Monolithic Chains vs Modular Blockchains: How Do Ethereum, Solana, and Celestia Compete?
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Monolithic Chains vs Modular Blockchains: How Do Ethereum, Solana, and Celestia Compete?
What are the philosophical similarities and execution differences between Solana and Celestia? Why might the Solana Virtual Machine (SVM) surpass the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) in user adoption?
Navigating Web3 tides with focused insightsBy Unchained Podcast
Translated by Kaori, BlockBeats
On January 2, the prominent crypto podcast Unchained released a new episode titled "Three Crypto Pioneers Debate Monolithic vs. Modular Blockchains." The episode featured Solana Labs co-founder Anatoly Yakovenko, Celestia Labs COO Nick White, and others discussing their views on Solana, Celestia, Bitcoin, Ethereum, blockchain security, and market forecasts. Key highlights include how Solana—one of the fastest blockchains—prepares for mass adoption and scalability; philosophical similarities and execution differences between Solana and Celestia; and why the Solana Virtual Machine (SVM) may surpass the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) in user adoption. Below is the translated and compiled content for reference.
Debate Topic: Monolithic Chains vs. Modular Blockchains
Host: Laura Shin
Guests:
Anatoly Yakovenko, Co-Founder of Solana Labs
Nick White, Chief Operating Officer at Celestia Labs
Chris Burniske, Former Head of Crypto at Ark Invest, Partner at Placeholder VC
Laura Shin: Chris, you proposed this special episode. Could you describe how you define these two blockchain models? And if you have an opinion on which approach will prevail or be superior, please explain.
Chris Burniske: In modular architectures, different layers of the stack allow individual protocols to excel at specific tasks or very limited functions. Thus, modularity often involves key concepts like data availability, settlement, and execution. In this context, Celestia stands out most prominently in data availability, becoming a true leader and defining standard in that space. On the other hand, the integrated approach emphasizes tightly combining stack layers to deliver a more seamless developer and end-user experience compared to modular methods.
There's a long-standing debate over which method is more economical, faster, or more scalable. This can be understood through an analogy: iOS takes a vertically integrated approach, while Android is assembled from various components. While many people use Android, iOS has built an extremely valuable ecosystem, contributing to Apple becoming one of the world’s most valuable companies.
As investors, we shouldn’t favor just iOS or Android. Growth-minded investors facing such choices would invest in both. That’s also Placeholder’s stance—we work with Toly and Nick. In my view, Celestia is the most compelling startup of 2023—each year has its defining company—and Solana is the phoenix rising from its so-called trough in 2022. Although 2022 was immensely challenging for Solana, it united during hardship and further solidified SOL’s position, proving many wrong about its trajectory.
Regarding integrated stacks, I believe Ethereum is currently more integrated than modular, though it’s gradually moving toward modularity. But in today’s development environment, developers still tend to choose either Ethereum and EVM, or Solana and SVM.
Laura Shin: Both Solana and Ethereum have emerged stronger after the FTX incident. Anatoly, why don’t you talk about why Solana pursues this integrated approach?
Anatoly Yakovenko: I have an obsession—to synchronize all the world’s information into a single shared memory, like RAM in a computer. It’s the fastest place to store information. No matter how large we make this memory, we replicate and scale it globally—like throwing information into a bucket, then instantly broadcasting it worldwide, as fast as physics allows. The reason is, if we achieve this, we could discover prices faster than exchanges like the New York Stock Exchange or Nasdaq. Even with sub-nanosecond matching engines, information still needs time to propagate across the globe.
For example, important market news occurs in Singapore and must travel via fiber or satellite at light speed to traders in New York who watch their terminals. This information must hit internal algorithms at the NYSE before action can be taken. Meanwhile, if someone in Singapore sends a state transition to a localized concurrent block producer on Solana, that transaction spreads globally almost instantly—just like the news. So when traders in New York check the market, the information is already reflected in Solana’s state—as if the news event had already impacted the market.
Thus, there’s no longer arbitrage space between New York or a decentralized system run by volunteers. Hardware becomes commoditized. It’s truly exciting—almost sci-fi. If we achieve this, I believe it will make the world fairer. I see it as a monumental engineering achievement, and I’m proud of it.
