Ethereum encounters a "happy honey pot", DeFi may help it never split again

Whether the inertia of Ethereum and the accompanying accumulation of DeFi applications make it “indivisible”, for example, even if Ether Square (ETC) and Ethereum (ETC) reappeared Will the differences not split?

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Two researchers believe that this is possible.

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This is the position of Dragonfly Capital's Leland Lee and Haseeb Qureshi, who published a new article this week entitled "Because of DeFi, Ethereum is now inseparable."

In this article, Lee and Qureshi argue that Ethereum will “will never have a meaningful minority split” and they refer to the reason as “the inherent vulnerability of DeFi”.

To prove his point, the author used the hypothetical scenario in which the Ethereum Smart Contract Platform has implemented ProgPoW – ProgPoW is designed to resist ASIC mining in the Ethereum network and has proven to be controversial to date.

Lee and Qureshi believe that if a political blockchain split occurs later, it may make a group like CENTER (the supporter of the USDC stable currency) in the position of “the king”.

why? Because projects like USDC and Tether (both of which are distributed on the Ethereum network) are supported by statutory reserves. Of course, if Ethereum is classified, the legal currency reserves of these stable currencies will not double, so these projects must choose one of the chains and stick to it. The authors say that because so many DeFi projects are closely linked to each other, other projects may follow important people to preserve their interrelated platform applications.

“If the DeFi operator can't keep up with the trend, then the decentralized financial ecosystem will fall into chaos. This is a classic game theory situation: the vast majority of incentives tend to coordinate, so all DeFi are forced to act together. ""

Therefore, Lee and Qureshi argue that if there is a controversial split, then the minority chain that actually becomes a “ghost town” will be at a disadvantage:

“If you imagine a legendary movie version, then a few chains are like an abandoned metropolis. The towering buildings are empty, the alarms ring, no one responds, and there is smoke in the distance. No one wants to rebuild it. ”

Therefore, the author believes that in this case, stakeholders are strongly discouraged from supporting the split, so the possibility of a political fork in Ethereum is no longer valid.

They concluded: "Welcome to the post-forked era."

Ethereum really will not split again? Some people don’t think so

Lee and Qureshi's article quickly sparked heated discussions in the Ethereum community, and supporters expressed good reasons for their arguments.

Others disagree with the crux of the article, including the Ethereum Foundation researcher Vlad Zamfir. The innovator of the Ethereum Casper points to the so-called "DeFi King", who believes that "the exchange… has always played such a role, and no one has credibly hinted that they are [controlling] blockchain politics. ”

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin responded to Zamfir's words, saying that his conclusion from the article by Lee and Qureshi does not mean that Ethereum is now completely inseparable, but that the threshold for the legality of forks has increased. ”

For this view of Vitalik, Zamfir still disagrees that the controversial fork is still "completely on the table" in Ethereum. If a fork occurs, the DeFi project must be "like everyone else." The same "deciding which chain to support" means that these projects will not be kings.

In addition, in connection with this, Zamfir said in a previous tweet that he believes that the researchers' arguments would be better if they argued that "a DeFi bug would lead to a split."

Having said that, the only way to really know what will happen in a controversial Ethereum split is that there is a real split. Although it is clear that many stakeholders in the Ethereum ecosystem will work to avoid this possibility.

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