foobar/@0xfoobar
Remain convinced that abandoning L1 too early is Ethereum's worst mistake to date. The warning signs were all there with account abstraction mindshare overtaking EOA batch transactions, but there's an even nastier oversight
The most important crypto usecase is a token swap, not sending money from person A to person B (as vitalik claims). It's more delightful to use uniswap than buy onchain coffee
The L2 roadmap has made this basic token swap usecase demonstrably worse. Previously all liquidity was aggregated on L1, and even a novice user could use an atomic dex aggregator for optimal execution
When liquidity (and even token availability) is fragmented across L1 and multiple L2s, the user gets worse execution, because cross-layer atomic aggregation doesn't exist. The user is now strictly worse off
This isn't something you can handwave away by claiming "the user is stupid, maybe they don't know and they don't care". Both new and sophisticated users and builders are driven out:
- The new user who "doesn't know what slippage is" sticks to monolithic Solana to avoid bridging hassles
- The sophisticated user who cares about execution prices now has strictly worse outcomes
- The app builder who needs cheap fees inherits idiosyncratic L2 execution risk of choosing where to deploy
- The app builder who needs high security can no longer rely on Ethereum's sticky liquidity moat bc Ethereum itself tells people to move funds off L1 "before it's too late"
Apps lead adoption. The simplest possible app is buying and selling a token. Ethereum used to do this well when all liquidity was aggregated on L1; now, it's self-immolated its own liquidity advantage. All other infra improvements are overkill until cross-layer atomic aggregation is solved
Ethereum has killed its dominant app, token swaps, in favor of infra-buzzword-as-a-service. This is a mistake. No matter how many whitepapers are published into the void, no cross-layer atomic aggregator exists. Even the handwavey solutions talk in timeframes of years not weeks. Users know it and apps know it. So they go elsewhere