Moreover, I believe this genuinely creates value for the world—making finance more transparent, better, and cheaper, which benefits consumers. This is the problem I want to solve. If the modular approach were a better engineering solution, I would毫不犹豫 discard all Solana code, copy Celestia’s code, and adopt that method. I have no doubt—I’ll do whatever it takes, and so far we’ve made significant progress.
Laura Shin: Now, Nick, please explain what Celestia is.
Nick White: Celestia is the first modular blockchain network whose unique feature is that it scales as the number of users and nodes increases. Its core value proposition is enabling developers to easily deploy custom blockchains. Unlike monolithic chains that integrate all functionalities needed for decentralized apps into one protocol, modular blockchains break them into separate component protocols. These can be optimized for specific needs, allowing developers to select and combine components to build fully functional products.
This approach grants developers unprecedented flexibility and customizability, enabling unique products impossible under general-purpose designs. Modular blockchains emphasize permissionless innovation—unlike scenarios where only one protocol or team exists, limiting innovation scope because all decisions are centralized.
In a modular setup, anyone can freely innovate execution or data availability methods, driving broader innovation across crypto. Compared to top-down, monolithic infrastructure design, modularity is bottom-up—developers and builders create their own components, letting the free market decide the best solutions.
Celestia focuses on data availability using a novel technique called data availability sampling, enabling blockchain verification on consumer-grade hardware like smartphones. As more people run light nodes, block sizes can grow—marking the first time capacity or throughput isn’t fixed but expands with users and nodes.
Solestia: Solana and Celestia’s “Same Destination, Different Paths”
Laura Shin: The modular approach indeed offers greater customization possibilities. I think of how the world increasingly shifts toward SaaS—software-as-a-service. In the future, if Celestia faces multiple competitors, developers might choose solutions best suited to their needs—say, better options for data availability. Regarding phone choices, Anatoly uses the Saga Phone instead of iPhone, while Chris and Nick likely use iPhones—this could symbolically represent a vote for Solana’s approach. I’d love to hear your thoughts on the future and how people will build within these domains—not focusing on what most people ultimately use.
Anatoly Yakovenko: To defend Nick, I believe developers cannot be marketed to—you can’t sell them things, but you can incentivize them to build. Modularity resembles operating systems—a whole school of thought called modular operating systems, completely opposite to Linux’s design. Coding in Linux faces many constraints, whereas modular approaches offer developers greater expressiveness and flexibility—for instance, QNX.
Giving developers choice is correct because there will always be developers interested in specific optimizations. You must choose what to optimize for, and they’re doing exactly that. From our perspective, we care about attracting developers who deeply care about particular optimizations. Developer pain points resemble a Pareto efficiency curve—pick a point of pain they’re willing to endure and code around it.
Laura Shin: I want to raise a question—I’m not sure if we covered it earlier. In November, you may have seen a paper titled “The Horrific Inefficiency of Monolithic Chains,” written anonymously by Polynya. They argued that blockchain scalability via validity proofs enables global mobile usage. Some saw this as an implicit critique of Solana. How do you respond?
Anatoly Yakovenko: If you want 100,000 nodes globally, you need ~1GB bandwidth synchronized every 400ms—but 1GB bandwidth isn't allowed. We have technologies solving synchronization demands between multiple boxes and Solana’s state. So technically, claims that Solana can’t scale to massive replicas, nodes, or bandwidth are incorrect. Current tech—like Google’s 20-gigabit home fiber—will become common in North American and European households within five to ten years.
You can see normal network and computing evolution has outpaced human awareness. Technology advances exponentially—it’s genuinely hard to grasp. At the hardware level, we already support extremely high-throughput networks. The software challenge lies elsewhere: shipping double-core systems from Amazon takes two days, but reliable software deployment takes six to twelve months.
Chris Burniske: I think there’s a hidden commonality between Celestia and Solana regarding future scalability and unit economics experiments. We mentioned differing value sets earlier, Laura. We reported on Bitcoin together, then Ethereum emerged. Now two leading value sets dominate today’s crypto landscape: Solana’s and Celestia’s. Though ecosystem values intertwine, they remain distinct.
When exploring future scalability and unit economics, what fascinates me is that with Solana, you can send value to anyone globally at extremely low cost. With Celestia, publishing transactions to the data availability layer costs about one cent—two to three orders of magnitude cheaper than competitors. This enables more experimentation, attracts more developers and users, paving the way for crypto’s future.
