Platform Moats

If you read this and it felt like a giant subtweet, you are right, I am talking here about all of the “Layer 1” smart contract platforms which are better than Ethereum. I have no doubt that they are incredibly designed by talented researchers and engineers and that, indeed, they allow for significantly better scalability, throughput, latency, security or even deployment costs…

I also understand that several ÐApp developers such as CryptoKitties or Kin may be frustrated by the limited capabilities of the current Ethereum blockchain. I am also worried that it won’t support Unlock at scale and I am already struggling with extravagant gas prices.

But what I fail to see, is how any of these more advanced Layer 1 is going to compete with the network effects around the Ethereum ecosystem. At this point, everyone knows that Ethereum is limited and yet, this is where everybody starts to build, this is the platform for which dev tools are being developed, and the platforms which has already too many wallet applications… Each of these are compounding network effects.

Every day spent optimizing transactions per second on another Layer 1 platform sees hundreds of new engineers embracing Solidity, Web3.js or Metamask and making the limited Ethereum as the only platform of choice.

In closing, I want to point at this tweet by Denis Nazarov, which, I believe threads around the same idea (despite him being such an EOS fanboy!):