Thread by @PiersRidyard

Ok guys - no, just moving the new Bored Ape Yacht Club project to [insert layer 1] running the EVM is not going to solve the Bored Ape/ApeCoin/NFT issue. A thread. 🧵

1/16 For reference, here is the issue:

https://twitter.com/yugalabs/status/1520612362986078208?s=24&t=fDuR0Q1-x8omSHOJOgfsWQ

and no, an application specific blockchain/subnet/parachain/L2 running the EVM isn’t going to help you either. Not if your ambition is mass market.

2/16 The scalability constraints that caused the issue here for the Bored Ape team isn’t just scaling transactions. It is about scaling trustless computation (smart contracts) via the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM).

3/16 For this kind of thing consensus is not the only blocking factor, it is also that the EVM is pretty awful for this type of workload:

ercwl.medium.com/hedera-hashgra…

4/16 The TLDR from the above is that while @hashgraph can do 10,000 tx per second, it can only do 15 EVM smart contract operations per second.

That isn’t a Hashgraph-specific problem. The EVM is a bottleneck for any network running or emulating it to support Solidity.

5/16 Scaling the base layer (#Avalanche, #Near, #Ethereum 2.0, L2s like #Polygon, #Polkadot, #Cosmos, #Solana, whatever) is not enough if an EVM-type approach is still being used.

6/16 This is also obvious when benchmarking the competing L1’s (@Ethereum, @Polygon, @Avalanche @Solana, etc) as to how many DEX swaps can be done per second:

medium.com/dragonfly-rese…

7/16 TLDR - Ethereum TPS: 30. @Uniswap v2 trades per second: 18.38 max

Polygon TPS: 10k. @QuickswapDEX trades per second: 95.33 max

Avalanche TPS: 4,500. @traderjoe_xyz trades per second: 31.65 average, 175.68 max.

Solana TPS: 65k. @orca_so trades per second: 273.34 max

8/16 That means that these networks are only able to squeeze out 2% of their headline TPS performance for smart contract operations.

This is clearly not a pure consensus issue.

9/16 One of the many reasons we explicitly decided not to use the EVM for @RadixDLT was for this reason. Instead we created the Radix Engine. You can learn more about our approach here: radixdlt.com/post/how-radix…

10/16 Yes, it meant that we couldn’t copy-pasta the existing DeFi Solidity codebase like every other L1 has basically done, but it meant we could focus on DeFi performance (and, at the same time, create a much more secure and easy way to build smart contracts with #Scrypto).

11/16 With the Radix Engine, a transaction is a transaction, it doesn’t matter if that is minting NFTs, swapping on DEXs or taking out a crypto loan. That means that TPS performance and DeFi performance on Radix are basically the same thing.

12/16 So, yes, more scalability is needed. No, just putting the EVM on a more scalable layer is not going to be enough. That’s a good doctor treating the symptoms to buy the patient a couple more years, not curing the disease.

13/16 The way things are going, the Radix Public Network is already going to be almost as scalable for DeFi as anything else in the space, and that is with only a 50 TPS network at Babylon. That alone is pretty awesome.

14/16 But it doesn’t stop there. The Xi’an release of the Radix Public network (ETA 2024) adds our massively parallelized Cerberus consensus that works with Radix Engine to create a decentralized public network with unbounded scalability for DeFi/smart contracts.

15/16 For those who are impatient, the Radix approach is a disciplined, methodical one. This is not about building *slightly* better. This is about building something good enough to be the base layer for the entire global financial system.

16/16 Ethereum killers have been claimed since 2016. To actually replace something, you have to be magnitudes better, not “a little bit better”. The Radix network is the only platform working toward that long-term goal rather than chasing misleading TPS numbers.