In 2021, we largely failed due to scalability—everything became too expensive to scale to mass users. Demand surged, causing dollar values of transactions and assets to skyrocket, forming bubbles. Speculation is part of innovation, but ultimately drove adoption peaks. Looking ahead, Celestia as a data availability layer truly supports all rollup discussions—rollups being execution, solving data availability. It could be Ethereum as DA layer, Eigenlayer, or Celestia. In my view, Celestia is poised to win this category.
One issue Celestia addresses with data availability sampling is increasing throughput as nodes grow on the network. This is a critical differentiator versus past blockchain systems. Similarly, Solana’s design philosophy assumes higher throughput as hardware performance and connectivity improve. Though both systems remain early in network scale, I believe Solana and Celestia are the most forward-thinking in unit economics and scalability.
Nick White: Yes, I agree with Chris. I believe Solana and Celestia share a deep commonality and philosophy: we both believe abundant, cheap fees can expand crypto’s base layer, enabling more builds, making new applications possible, achieving mass adoption. It’s a noble mission we should all pursue.
But where we diverge somewhat is Celestia’s strong emphasis on verifiability. Beyond scaling block production and network throughput, we care about scaling verifiability—meaning end users can actually audit and verify whether the chain follows rules and everything is legitimate. This matters because it defines blockchains and distinguishes them from Web2—they are verifiable computers.
So I think this leads to architectural differences. We prioritize data availability sampling because it allows users to run light nodes on phones and verify Celestia. I believe Solana currently accepts high node requirements. Our validators and block producers also have high specs, but we aim to offer end users a low-node-requirement option. So here lies overlap with slight divergence—perhaps related to the “Solestia” meme I see on Twitter, merging Solana and Celestia, yet not fully overlapping.
Will Solana Turn Modular?
Laura Shin: This leads to a question for Anatoly: Ethereum started as a monolithic chain, then shifted toward modularity. Is it possible you might someday think Solana also needs to shift to a modular structure?
Yakovenko: We can’t stop developers from putting Solana user transactions into Celestia, using Solana state routing, then running fraud-proof mechanisms or validity proofs to secure it—effectively creating rollup bridges with data availability from Celestia to Solana, or even from Ethereum to Solana. Unless our protocol has flaws, we can’t block this at the protocol level. I hope Solana is flexible enough to allow this—it’s perfectly fine.
If there’s sufficient demand for higher-assurance bridges from assets on Celestia, someone will build and profit from it—that’s natural. So to me, we’re starting to see boundaries blur between data availability, optimized chains, and what I call execution-layer-optimized chains. There may be much crossover—things start looking like everyone’s cooperating while competing.
From my perspective, whether we modularize code isn’t the issue—it’s more of an implementation detail. When we consider reducing 400ms block times to 200ms, for us it means practically separating execution from fork choice. They’re still the same binary, just running asynchronously. This starts resembling a chain with embedded rollups. You ask—is this modular design? No, it’s just the same techniques we borrow to achieve our goals—shorter block times and higher performance.
I think these things will naturally happen on all chains with users because we’re all smart engineers, ideas are open-source, and we’re all improving products. It’s iterative. But I think clear distinctions remain. The best example I can show now is Jupyter—a routing app routing between internal markets within a single state machine. It executes 20-cent trades split across five different liquidity pools.
Doing this on Ethereum is really hard—because if you perform one operation, Ethereum L1 gas fees are expensive. Even across L2s, due to jumps and asynchronous design, you can’t get the same guarantees at such low prices. You might only execute very large trades, but as things get smaller and faster, the asynchronous nature of separated state machines begins to show. We’ll see that separation.
I’ve spoken with Don Cradd from Ethereum—one of the best engineers I’ve met—and often ask him questions. How do you solve this? It’s very open and collaborative—the people are great. The Celestia team—I think their data availability sampling design is excellent. If it works on Solana at the bandwidth we want, we’d definitely implement it for our users. It’s just a bonus—it doesn’t take anything away. It adds extra security. Having research teams like theirs is fantastic.
