/biz/ - Business & Finance

The problem with scaling is a problem of costs. If you want a truly revolutionary smart contract/blockchain product, it's all but inevitably going to require high transaction volumes. High transaction volumes quickly become expensive regardless of the particular blockchain. ETH's proposed current solution is sharding -- fancy sidechains that are less expensive. Arbitrum offers a totally different model.
What Arbitrum does is employ some extremely clever game theoretical methods for moving smart contract computation offchain. They're being humble when they say that it's 'trust-minimized' -- what they've done is allow the majority of the computational logic to get orders of magnitude cheaper while simultaneously maintaining the reliability of a public network like Ethereum. The big point is this:
THEY IMPLEMENTED A SCALING SOLUTION SOMEWHERE BETWEEN SIX MONTHS AND A YEAR BEFORE ANY OTHER SOLUTION EVEN SNIFFS THE ASS OF FEASIBILITY
What does this mean for Chainlink? First: fuck you, what Arbitrum has accomplished is going to change the world and should be respected on its own terms. This is an extraordinarily well-respected team in the space and a lot of folks were waiting for them to roll out to enable a lot of previously cost-prohibitive use cases.
But what does this mean for Chainlink? Instead of developing their own node system, they chose Sergey. We're now the standard solution for one of the (and the only currently functional) scaling solution.