Ethereum researcher Polynya: Why is a monolithic public chain a "dead end"?

I've never written an article on "Optimistic Rollups vs. ZK-Rollups". They are all great. My articles are all about opposing monolithic L1 blockchains that are extremely inefficient, unscalable, insecure, and inflexible, and we have seen the ridiculous allocation of capital to these L1 networks. My sole purpose is to see blockchain expand to global ubiquity in a technologically, economically and socially sustainable way. Not only are monolithic L1 blockchain networks unsustainable, in fact they will never deliver the required throughput — and are orders of magnitude off target. But this is no longer an issue - we need modular execution layers & data availability sampling to scale the blockchain. This has never been so clear. The sooner we recognize this and move to this approach, the better off the blockchain industry will be. Yes, this is just my opinion. As always, please consider this article a stream of consciousness rambling for hobbyists, not a professional research article.

Monolithic L1 blockchains are (still) extremely inefficient
I started writing reviews on Rollups in 2020 and blogged about this time last year when the prevailing narrative was that "Cardano/other L1 smart contract platforms are coming and users will migrate from Ethereum at scale overnight. to other L1 networks." The statement after that is "L2 networks are a temporary stopgap, and the only way to achieve scaling is L1 networks." However, even with the mildest tests in late 2021, the narrative of these alternative L1 networks is Disintegrates at breakneck speed:

Binance Smart Chain (BSC) makes its system more demanding due to state bloat. As a result, the nodes started to get out of sync, causing many problems. The problem here is that they specified very low system requirements in the beginning - but they didn't tell people that system requirements would grow exponentially with state inflation. Now, they make reckless network changes without adequate auditing or testing. Of course, switching to Erigon and having multiple chains will provide incremental benefits, but there will always be serious limitations.


Solana made no such mistake, they were very open to high system requirements from the start. Now, I'm definitely not going to criticize Solana for its various failures and problems, because that's largely because it's an early beta product. Bugs and issues due to missing features will always show up in beta projects, be it Rollups, dapps, or monolithic L1 networks, and I just hope the developers fix them. But the problem is that over time, as Solana matures, has been tested to eliminate bugs, and implements a fee market, it will need to provide an incremental throughput at a huge cost in technical and economic sustainability price. Solana is inherently not scalable. Optimistic Rollups is a much better solution than Solana and will mature very quickly.