ANanonporridge·Oct 13, 2021
I'll second looking into layer 2 projects.
Most of the new blockchains constantly being spun up are little more than schemes to make the founders rich. Even if the stacks are technically cleaner and nicer to work with, it's really hard to imagine any new blockchain bringing anything significant enough to the table to overcome network effects of established leaders. Specifically be wary of coins like Solana, Cardano, and maybe even Ethereum, which Gary Gensler of the SEC has indicated are probably all unregistered securities and he looks to be gearing up to come after them.
I'm in the bitcoin only, simple, rock solid foundation with complexity built in higher layers camp, so I'll mention a couple of interesting things going on.
The taproot softfork was recently approved by the network and will go live on mainnet next month. Read up here, h
Read the rest
ttps://blog.keys.casa/what-is-taproot-bitcoin-upgrade/.
The lightning network is starting to get some real momentum after years of development. People are using it in unexpected ways, like building an e2e encrypted chat network (https://sphinx.chat/) that piggybacks on the network, or the LNURL-auth protocol (https://xn--57h.bigsun.xyz/lnurl-auth.html) that allows websites to provide persistent user accounts that are authenticated with a user's lightning wallet and require no other personal information. There's recently been some proposals (e.g. https://github.com/JohnLaw2/btc-iids/blob/main/iids14.pdf) to do some magic to stuff a truly massive amount of scaling within the limited bitcoin blocksize.
Protocol changes needed for trustless drivechains/sidechains seems to be gaining traction, https://github.com/bitcoin/bips/blob/master/bip-0300.mediawi.... The Rootstock sidechain will potentially bring the ethereum virtual machine to bitcoin as a sidechain.
I know Ethereum also has some interesting layer 2 work, but I'm not as familiar with what's happening since I don't personally buy into the fat, complex base layer approach, the much more centralized nature of the network and development, nor the planned transition to proof of stake.