anybody who often reads up on the most recent crypto information will seemingly pay attention to the so-called “scalability” drawback in blockchain. The difficulty is that blockchains wrestle to course of transactions quick sufficient. Bitcoin customers can attest to that solely too properly, with the average transaction usually taking round 10 minutes, although at busy instances it may be wherever from half-hour to 1 hour to course of. If we’re to see mass adoption of blockchain and cryptocurrencies, the present transaction snail tempo merely is not going to do.
Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin outlined the problem of accelerating transaction speeds when he spoke in regards to the “blockchain trilemma”, which defines the best blockchain as one which’s decentralized, safe and scalable.
Attaining that perfect has to date confirmed to be unattainable to any blockchain. The difficulty is that in case your blockchain can solely ever have two of the three traits, on the expense of the third.
Within the case of Bitcoin for example, we have now numerous nodes that guarantee it’s each decentralized and extremely safe. Bitcoin has a thriving group consequently and it has by no means been hacked (and virtually actually by no means shall be!). However these traits come on the expense of scalability. As a result of there’s such numerous nodes within the Bitcoin community, every one in every of them has to validate every transaction. As a rule, the result’s gridlock, as lots of the nodes wrestle with poor connectivity and can’t sustain with the tempo of transactions being made by Bitcoin customers.
If we lower the variety of nodes in Bitcoin’s community, it will absolutely be capable of course of transactions quicker, however it will come at the price of decrease safety.
Builders have been working across the clock for years making an attempt to provide you with an answer to the blockchain trilemma and the excellent news is that they’re making progress. A wide range of concepts and methods have been carried out at many various ranges on a number of blockchains, with various ranges of success. A few of these concepts revolve round constructing a second “layer” onto the blockchain to course of transactions via an alternate community. Because of this, we have now seen the emergence of many various sorts of Layer 1 and Layer 2 blockchain scaling options.
Blockchain Layers Defined
Layers typically consult with the extent at which scaling options are carried out throughout the blockchain. Some options are carried out on the blockchain itself, whereas others are merely linked to it and performance independently as a sort of dependent community or protocol.
Therefore, once we discuss blockchain Layer 1s, we’re typically referring to the precise blockchain – the distributed peer-to-peer community – that encompasses the entire nodes that comprise the system. So, for instance, the Ethereum cryptocurrency’s Layer 1 community is the Ethereum Community, whereas XRP runs on the XRP Ledger and AVAX sits on the Avalanche Community.
Layer 2 networks are the unbiased scaling protocols and techniques that sit atop of a kind of Layer 1 blockchains. They are often regarded as a second layer to the primary blockchain community.
On the whole there are two sorts of Layer 2 answer, particularly nested networks and state channels. Within the former, the blockchain is taken into account because the “mainchain” and units the principles for your complete community of subchains. It typically doesn’t take part within the system’s operation, apart from when there’s a have to resolve a dispute. With this type of system, builders can construct numerous unbiased blockchains that interoperate with one another, every designed for various functions. The concept is to scale back community congestion by having separate, streamlined chains for every use case.
A superb instance of that is the Polkadot blockchain, which really is a “Layer 0 platform that ties collectively varied parachains right into a single, large community. All the parachains in Polkadot’s ecosystem, such because the Web3 privateness protocol Manta Network, are literally Layer 1 blockchains in their very own proper, nevertheless they get the advantages of Polkadot’s consensus community and safety. One other benefit of this method is that the entire parachains are interoperable with each other. So Manta Community, which masks crypto pockets addresses and transaction quantities utilizing cryptography, can deliver its privateness options to functions constructed on Polkadot’s principal chain and all of its parachains too.
In future, Manta may also be capable of entry different blockchains because of its new partnership with Axelar, which has developed a cross-chain bridge to networks comparable to Ethereum, Polygon, Avalanche and Terra.
As for state channels, these are protocols that facilitate two-way communication between the off-chain transaction community, and the primary blockchain. So when an utility builds on such a protocol, all transactions will happen off of the primary blockchain. The secret is that these off-chain transactions don’t require node verification, that means they are often processed a lot quicker to ease congestion.
