Ethereum failing to target core Web 3 issues, says NEAR co-founder

cointelegraph.com:

Illia Polosukhin, the co-founder of NEAR protocol, thinks Ethereum development has a focus problem. He says engineers should be fixing crucial issues that will enable Web 3 to scale to billions of users.

“We need simplicity of usage. We need easy programmability. We need composability that is natural to the applications. I don't see the current Ethereum evolutions targeting any of those goals.”, Polosukhin said in an exclusive interview with Cointelegraph.

Polosukhin envisions a new version of the internet, or Web 3, in which the user will retain full ownership of their own data and assets. He believes this new iteration of the internet won’t be based on a single “killer app” but instead a combination of different apps.

“Our goal is that users in control of their data, they're in control of their money and assets. They are able to govern these platforms, which means there is no need to build an everything-fulfilling platform.”, he said.

Thus, improving both blockchain technology’s scalability and interoperability is key in order to build the foundations of Web 3. According to Polosukhin, while Ethereum remains the dominant smart-contract platform, it lacks NEAR’s focus on achieving those goals.

Specifically, he thinks Ethereum's reliance on Layer 2 solutions or rollups to solve its scalability problem could lead to tradeoffs in terms of composability.

“Rollups naturally will kind of create less compatibility and create more sub-spaces in which things are happening.”, he said.

As a Layer-1 solution alternative to Ethereum, NEAR aims to solve the scalability issue by leveraging sharding technology, a process that splits the protocol’s infrastructure into several segments, without sacrificing composibility.

“By actually