Days go by and every time I meet my friend Ricard Borrell, I have the feeling that he’s making history. Writing it. Writing it in code, which is a frankly interesting way to write history in these modern times.
Ricard is a developer who works with Jordi Baylina, one of those Spanish cracks scattered around the world that it’s worth listening to. And from Baylina we jump to Vitalik Buterins, that young man who at just 17 or 19 years old created Ethereum, the largest computer in the world, the programmable money that many decentralized applications run on. Today he is 29 years old, and when he speaks, it’s also worth listening to him.
But you don’t have to believe my words, believe this graph. With all the new innovations and developments that have appeared, this Ethereum dominance graph, which represents 20% of the crypto market, is enough to understand how important it is.
If you want to understand in depth why this is so important, I invite you to continue, read and listen to Valentin Santamaria gonzalez, who in addition to deeply knowing these technologies, translates them into simple language that allows us non-technicians to understand a bit better this whole world. I recommend his classes at #Belobaba Academy, which are a delight. And when you listen to him, one of the keys he always repeats is the importance of infrastructure, to know how to distinguish between ecosystems and finalist projects. Ethereum and Polygon are worth what the projects that run on them are worth. They are the blockchain infrastructure, like when telephone companies were laying fiber optic cable or installing connectors to provide 5G coverage.
Let’s go inch by inch, so no one gets lost:
How does blockchain infrastructure work?
It works in layers. Blockchain transactions are usually carried out in Layer 1 (L1), which is the main layer of the blockchain (Bitcoin, Ethereum, Cardano, …). However, due to the increase in the use and popularity of blockchain technology, L1 transactions often encounter scalability problems and high gas costs (transaction fees). To address these problems, Layer 2 (L2) was introduced, which are essentially scalability solutions built on L1 to increase its performance and reduce costs, such as Bitcoin Lightning or Polygon.
Just 5 days ago, Vitalik published a new post on his blog, and as we’re talking about a guy who at 19 created a project that today is worth 230B, we should try to understand it. To put you in context, if ETH were a normal company, it would rank 39th in the world ranking, above Bank of America or Pfizer.
https://companiesmarketcap.com/
In the next post, we will see what Vitalik says and to what extent the Polygon guys are making history.