Put aside market value and hype, what exactly determines the long-term success of blockchain? Gavin Wood, co-founder of Ethereum, the proposer of the Web3 concept and creator of Polkadot, shared his five key criteria for evaluating blockchain.

In an interview with Forbes, Gavin Wood, the crypto industry prophet, explained what factors can make blockchain projects successful and what factors will Causes them to fail. He also shared some useful evaluation criteria and made direct analysis of the most popular blockchain projects at present.

His analysis method helps us understand more clearly the cryptocurrency price fluctuations in leading blockchains. For example, why did ETH's market value drop from its highest $575 billion in 2021 to $394 billion now? Why did SOL's market cap break through its all-time high to $115 billion, while Polkadot's DOT (launched around the same period) dropped to $9 billion? Wood not only saw the numbers of these changes, but also identified the key reasons behind the changes.

Gavin Wood speaks at the Decoded Conference in Brussels in July 2024

< p style="text-align: left;">Gavin Wood's five blockchain evaluation criteria

There are currently hundreds of blockchains, each of which They all have their own unique technologies, application scenarios and usage situations. To help us see clearly the blockchains that have real potential, Gavin Wood lists five basic criteria for evaluating them.

Resilience: The cornerstone of Web3, resilience combines cryptography, decentralization and game theory to protect blockchains from attacks and ensure long-term stability.

Performance: Not only scalability, performance also measures the efficiency of a network processing and completing tasks.

University: The ability of blockchain to support multiple applications and programmability.

Accessibility: users, developers, applications and machinesHow easy is it to interact with the robot and the Internet.

Consistency: A system's ability to maintain fast and consistent communication across its network.

Resilience: an uncompromising standard

Although blockchains can focus on different characteristics, But there is one standard that cannot be compromised, that is decentralization and resilience. This standard is difficult to evaluate and requires long-term attention, but it is the most important.

Gavin Wood said: "Those blockchains that ignore decentralization and resilience should not be called Web3." text-align: left;">He went on to say, "For example, we see that the L2 network on Ethereum has a fixed set of validators, and these validators are managed by a specific company, right? This is obviously not a feature of Web3 . ”

Evaluating the resilience of a blockchain usually boils down to evaluating its degree of decentralization. Wood asked several questions to evaluate:

Who makes the protocol decision?

Is there a clear or low threshold entry method for the governance structure?

There is also the Nakamoto coefficient, which measures the number of participants required to destroy the network.

Finally, Wood also mentioned a broader question, such as whether there is a single entity that can dominate the direction of the entire project and "full control of the ecosystem" , suppress other voices and opinions. ”

Gavin was satisfied with the decentralization of Polkadot and said that it has a high Satoshi Nakamoto coefficient. According to Nakaflow, Polkadot's current Satoshi coefficient is 149, meaning at least 149 independent validators are needed to unite to destroy the network. In contrast, some other major blockchains scored much lower, such as Solana scored 19 and Ethereum only had 2.

But, the threshold for entry is still a problem.

Maurantonio Caprolu, a research scientist in KAUST in Saudi Arabia, has co-written several papers on Polkadot, describing the high barriers to this issue .

" Until 2022, if you want to become an active validator, you would need to stake an average of about 1.8 million DOT (about $32 million at the time). Even now, this The minimum pledge requirement is still very high, which is actually more conducive to the participation of institutions that can afford a large amount of DOT token costs. ”

From the resilience standard defined by Gavin, Ethereum's weaknesses become obvious. Ethereum is often criticized for its huge influence in Vitalik Buterin. Especially his recent post on X - "I am the one who decides to lead the new EF (Ethereum Foundation) team" - has escalated this controversy.

People may ask: Given Gavin Wood's important position in Polkadot, does Polkadot Will you also face the risk of a Gavin-dominated narrative? Wood admits that his name does have weight, but he emphasizes that Polkadot's governance is community-driven. He cited some successful community-led proposals as examples, such as reducing the inflation rate of DOT, demonstrating the decentralized decision-making process of Polkadot.

Polkassembly governance platform further promotes community participation and launches a framework that is adapted to OpenGov in 2023. Caprolu and his team believe that OpenGov can “expand inclusion and reduce concentration of power.” However, the researchers noted: “Because this system is still in its early stages, more time and data is needed to verify whether OpenGov can successfully mitigate the tendency to centralize power we observed in Governance 1.0, the governance model before Polkadot.”

Performance: What is the price to pay?

Different blockchains take advantage of improving performance Different strategiesSimilarly, but the common challenge they face is finding a balance between improving performance, decentralization and consistency.

Take Ethereum as an example. Wood explained: "In the beginning, they planned to use sharding technology to add EVM sharding to the network. But then they abandoned the solution and chose to support the L2 solution. In fact, they did nothing, just let the others People build chains and use Ethereum to ensure the security of these chains. "This practice has led to a lack of consistency and even affects security." Wood believes that "Ethereum and L2 are not actually real Ethereum, because L2 does not provide the same security."

In addition, Gavin It is believed that Solana sacrificed decentralization.

