Eventually, We Are All Ethereum

Ethereum is eating all the blockchains. That’s fine.

If history is a prologue, then Ethereum is going to eat the entire blockchain sector and everything that is not Ethereum will eventually become an Ethereum Layer 2. I believe the recent decision by CELO stakeholders to shift into operating as an Ethereum Layer 2 is just the beginning of an avalanche of similar integrations and shifts that lead us to an end-state where Ethereum ultimately operates as the Layer 1 for all blockchains.

Paul Brody is EY’s global blockchain leader and a CoinDesk columnist.

There is ample precedent for this kind of consolidation in the technology industry, and one of my favorite examples is how an immensely diverse world of networks slowly but surely converged upon a single global standard over a period of about 15 years.

The networking story goes like this: A long time ago, roughly around the dawn of human civilization (in the 1970s), we had lots of different data networks. All kinds of them for a whole range of companies and governments from the U.S. Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (ARPANET), the precursor of the internet, to IBM’s Systems Network Architecture (SNA), Xerox’s Internetwork Datagram Protocol (IDP) and several others. The result was a veritable alphabet soup of incompatible networks that made connecting business and government systems extremely difficult.

From connectivity glue to global standard

Starting in the 1970s, a concerted effort was made to create a protocol that could work across multiple networks and smoothly handle interruptions and changes in network operation. The result was TCP/IP, which stood for Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol. In the early days, TCP/IP did exactly what it was supposed to do: connect all these different networks.

At first, TCP/IP was just supposed to connect different networking standards, a job it did very well. Over time, however, the inexorable logic of standardization and scale turned TCP/IP from connectivity glue into a global standard. IP Networks ate up the networking business and today, there are virtually no non-IP networks remaining.

Read more: Paul Brody – Decentralization Is the Point, and We’re Not Talking Enough About Why

Given how much the technology industry loves scaling around a standard, nobody should be…