Chris Burniske: Natural modularity on Solana is already happening. For example, the Eclipse team runs an SVM rollup settling on Ethereum while using Celestia for data availability. So it executes via SVM on Solana while leveraging Celestia’s unit economics for data availability. Similar cases may emerge in 2024 with Showtime development, or teams like CODE founded by Ted Livingston, who previously created Kik—a hugely successful messaging app later squeezed out by WhatsApp. The CODE team is building a sleek wallet on Solana and constructing an L2 inside Solana using clever techniques to scale. So smart engineers are finding ways to modularize Solana itself to meet their needs—not necessarily driven by Solana core.
Laura Shin: You mentioned the Eclipse project—said it settles on Ethereum but is an SVM project. Do you think we’ll see more modular Ethereum apps moving to SVM, or more monolithic Solana apps moving to Ethereum?
Chris Burniske: Apps written for SVM cannot be directly ported to EVM because they have different processes and environments. For projects like Eclipse, since the execution layer uses SVM, apps built on Solana can run on Eclipse while gaining access to Ethereum’s liquidity and wallets.
This makes it easier for developers within the Solana ecosystem to reach Ethereum users. However, migrating from EVM to SVM is a daunting task for teams, requiring complete rebuilding. Currently, some young native developers are building apps from scratch for SVM, creating independent developer and user communities within Solana. This could enable SVM to surpass EVM in user count within a few years. Hence, some may want to run their Ethereum apps among Solana users—exactly the reverse trend we see with Eclipse. But achieving this requires orders of magnitude more users on-chain.
Laura Shin: Before we continue—Chris, can you clarify why you think Solana users will outnumber Ethereum users? Because in certain corners of Twitter, this would certainly spark controversy.
Chris Burniske: I said SVM and EVM, right?
Laura Shin: Oh, okay.
Chris Burniske: I mean the Solana Virtual Machine is parallelized, offering significantly higher performance. Teams like Monad are completely redesigning EVM for parallelization, but SVM currently outperforms EVM clearly in user experience, cost, and performance, making it easier for users to engage with on-chain applications. Instead of tipping ETH, now it’s SOL. Using Phantom Wallet, I click a button and nearly instantly send value to anyone’s phone for just a fraction of a cent. This realizes the near-free, instant value transfer I’ve dreamed of in crypto. SVM plays a key role in achieving this. While EVM can eventually achieve similar results, it requires much more work. Until EVM gets there, I believe SVM will keep capturing market share.
Currently, from a developer standpoint, EVM still holds a massive lead over SVM. A year ago this seemed unimaginable, but people are beginning to consider it more seriously. If SVM produces breakthrough applications attracting hundreds of millions of on-chain users, it will draw widespread developer attention and curiosity. Just a few such apps appearing would prompt people to include SVM in their design considerations or potential shortlists.
Perspectives on the Bitcoin Ecosystem
Laura Shin: For startups recently building on Bitcoin, do you think founders face disadvantages compared to those building on Ethereum or Solana? Or do they benefit from Bitcoin’s mainstream acceptance as the leading digital asset?
Yakovenko: Building projects on Bitcoin with low fees is extremely difficult unless sidechains are used. In contrast, bringing Bitcoin onto Solana or Celestia via bridges may be more practical. I think people can succeed here, but it’s similar to the high-fee environment of building on Ethereum Layer 1. While high transaction fees can generate revenue, successful companies struggle to scale to hundreds of millions of users wanting to join the ecosystem.
Nick White: Modularity is reshaping the Bitcoin community to some extent. People no longer see Bitcoin merely as a layer for transferring digital gold but increasingly as a data availability layer usable for NFTs or even running rollups. Teams are actively exploring running rollups on Bitcoin, including EVM-like rollup schemes. While exciting, Bitcoin has fundamental limitations making it poorly suited as a data availability or settlement layer—low data availability throughput and lack of real settlement functionality. Recently, a paper detailed how to verify execution on Bitcoin Layer 1, but I forgot the name.
Chris Burniske: BitVM.
Nick White: BitVM. Yes, if that works, it would be incredibly exciting—actually turning Bitcoin into a settlement layer. I think that might be the best outcome. Though I’m not sure Bitcoin maxis would be happy about it.
