Why Blockchain Interoperability Matters for Web3 Adoption

cryptonews.com:

Disclaimer: The Industry Talk section features insights by crypto industry players and is not a part of the editorial content of Cryptonews.com.

Web3 is currently one of the hottest buzzwords flying around tech circles across the globe, with billions of dollars of venture capital pouring into the space. There are endless news headlines about how 2022 will be the year that we start taking control of our own data and assets using decentralized applications running on blockchains. 

Except, there’s a core problem with this thesis – or at least, the timeline. The underlying infrastructure still has fundamental problems to address – mainly, dependence on legacy architecture. Consider that there are over 4.5 billion internet users, and yet crypto has only around 300 million users. Yet scalability is still an issue that’s debated endlessly, as blockchain core developers strive to meet the transaction speeds to which users have become accustomed on Web2. 

Ethereum’s dominance over the blockchain ecosystem is now undeniable. The platform had a first-mover advantage like no other. After launching in 2015, there was a boom in development as innovators latched onto the new economic opportunities of token minting. While the heady days of the ICO era are long behind us, many projects still zoom in on Ethereum as a development platform simply because of the network effects. 

How did this happen? After all, the idea of “Ethereum-killing” blockchain platforms has been around almost as long as Ethereum itself. But the earliest competitors to Ethereum made a huge mistake. They attempted to compete on Ethereum’s main weak point – lack of scalability – often by compromising on decentralization. Operating fewer network nodes meant they could