Hold tight here come the blockchain wars

According to Gavin Wood, Blockchain 3.0 is on its way, and what were once pipe dreams may start becoming fulfilled in 2020. The days of easy money for projects is over and “smart” money will do its homework before backing projects. Such projects seeking funding will need to move beyond promising miracles and actually begin delivering them. These projects will also need defensible moats. And as the rewards for backing a winning project increase and the total winners become fewer, the landscape will start to look more zero-sum with projects beginning to behave more adversarially.

“While there is surely some below-the-belt fighting in the corporate world, it is mostly kept in check by national governments and legal systems…. But blockchains are less like corporate entities and more like nation-states. They share core properties like nationalism (“maximalism”), currency, and sovereignty. And as we know from the news, there is a quiet cyberwar going on between the world’s powers. When there is no omnipotent force of just oversight, ruthless realpolitik rules… And so it is between the crypto-states where the equivalent of “international law” or, more aptly, lawlessness, exists.”

Crowd driven, decentralized cryptosystems are laws unto themselves and their stakeholders will be driven purely by the desire to see their platform succeed. In this environment, individuals and groups will use their resources both exogenous and endogenous to the blockchain to attack competitive networks. Initially, weak networks will perish. After the blockchain wars will begin.

Why it matters:

• There is a plethora of smart contract platforms that have launched either this year or plan to launch next year. These projects have collectively raised billions of dollars in pursuit of uncrowning Ethereum as the dominant smart contract platform. While interaction between projects to date has been mostly friendly, expect that to change as competition heats up and the stakes become higher than ever.
• Gavin Wood, is the founder of PolkaDot, a soon to launch multichain framework platform designed to offer interoperability and scalability for blockchains build on Polkadot. Polkadot is one of if not the most anticipated launches of the slew of Ethereum killers. Gavin understands clearly the challenges ahead and the potential adversarial environment his project may find itself navigating through.