Chris Burniske: Modularity is reshaping the Bitcoin community. People no longer see Bitcoin solely as a digital gold transfer layer but increasingly as a data availability layer for publishing NFTs or running rollups. Teams are actively exploring Bitcoin-based rollups, including EVM-like versions. While exciting, Bitcoin has inherent limitations making it suboptimal as a data availability or settlement layer—low DA throughput and lack of real settlement. A recent paper explained how to validate execution on Bitcoin Layer 1, but I forgot the title.
I think Bitcoin maxis should open their minds—because as Bitcoin’s supply inflation decreases, transaction fees must replace miners’ inflation income. As digital gold, relying solely on fees may prove insufficient. Over the past year, we’ve seen exciting developments like Ordinals generating substantial fee revenue for miners—crucial for maxis pursuing Bitcoin as digital gold. Many teams are researching Layer 2 solutions, needing opcode changes to create real L2s. Currently, true L2s aren’t independently secured but leverage L1 security. Most current solutions are sidechains. We collaborate with Stacks—Muneeb has been working hard to evolve Stacks into a Layer 2, though currently it’s more like a sidechain.
Having expressive Layer 2s on Bitcoin would be amazing. These L2s would add more value to Bitcoin than Ethereum L2s add to Ethereum, because Ethereum L2s simply extend Ethereum’s expressiveness. Bitcoin’s scripting language is extremely limited, so expressive L2s would simultaneously enhance scalability and expressiveness—this is highly significant. However, many teams building in the new Bitcoin ecosystem face challenges—they don’t get expected cooperation from Bitcoin whales. In contrast, on Ethereum or Solana, many whales are active on-chain, excited by innovation and willing to support new projects. OG Bitcoin whales typically cold-store their coins deeply frozen, making it harder to mobilize capital to support Bitcoin DeFi projects. Thus, the Bitcoin ecosystem faces resistance from its OG community, adding friction. Friction slows momentum. These are issues Bitcoin’s ecosystem must address—but I’m excited to see renewed focus on Bitcoin.
Will Ethereum Ultimately Succeed?
Laura Shin: If we consider Ethereum as “Modulithic,” do you think there’s a world where Ethereum can compete with Celestia on cost or data availability? Or was it never designed for that world, while Celestia was purpose-built for it?
Anatoly Yakovenko: Ethereum is like steering a $300 billion ship—every change carries enormous risk. People may underestimate the Merge and Ethereum’s progress over recent years. Design-wise, danksharding can scale to accommodate all of Solana’s data. However, adding features to Ethereum involves economic and social factors—feasibility is another question entirely. Despite immense challenges, I believe they’re heading in the right direction.
Chris Burniske: What do you think, Nick?
Nick White: The Ethereum community continues iterating and innovating at scale, which deserves credit. Unlike Bitcoin’s protocol rigidity, Ethereum maintains flexibility. Yet changing a massive vessel is extremely challenging due to complex dependencies. Transitioning from modular to monolithic is more ambitious than shifting from proof-of-work to proof-of-stake—it touches multiple aspects of the protocol. Danksharding’s design and effort are outstanding, but deployment will be exceptionally difficult. Ethereum’s researchers and engineers are among the best. Though the path may be relatively slow, they will ultimately succeed.
Crypto Market Predictions
Laura Shin: I’d like to ask what drives the next bull cycle. In 2013, Bitcoin gained attention mainly for being the first cryptocurrency. But based on my observation, the past two crypto market cycles were driven more by technology. ICOs dominated 2017–2018; in 2021, despite DeFi leading, it felt more like NFTs. To me, this bull cycle is seeing spot Bitcoin ETFs placing Bitcoin front and center—even before halving. I’m curious what you think will drive this bull cycle—or whether this marks the beginning of a supercycle, leaving behind the era of alternating bull and bear markets.
Chris Burniske: I don’t think it’s a supercycle, but it will be a compelling one. Expansion will occur across users, value, integration, and relevance to daily global life. Bitcoin ETFs are a major event—they’ll further integrate Bitcoin and crypto into the real world. With traditional finance giants like BlackRock and ARK Invest involved, Bitcoin ETF launches will drive wealth advisors to train and introduce Bitcoin to millions of clients. This may spark curiosity about Bitcoin, followed by interest in other digital assets—like ETH ETFs—creating a continuous ripple effect.
