Near Protocol co-founder Illia Polosukhin lays out his vision for Web3 and explains why Ethereum may not play a prominent role in its foundation. Illia Polosukhin, the co-founder of Near Protocol, thinks Ethereum development has a focus problem. Instead, he says engineers should be fixing crucial issues that will enable Web3 to scale to billions of users.
“We need the simplicity of usage. We need easy programmability. We need composability that is natural to the applications. I don’t see the current Ethereum evolutions targeting any of those goals,” Polosukhin said in an exclusive interview with Cointelegraph. Ethereum is currently one of the most popular cryptocurrencies in the world. However, the crypto has been facing some fluctuations in price, and due to that, there are certain issues with the functioning of the cryptocurrency. With the recent development of Web3 and Ethereum’s absence in the core foundation of the
Polosukhin envisions a new version of the internet, or Web3, in which the user will retain full ownership of their data and assets. He believes this new internet iteration won’t be based on a single “killer app” but instead a combination of different apps.
Ethereum to Not Be Included in Web3 Foundation due to Faults
“Our goal is that users [are] in control of their data. They’re in control of their money and assets. So they can govern these platforms, which means there is no need to build an everything-fulfilling platform,” he said.
Thus, improving blockchain technology’s scalability and interoperability is key to building the foundations of Web3. However, according to Polosukhin, while Ethereum remains the dominant smart-contract platform, it lacks Near’s focus on achieving those goals.
Specifically, he thinks Ethereum’s reliance on layer two solutions or rollups to solve its scalability problem could lead to tradeoffs in terms of composability. “Rollups naturally will kind of create less compatibility and create more sub-spaces in which things are happening,” he said.
This might not go well with the foundation of Web3, and that is one of the most important reasons why Ethereum is not going to have any role in the developmental stage of Web3. There is no doubt that the exclusion of Ethereum from the Web3 foundational phase will create a lot of controversies in the crypto world.
Also Read : White House Allegedly Preparing Executive Orders for Crypto currency
As a layer-1 solution alternative to Ethereum, Near aims to solve the scalability issue by leveraging sharding technology, a process that splits the Protocol’s infrastructure into several segments without sacrificing composability; this was a decision taken by Near to ensure that Web3 doesn’t require the inclusion of Ethereum to function properly on its own.
“By actually scaling up the composable structure, we allow to have a lot more applications running closely with each other with the same financial models,” explains Polosukhin.
A core component of Near’s composability feature is the Rainbow Bridge, a protocol that allows a free transfer of assets from the Ethereum blockchain and vice-versa.
“That allows not just to send tokens around, but it allows to read the state of each chain from the other chain so you can pass any generic messages between them and execute contracts,” he explained.
Near was one of the fastest-growing development communities in 2021. According to Polosukhin, one of the Protocol’s main attractivity consists in offering popular and easy-to-use programming languages such as Java and Rust. Another factor was the $800 million fund announced last year for developers to build Near Protocol.
“Buiding development of core components and then other people can build on their own companies and projects have been very powerful,” he said.
