Gone are the days when blockchain didn’t scale. A modern blockchain can handle a huge number of transactions per second (TPS). Blockchain that does not scale well is lost and will soon disappear. Sharding and parallelization are the way to go. The future is bright. This narrative is getting stronger. Many influencers overlook decentralization in their obsession with high TPS. Thus, the essence of the blockchain industry is being forgotten. How do we combine scalability and decentralization? Let’s think about it.
To be clear, the modern blockchain needs to scale better than the first generation of blockchain. It makes no sense for the network to divide users into first-class and second-class citizens because of outdated technology.
All users must have the same status. The division between rich and poor creates inequality in the system that will be an obstacle to adoption. The poor will not adopt a system in which the rich have advantages.
If the blockchain ecosystem does not provide cheap onboarding of new users as well as fast and cheap payments, it has no chance to compete with traditional financial systems. For DeFi services and all other use cases, scalability is essential.
Knowing the above, it is necessary to return to the roots of the crypto industry and remember that the key feature is decentralization.
Decentralization is often forgotten in the effort to deliver a network with huge TPS to market. The priorities for each blockchain should be in this order:
SecurityDecentralizationScalability
If you see the famous blockchain trilemma in this, you know exactly what I’m talking about.
Each team balances these characteristics differently. That’s fine. One team prefers decentralization over scalability. The other prefers scalability over decentralization. Blockchain can be highly scalable and only moderately decentralized. It will still be useful.
