Today’s blockchains are fast, but to replicate Uber’s global functionality on-chain, you’d need thousands of the MegaETH-equivalent rollups cohesively operating with hardware running at max capacity. For reference, Uber’s analytical backend processes 100+ petabytes of data (1 petabyte = 1,000,000 gigabytes) with minute latency across 20+ database systems processing different workloads at scale, supported by global data centers and the cloud.
The decentralized web is not ready to support internet scale apps…yet. We’ve made a lot of progress as an industry, but we’re just beginning to scratch the surface. Unlocking this efficiently coordinated sum-of-the-parts architecture using web3 would require substantial reductions in latency and orders of magnitude increased throughput to deliver internet-grade performance and UX. This simply does not exist today.
The truth is most on-chain apps’ performance are handicapped. Blockspace is incredibly expensive relative to web2 compute. The DevX of building on-chain and the UX of apps are both light years away from what’s possible off-chain. Today, it’s over 357 million times more expensive to send a packet between rollups using the weakest security model vs using the cloud. While this isn’t an apples to apples comparison, it gives us a sense of how big the gap we need to bridge is.
Connectivity Is The Key to Performance
The next generation of applications will be real-time. We believe these next apps will be built on app rollups with specialized blockspace and architectures unique to each use case. However, optimizing for performance on individual rollups won’t bring us to internet scale. This is the equivalent of trying to run all of Uber on a single giant server, which actually isn’t possible.
Performance in web2 applications comes from horizontal scaling, which involves aggregating compute across a vast array of workload-specific web servers running specialized workloads. Developers can easily build and assemble components offered by existing networks/platforms to their app. Connectivity is ubiquitous, performant, extremely cost effective, and facilitates performance and innovation.
Horizontal scaling can be leveraged in web3 by using multiple rollups, allowing them to communicate with each other for more compute. However, current interoperability solutions cannot provide this level of coordination and performance because the sole focus has been optimizing token transfers to combat liquidity and user fragmentation. However, this zero-sum game isn’t the real problem. The crux of the issue is that web3 developers don’t have the connectivity to actually build for scale and performance.
Interoperability Is The Beginning
The app rollup thesis rests on the ability for interop to reach comparable performance with web2 connectivity.
At the app level, interoperability solutions must enhance performance, either by unlocking new on-chain architectures or by removing scalability bottlenecks with comparable latency, throughput, and unit economics.
At the infra level, interoperability solutions must be capable of connecting an infinitely increasing number of on-chain building blocks, enabling developers to leverage web3 tech that address increasingly diverse problem domains.
Making progress in these areas makes building on-chain more feasible. Improved performance and costs makes it more practical for builders to create app building blocks in the first place, which in turn enables other builders to freely leverage on-chain primitives to minimize technical debt, development time and complexity, and get to market faster.
To build forward, the sum of the parts must be greater than the whole. Interoperability is just the first step towards making any of the above a reality.
About Us
Polymer Labs equips developers with performant day zero connectivity, allowing them to focus on app and infra-level innovation without losing composability.
Our first product, Polymer Hub, is a new networking primitive for Ethereum rollups. It is the first real-time interoperability solution that combines message passing and state streaming into an infinitely scalable network layer with an one-to-all connectivity model. Through pushing the boundaries of interop throughput, latency, and efficiency, Polymer Hub can scale alongside L2 block times and leverage the security guarantees of connected rollups while offering re-org protection.