From education, awareness, and capital flow perspectives, Bitcoin ETFs are crucial and long-awaited for the industry. This cycle will align with increasing global liquidity and potential interest rate cuts. Despite inflation potentially causing instability, we’re nearing peak rates. Interestingly, memes reflect ongoing debates about the Fed raising and lowering rates. Also, Toly mentioned the relationship between value and federal funds rates—there’s deep reasoning behind it. As rates fall, value itself expands—consistent with capitalism’s inevitable trend.
We’re entering a phase of Bitcoin ETF inflows, falling rates, and rising liquidity. Looking back at 2017’s ICOs—static fungibles—laid groundwork for DeFi. Now, I describe it as evolving internet financial systems—from static to dynamic, toward mature dynamism. In coming years, I believe we’ll see more mature dynamic finance at institutional levels across platforms like Solana, Avalanche, and Ethereum. Celestia plays a key role—providing infrastructure for anyone wanting to publish DA transactions.
Non-fungibles typically lag fungibles by one cycle because they’re more complex and sometimes dismissed as worthless—like six-figure monkey JPEGs. In 2021, non-fungibles experienced static development, similar to 2017’s fungibles. In coming years, we’ll witness many dynamic non-fungibles emerging—games possibly the most compelling area. Experiments like DRiP on Solana show NFTs’ potential in building loyalty or creator audience mechanisms. These low-cost, scalable practices are becoming foundations for new social media and interpersonal interactions.
Laura Shin: Anatoly, Nick—what about you? What do you think will define this bull cycle?
Anatoly Yakovenko: I think Chris has thoroughly covered the aspects. During this expansion of applications, I hope to see more practical uses—like payments. I hope crypto payments like Solana Pay begin competing with traditional financial services, as I believe this is key to adoption. If we can launch a decentralized version of WeChat with payment capabilities seamlessly integrated into traditional finance, it could liberate users from legacy systems—letting them pay and perform various tasks within a single super-app. I believe breakthroughs in payment use cases will be pivotal.
We’re now at a stage where decentralized technology lets us deconstruct financial services. In DeFi, we already see multiple competitors for each financial function. In the future, a decentralized WeChat with billions of users might emerge. I think such an app could actually become more valuable than its underlying base layer. This would shift attention to applications—recognizing them as key touchpoints for customer interaction, where all money flows, while the base layer becomes more like an information medium. I’m unsure of timing, but I believe this could be phase two of development.
Nick White: One key theme of the next cycle will be modularity vs. monolithicity. Over recent years, we’ve emphasized modularity, but it remained theoretical—until now, when modular stacks have finally matured. As Chris said, this may be the first wave of modular stacks, and achieving full dynamic maturity may require multiple waves. But we’ve finally reached the stage from theory to practice—we can observe modular stacks operating, people building and demonstrating modular blockchains’ capabilities and unlocks.
Celestia and Solana lead in integration, while Ethereum with its L2 expansions and broader modular ecosystem also pushes modularity forward. Where users and developers ultimately land remains unknown. Overall, I believe it will be an exciting time—we’ll explore new use cases. It resembles Ethereum’s initial launch—before that, if you wanted to launch an app, you had to build your own blockchain, just like… if you wanted to create Litecoin, you had to issue... Litecoin was basically just a token, right?
When Ethereum launched, issuing tokens and writing DeFi apps became much easier. Modular blockchains achieve something similar but deeper—innovation at protocol and execution layers. I believe this will trigger an entirely new explosion of experimentation—just as Ethereum led DeFi and NFT growth. I expect we’ll discover completely new, product-market-fit applications. Payments excite me greatly, while games and social apps have viral potential to rapidly reach hundreds of millions—if proper incentives are set.
Explorations by Coinbase and Worldcoin in identity are also significant breakthroughs—many applications remain constrained by inability to truly possess citizenship, identity, or reputation. This is a major unlock, though we’re still early. I once thought I entered crypto too late in 2017, but over time realized this journey takes long—but it will be an interesting ride.
Chris Burniske: Toly, are you worried Solana might become a victim of its own success like Ethereum did in 2021?
