Moving beyond the blockchain trilemma: L1 vs. L2
To effectively address the scalability challenge, it is crucial that both L1 and L2 solutions work together. As of February 2023, over 44.15 million unique addresses have a non-zero balance of Bitcoin (BTC). While this may seem impressive, let’s face it — blockchain technology has come a long way since Bitcoin’s inception in 2009. Bitcoin addresses with a non-zero balance. Source: Glassnode However, as the technology continues to evolve and gain mainstream adoption, scalability remains one of the biggest challenges facing the industry. Bitcoin and Ethereum, two of the largest blockchain networks, are highly decentralized, with thousands of nodes operating on each network (17,553 nodes for Bitcoin and 7,099 nodes for Ethereum as of April 14, 2023). Ethereum mainnet statistics. Source: Ethernodes While this decentralization provides greater security, it also results in slower transaction speeds and scalability issues due to the significant computational resources required to maintain th...