Blockchain Layers In Motion
To higher perceive how Layer 1 and Layer 2 differ, we will have a look at some examples. Probably the most well-known Layer 1 of all is, after all, Bitcoin. Bitcoin’s scaling issues are well-known, and various Layer 2 options have emerged to attempt to enhance issues. Probably the most well-known is the Lightning Network, which depends on good contracts to course of transactions off-chain between completely different wallets. The community establishes these cost channels between pairs of wallets to facilitate transactions virtually instantaneously.
The best way it really works is sort of intelligent, as a result of it doesn’t have to create pairs between each pockets. For instance if Pockets A has a longtime channel to Pockets B, and Pockets B with Pockets C, then Pockets A can switch funds to Pockets C with out making a separate channel. A pockets can shut its cost channel at any time, and solely then will the entire transactions that went via its channel be recorded onto the primary blockchain. This permits your complete community to maneuver a lot quicker.
The second-most well-known Layer 1 blockchain is Ethereum, and it too has given delivery to a number of Layer 2s. Maybe the most effective identified is Ethereum’s Polygon. Polygon is a quicker parallel blockchain that runs alongside the Ethereum Community. To reap the benefits of Polygon, customers should bridge a few of their tokens to it, from the place they will work together with a number of “Layer 3” decentralized functions which have additionally bridged to Polygon.
In the meantime, the Cardano blockchain’s greatest DeFi utility AdaSwap has constructed itself atop of one other Layer 2 answer known as Hydra. AdaSwap is constructing an ecosystem for Cardano that encompasses an automatic market maker-based decentralized change, a launchpad, a local NFT market and high-yield liquidity swimming pools known as Stake and Neglect. It should enable Cardano customers to purchase and promote NFTs, launch initiatives, stake tokens and earn curiosity.
AdaSwap is definitely a “Layer 3”, or decentralized app. dApps, as they’re identified, can sit on both Layer 1 or Layer 2. Within the case of AdaSwap. It’s constructing on a Layer 2.
The issue with constructing on Cardano (Layer 1) is that its blockchain structure is way nearer to Bitcoin’s than Ethereum’s, and consequently it turns into a lot tougher to jot down functions that stay instantly on the Cardano chain. Due to this, AdaSwap and its DEX and different companies all sit on the Hydra Layer 2 protocol, which is able to enable it to bundle and course of transactions off of the primary Cardano community.
One of the intriguing scaling options that’s being explored by the Tezos blockchain is a Layer 2 mechanism generally known as “optimistic rollups”, that it plans to implement alongside its newly up to date Tenderbake consensus mechanism.
Whereas Tenderbake improves latency and finality to offer quicker transactions and smoother-running decentralized apps, it doesn’t considerably alter its throughput, or the variety of transactions that may be processed per second.
To beat this, Nomadic Labs lately proposed the usage of optimistic rollups, that are entities that sit on the primary blockchain with their very own pockets tackle that may compactly course of off-chain transaction executions and state updates. The concept is that transactions despatched to a rollup are left unprocessed by the primary chain nodes, as a substitute being processed by specialist rollup operators. The operators course of transactions off-chain earlier than posting a receipt again to the primary chain to summarize the rollup’s new state as a cryptographic hash. In essence, the system repeatedly “rolls up” transactions off-chain, releasing up the community from congestion.
It’s vital to not get confused by the completely different layers. Some blockchains, comparable to Stacks, might be fairly muddling. Stacks is commonly incorrectly described as a Layer 2 answer for Bitcoin, when it is in fact a Layer 1 platform in its personal proper. The confusion arises as a result of Stacks is linked to Bitcoin by its consensus mechanism, which spans each the Bitcoin and Stacks blockchains, known as Proof of Switch. This allows Stacks to profit from Bitcoin’s safety, whereas Stacks apps can use Bitcoin’s state, regardless of being hosted on a separate blockchain. So whereas Lightning Community is designed to assist Bitcoin scale, Stacks was constructed to deliver new use circumstances to Bitcoin through good contracts.
The Upshot
Though the crypto layers look fairly muddled to an outsider, the very fact is that they’re proof the group is working arduous to handle the largest problem in blockchain, that of scale. Because the demand for crypto will increase, blockchain networks will come beneath elevated strain to seek out options to scaling.
Layer 1 options have an important function as a result of they’re the inspiration of our decentralized blockchains. However they want Layer 2. Hopefully, some enhancements and refinements, plainly Layer 2s will ultimately be capable of tackle Layer 1’s congestion points, permitting us to lastly embrace the blockchain trilemma of decentralization, safety and scalability.