"Solana's strategy is to make its validators stronger and ensure that there is good connectivity between these validators. To achieve this ,Solana reduces the number of validators. Because if you want to improve connectivity between two validators, it is usually necessary to reduce the number of validators participating. The result of this is that Solana's Satoshi coefficient has decreased because fewer Validators mean fewer participants can control the network, thus reducing the degree of decentralization. ”

Gavin Wood calls Solana "a height Synchronous scaling strategy”, whose speed is limited by the speed of processing and synchronized data on a single machine. While this approach can be achieved quickly in the early stages, it will eventually be bottlenecks due to hardware and network limitations.

For Wood, "the same is true for many other proof-of-stake chains. They do not have a consistent scaling strategy, and in order to handle more data, they just reduce The number of validators and speed up. ”

Polkadot is built differently from Solana, which enables network scaling and optimization by adding more validators. Specifically, Polkadot enhances the degree of decentralization by increasing the number of validators, rather than reducing validators. With more validator participation, Polkadot not only maintains decentralization, but also enables the network to run faster. In other words, Polkadot optimizes performance by "scaling" rather than sacrificing decentralization to pursue speed.

University: True Turing Completeness

Gavin Wood defines the universality of blockchain by measuring the difficulty of converting a Web2 application to Web3. More specifically, he measures universality by how many different computing tasks the blockchain can support, and how complex these computing tasks are.

Ethereum introduced the concept of Turing completeness, meaning it can perform any task that can be computed. But as Wood pointed out, Ethereum doesn't fully implement this. This is because it is bound by gas limits and block size, and the calculation must be done within these limits, which limits the scope of complex problems it can solve.

Polkadot aims to eliminate these constraints through its parachain model. Parachains execute their own logic in the WebAssembly environment, as long as the calculation is completed within a few seconds. This setup allows the parachain to process larger data sets. Currently, Ethereum allows approximately 15 million EVM gas per block, and for Polkadot, this number is equivalent to 18 billion gas.

Nevertheless, Polkadot's universality is still quantitative rather than qualitative, just like Ethereum. It expands computing power, but does not fundamentally change the scope of computing. This will change with the upcoming JAM upgrade. JAM upgrade promises to enable "continuations", i.e. calculations can be paused and resumed between blocks.

Professor Soulla Louca, head of the Blockchain Initiative at the University of Nicosia, Cyprus, believes that removing the limitations of single block computing could be a major breakthrough. She explained:

"While other blockchains have mechanisms to handle complex computing (e.g., layer 2 solutions, optimistic Rollups), there are currently no other zones Blockchain provides a built-in continuity mechanism similar to the proposed JAM. This capability may provide Polkadot with a significant advantage in supporting more complex and general applications, especially like complex financial tools, large-scale data processing, on-chain More advanced applications such as AI/ML. ”

Consistency: Eliminate barriers

Consistency Sex is a major challenge facing the blockchain ecosystem. Ethereum's L2Both the parachains of Polkadot have difficulties in this regard. As Wood describes, they run in isolated environments, cross-chain interactions are often slow, expensive, and potentially unsafe unless a co-sorting system is introduced. However, such a system also presents its own challenges, as it requires supercomputers to sort, which inevitably leads to centralization.

Wood admits that consistency is not a major concern for Polkadot. Although some integration and bridging have been done over the past year, parachains still face the problem of consistency.

This question was also pointed out by OriginTrail founder Tomaz Levak. His company developed a DeSci (Decentralized Science) protocol designed to structure and connect real-world data for AI and enterprises and run on its own Polkadot parachain. Levak said that while “the performance and customization capabilities brought by Polkadot technology design are very unique in meeting demand,” he hopes to see “the bridging infrastructure with other blockchain ecosystems is strengthened.”

Accessibility: usability testing

In the field of blockchain, the general view is Polkadot is very powerful, but difficult to understand. However, Wood notes that Polkadot's accessibility has improved significantly over the past year thanks to the upgrade of XCM (cross-chain messaging) systems and eco-wallets. Similarly, Tomaz Levak also stated that the end users of OriginTrail "seldom interact directly with the blockchain layer because a friendly user interface ensures a smooth experience."

Nevertheless, consistency issues persist, hindering accessibility. Wood said JAM will solve this problem by providing shared data availability storage, where services can be built, thus completely hiding the consistency problems faced by users.

When it comes to developer engagement, Wood proudly points out that Polkadot has always had many "serious" full-time developers. In fact, Electric Capital's developer report shows that Polkadot's technology stack ranks third in the field of encryption. Currently, Polkadot has 467 full-time developers, second only to Solana (599) and Ethereum (3562). However, Wood believes the actual numbers are higher, as the 35 teams working on JAM are in a closed source environment and are not included in the report.

In general, no blockchain can perfectly master these five standards. As Gavin Wood said:

"Some blockchain systems have very good performance but lack consistency, such as Polkadot. And zones like Ethereum Although blockchain performs well in consistency, it has poor performance. If you look at Solana, it does a good job in consistency, but lacks resilience and decentralization. So, the current situation is that you can choose Some of these features, but none of the blockchains can meet all of these needs at the same time. ”

The real winners will be those who do not compromise on the core principles of Web3 Blockchain adapted to changes under the premise. The question is: Which blockchain will find the balance first? ?

Original link:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/ digital-assets/2025/01/31/what-makes-or-breaks-a-blockchain-gavin-woods-5-criteria/