Brandon Iles, Co-founder and Chief technology officer of Ampleforth told Cointelegraph China on its August 5 Hub interview that multi-chain gives users the opportunity to choose the quality they would value the most. He believes the future of DeFi would highly depend on how the development of multi chains goes. He explains that:
“Ethereum is highly secure. What happens when you strive for decentralization? That is, scalability is expensive, but in BSC, if we sacrifice some decentralization, we can achieve scalability. This is a big market. I believe that in the future, the ecosystem will require us to gradually narrow the gap between them.”
Iles pointed out that many people have been looking at the multi chain space and its development. There are also many projects on the market, and they have many interesting communities in different fields. Multi chains will become more and more complex before they become simple. He added that:
"There may be layers that would pursue decentralization just as extreme as Ethereum. He continues that maybe in the future some layers 1 and 2 can get the most attention. Or it may be optimism or the side chain of proof of interest like Polygon that wins the race."
Iles thinks it is still too early to tell who wins the race, however he believes that whoever wins, would mainly depend on how these platforms shape their own characteristics and whether they are enough to attract users. He continued with Ampleforth as an example that:
“Ampl was first launched in Ethereum, and we also launched it on BSC. From a technical point of view, we also deploy on Polygon.” He continued to explain that:
“Ampl is more like the brain of the system. It is deployed on the blockchain, which is the most centralized and secure. There is no doubt that Ethereum has won. Since then, we have launched a pass contract on Polygon. As long as polygon can share liquidity and provide the same scarcity mechanism as Ethereum, the ampl on the two platforms is the same. As long as the ampl can be transferred between different chains, as long as the ampl on polygon can be rebased in the same way and follow the operation instructions of ampl on Ethereum, the ampl on the two platforms is the same.”
Although it was a tough decision to make at the beginning to not develop Ampleforth’s own blockchain to attract people to join, Iles says the choice of going where people have stored value and made transactions was the right decision.
Marc Zeller, Head of AAVE integration agrees with Iles that users’ preference would be the key to the development of DeFi and blockchain as well. He explained that:
“Our current user hierarchy is more complex, that is, in terms of social media, most of us in the West use Twitter, while in Japan, we mostly use line, etc. each application has hundreds of millions of users, is very successful, has its own ecosystem, and various software cooperate with each other.”
Zeller thinks ten years later, we will finally settle on Web 3, bitcoin will still exist 100%, Ethereum will certainly exist, and everything will stay with its own community and applications.
Zeller pointed out that DeFi is facing a bottleneck period, and the adoption speed is slowing down. Now, there are about 3 million DeFi users who are participating, and their participation times are getting less and less. However our current technology can not handle boarding more users. He added that:
“If possible, the transaction fee will be unimaginable, and those who want to use the high-quality service we are developing will leave directly.”
Zeller believes that the main focus for each network shouldn’t be about expanding its users to millions. But rather improving its infrastructure and collaborating with other networks. He says:
“No network can cope with millions or even hundreds of millions of users. Although our goal is to create a financial service for hundreds of millions of users, we will have Polygon, Solana, Avalanche and many partners. You can choose what you like. All these networks are improving their structures and making common progress. We will reach hundreds of millions of DeFi users.”
Marta Geater Piekarska, head of Balancer community development agrees that there is no zero sum game in the DeFi ecosystem. Further, collaborative creation is the only way to the success of the encrypted ecosystem. She explained that:
“Focus on what you do, draw strength from others and cooperate with others. The price of AAVE has been changing because they do their own best. We don't need to compete. That's not our job. Our job is to cooperate well. This is the most effective strategy of DeFi. This may be the first time in the history of finance that it has succeeded because of cooperation, not because of competition.”
For instance, Ample has developed deep liquidity on AMMs like Uniswap, SushiSwap, Mooniswap, and a Smart Pool on Balancer through its liquidity mining program. On August 7, both Ample and AAVE communities passed the votes to add AMPLE to AAVE. Piekarska also reveals that at Balancer, they have been vigorously promoting community driven organization building. The community determines the direction and content.