Anatoly Yakovenko: Yes, I experienced something similar building the Brew OS at Qualcomm. It was top-tier engineering—one of the coolest things, with exceptional mobile download records. We actually held the first real mobile platform—the iPhone design was in our hands. But Verizon pushed back because they thought they knew what to do. We felt uneasy in this middle ground—too big to pivot, too small to overcome Apple once it shipped. So we worry about mid-sized changes. Our singular focus on performance makes it easier for engineers to align, push chain acceleration, and ensure high priority and stability.
But then comes the next question—why make this change? We do it to unlock the next performance tier. We have a culture of pushing forward through singular focus—it’s consistently worked. But as things mature, we must treat changes and other aspects more carefully. We need to slow down slightly, but we also have more resources. We want the ecosystem to maintain this pace, though it’s a scary thought. Yes, Firedancer is launching a second implementation—eliminating single points of failure is our highest priority.
Laura Shin: On the day we recorded, a widespread vulnerability affected numerous dApps across multiple blockchains. This stemmed from a former Ledger employee falling victim to a phishing attack, allowing hackers to update Ledger’s Connect Kit software. This software connects various dApps across blockchains—hackers uploaded malicious code, draining users’ wallets. The incident clearly caused chaos and distress. I wonder about your outlook for the industry’s future—because to bring this technology to the masses, such incidents shouldn’t keep happening. What are your thoughts?
Anatoly Yakovenko: I believe technology is improving. I use the Fuse wallet, released two months ago. It’s an on-chain wallet allowing users to set up different supply chains across multiple hardware devices as signers. Such solutions exist and are live, but they take time to spread globally until people are no longer vulnerable to these attacks. Promoting these solutions is very difficult—it requires changing user behavior and downstream updates. Long-term, I believe these problems are solvable, though it will be a bumpy journey.
Nick White: I think we’re still in the early stages of blockchain development. At this stage, risks are unavoidable—especially in protocols and the entire stack, including wallets. Though hacks occur periodically, they actually drive progress by exposing issues needing fixes. Once fixed, we hope similar problems won’t recur. It’s like we’re running an ongoing bug bounty—perhaps unintentionally—but this process continuously pushes us toward more robust systems. We hope blockchains become cornerstones of future global finance—an effort requiring persistence, not shortcuts—occasional hacks are just part of the process.
Laura Shin: From my perspective, considering our current moment—especially with spot Bitcoin ETFs imminent—I sense massive capital will enter the system, drawing more attention. People will pay closer attention and tie their wealth to events in the crypto ecosystem. I believe this will quickly transform the atmosphere of the field, attracting greater scrutiny. While some think problems will fix themselves, I disagree. I feel once Bitcoin ETFs launch, media attention will surge dramatically—especially if this happens in 2024. So I’m not sure such explanations will satisfy expectations of newcomers entering the space.
Anatoly Yakovenko: Yes, absolutely. My biggest fear is a massive hack setting back the entire blockchain field by years. I hope it doesn’t happen, but that’s what I find most terrifying. Everyone is trying to stay vigilant—developers and companies involved. Fortunately, many are doing so, but the entire crypto industry lacks a single point of failure. Still, each such incident reminds us to be more alert.
Chris Burniske: I see this as part of financial technology’s evolution over time. Different types of fraud emerge in different eras, then get fixed—like bank robberies no longer being as common. Partly because much value has moved from banks to various ledgers. Now, much value resides on blockchains, where transactions are irreversible—making blockchain fraud more prevalent.
Teams we work with at Agoric strengthen JavaScript in multiple ways, shifting toward object-oriented programming environments. Similarly, Sui does comparable work using Move. Toly and Nick are better suited to explain the benefits, but it’s foreseeable that over time, developers’ environments and tools will become more robust, protecting them from potential harm. Toly also mentioned Fuse and perspectives on available wallets—making ultra-secure wallets already existing easier to use. Yet even with Fuse being user-friendly, users may still become targets for hackers.
As Carlota Perez said, this is the new default—just as proper hygiene and correct blockchain usage haven’t yet become the new norm. Today, almost everyone in crypto uses local 2FA—it’s the new default within crypto, but not outside. But as more people face spam, SMS attacks, and email attacks, this trend will increasingly push toward crypto practices. We have a responsibility to provide correct solutions. Though it may bring challenges, I believe through innovation we can solve this. If crypto fails to solve it through innovation, other fields may face the same困境, forcing us to innovate regardless.
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