Co-founder of NEAR Protocol, Illia Polosukhin, lays out her vision for Web 3 and explains why Ethereum may not play a prominent role in its foundation.
Illia Polosukhin, the co-founder of the NEAR protocol, thinks that Ethereum development has a problem of focus. He said that engineers should fix the critical issues to allow Web 3 to scale to billions of users.
“We needed simplicity in use. We need the ability to program easily. We need native composability for applications. I don’t see current Ethereum development targeting any of those. ,” said Polosukhin in an exclusive interview with Cointelegraph.
Polosukhin envisions a new version of the Internet, or Web 3, in which users will retain full ownership of their own data and assets. He believes this new iteration of the Internet will not be based on a single “killer app” but instead on a combination of different applications.
“Our goal is that users control their data, they control their money and assets. They can manage these platforms, which means there’s no need to build a one-stop platform. ”, he said.
Therefore, improving both the scalability and interoperability of blockchain technology is key to building the foundation of Web 3. According to Polosukhin, while Ethereum remains the dominant smart contract platform, it lacks NEAR is focused on achieving those goals.
Specifically, he suggested that Ethereum’s reliance on Layer 2 or roll-up solutions to solve its scalability problem could lead to a trade-off in composability.
“Natural roll-ups create less compatibility and create more of the extra space in which things are happening,” he said.
As an alternative Layer 1 solution to Ethereum, NEAR aims to solve the problem of scalability by leveraging sharding technology, a process that divides the protocol’s infrastructure into multiple shards without compromising affect synthesis.
“By really extending the composable architecture, we enable a lot more applications that work closely together with the same financial models,” explains Polosukhin.
A core component of NEAR Its aggregate feature is Rainbow, a protocol that allows free transfers of assets from the Ethereum blockchain and vice versa.
“That not only allows sending tokens around, but also allows reading the state of each thread from the other so you can really pass any common messages between them and execute the contract.” He explained.
NEAR is one of the fastest growing communities in 2021. According to Polosukhin, one of the main attractions of the protocol is the provision of popular and easy-to-use programming languages like Java and Rust. Another factor is the $800 million fund announced last year for developers to build the NEAR protocol.
“Strengthening the development of core components and then others being able to build their own companies and projects is very powerful,” he said.
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