❓Monolithic Chain Issues

Blockchain technology initially adopted a "Monolithic Chain[1]" design, a concept originating from the Bitcoin network and adopted by many blockchains, such as Ethereum 1.0. Although monolithic chains gained widespread application in their early days, their limitations gradually became apparent: First, the processing speed of blockchain transactions is significantly lower than the Web2.0 standards. Second, as the number of applications increases, the blockchain network becomes increasingly congested, leading to rising transaction fees (Gas Fee). Although sidechain[2] technology and new public chains like Solana have temporarily alleviated these issues, they have also led to the fragmentation of the blockchain ecosystem. The launch of Cosmos and Polkadot enabled developers to rapidly build application chains, however, the high cost of node operation also poses a limitation to their development. With the development of Layer2 Rollup technologies, such as Arbitrum and Optimistic, although the so-called "trilemma" issue has been alleviated, these solutions are still limited by the processing capacity of their main chains, and the high cost of block storage on the main chain also limits their further optimization potential.

A more severe problem lies in the inherent lack of "adaptability" in monolithic chains. If every node in the network must execute and validate every transaction, this leads to the network's processing capacity being limited by the hardware resources of the weakest node, causing a significant waste of resources and environmental pollution due to electricity consumption in reality. This phenomenon can be described as the "barrel theory," where the overall system's efficiency is limited by its weakest part. In the design of monolithic chains, despite nodes incurring more costs in maintaining consensus, they do not receive corresponding rewards. This lack of adaptability means that certain nodes continuously become the "short planks" that limit the entire system's development.

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[1] Mustafa Bedawala, VISA. Monolithic vs. M odular blockchain.

[2] Adam Back. Enabling blockchain innovations with pegged sidechains. 2014