Ethereum

The EU Parliament’s economic committee just reached a compromise on the digital euro, and the part that matters got almost none of the coverage. Fees and offline payments took the headlines. Underneath them, the French and German data authorities had forced privacy up the agenda, insisting the digital euro behave like cash. They are right to fight that. They are fighting it on far too small a field. Because the digital euro the ECB is actually building is a capped, intermediated, offchain instrument that arrives around 2029. By then the question won’t be whether Europe has a digital euro. It’ll be whether anyone still needs one. The opportunity in front of the ECB right now is larger than the one it is planning for, it is buildable with technology that already exists, and everything standing in the way is a policy choice. None of it is cryptographic. ...

The Ethereum Foundation published its mandate, and a lot of people read it as a change of direction. It’s not. It reads that way because it’s the first time the Foundation has written down, in a single place, what Ethereum was always supposed to be. I support the mandate. And I think most of the surrounding noise is either missing the point or defending an arrangement that happened to be comfortable. ...

As soon as we started having multiple blockchains, be that numerous L1s or L2s, public or private, and any mix of these, the question of how they interact with each other was asked. There are numerous types of interactions between blockchains, but a typical example is that of “the bridge”. In short, a bridge allows you to lock up a token native to a source blockchain, and then make it available on a target blockchain. It’s important that these tokens are native to the source blockchain, because if they are not they could in theory exist across many and hence don’t need a bridge to begin with. ...