Cyber Capital Founder: Monolithic is the Future of Blockchain Scalability
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Cyber Capital Founder: Monolithic is the Future of Blockchain Scalability
Justin Bons believes that modular scalability is a technological dead end.
Navigating Web3 tides with focused insightsAuthor: Justin Bons, Founder of Cyber Capital
Translation: Luffy, Foresight News
There are three ways blockchains achieve scalability:
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"L2 scaling" (BTC, ETH, TIA)
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Parallelization (SOL, APT, SUI)
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Sharding (TON, NEAR, EGLD)
Sharding is the future, and parallelization is an inevitable trend. In my view, this is how it all ends.
"L2 scaling" delivers poor user experience and weak token economics. It cannot keep fees within L1 ranges, and fragmentation harms the user experience. Monolithic blockchain scaling approaches—parallelization and sharding—do not suffer from these fatal flaws because they form a coherent whole.
Parallelization is inevitable because it's absurd for client software not to support multithreaded processing. All modern CPUs have multiple cores, yet chains like Ethereum and Bitcoin still process transactions sequentially, leaving most validator hardware underutilized—an enormous waste.
The same applies to sharded chains—each shard should be parallelized:
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Maximize individual shard capacity
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Sharding is the logical extension of parallelization
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By extending concurrency from multicore processors to distributing workloads across multiple machines
This breaks previous scalability limits.
Sharded systems can now achieve over 100,000 TPS, with theoretical limits approaching 1 million TPS. At the same time, sharding keeps node requirements relatively low. This is how sharding solves the blockchain trilemma.
Traditional blockchain designs all face the trilemma. At some point, node requirements become so high that decentralization is threatened. Since every node must validate all global state updates, such systems are fundamentally unscalable. Sharding solves this problem.
Unlike traditional designs, sharded chains can scale capacity based on usage, whereas non-sharded chains eventually hit a ceiling. As sharded chains gain more usage and validators, they can launch new shards. In other words, sharding scales linearly.
Other blockchains scale quadratically, meaning as the network grows, node requirements increase until hitting physical limits. There's a hard cap on how much work we can process within a single silicon chip compared to what's possible across computer networks.
There are many misconceptions about sharding—I'll address two:
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"You can attack a single shard"; Rebuttal: Because validators are randomized, shards share L1 security
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"No composability"; Rebuttal: Cross-shard communication is natively built-in, enabling seamless interoperability
The irony of these criticisms is that "L2 scaling" is even more vulnerable to the same issues:
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"You can attack a single L2"; True, especially considering management keys and decentralized sequencers require their own consensus
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"No composability"; Also true, without enshrining
Fortunately, the leap from parallelization to sharding is far shorter than the leap to modular blockchains.
Meanwhile, parallelization may provide sufficient capacity for many years to come, which is why I support the latter two approaches.
Monolithic scaling still allows modular expansion via L2s, letting the free market choose the best solution; modular scaling resembles a planned economy where L1s force modularity.
We should let the market pick another L1/L2.
We must draw a clear line against modular blockchains. I am convinced modular scaling is a technological dead end. Worse, it sets us back by wrongly associating modular design with cryptocurrency—slow, expensive, and difficult—that's modular.
Monolithic design is fast, cheap, easy to use and understand. If the community offers enough resistance, Ethereum might still return to sharding, potentially causing a block size debate-style fork, as conservatives try to preserve their power.
Undoubtedly, entrenched power within Ethereum won't be easily overturned. Venture capital and tokens create strong incentives for Ethereum's L1 scaling. And since Ethereum also lacks good on-chain governance, voting with feet may be easier.
I'm not Ethereum's enemy, but its friend. If I'm right, then Ethereum's greatest enemy lies within its entrenched leadership—same for Bitcoin.
Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.
Setting tribalism aside, the bottom line is whether blockchain technology evolves along the right path: as I've said, monolithic scaling. Advocates of modular scaling often cite the blockchain trilemma as justification for their approach.
I respect this ideology because many smart and talented people support "L2 scaling."
However, this belief rests on a flawed assumption. Evidence for viable L1 scaling continues to accumulate—it's becoming a mountain. So large it can no longer be ignored, competing blockchains are outperforming Bitcoin and Ethereum across multiple metrics.
The truth is out there: monolithic scaling is the future. It enables everyone to directly use blockchains, bringing us back to Satoshi's vision.
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