Being "Chain Agnostic"

I wrote in Saturday's post that I am "chain agnostic in all things crypto."

That led to a discussion on Farcaster about whether I am truly "chain agnostic."

I've never liked the tribal nature of crypto. There are folks who prefer Bitcoin, folks who prefer Solana, folks who prefer Ethereum, folks who prefer the Base chain on top of Ethereum, and so on and so forth. I've always thought that more experimentation, more innovation, more choice, and more opportunity is a good thing.

But as to whether I am truly "chain agnostic", I have to admit that might be pushing it.

As I replied on Farcaster, "There are a ton of chains I don't believe in. But those that have meaningful developer adoption and ultimately end user adoption are all good with me."

I admit that means I am not particularly "opinionated" about what blockchains are best. I am open to the idea that there are many good choices. But I do prefer choosing one that has growing developer and user adoption.

7 comments

fredwilson

Hi Casters. The @stoic got me to be a bit introspective on the topic of crypto maxis this morning https://avc.xyz/being-chain-agnostic

malone

fair point, maximalism is like wearing blinkers. I do believe that having a basic acceptance criteria is important though beyond developer usage. A core principle of committing to decentralization is one of those for me. Otherwise why are we all here?

fredwilson

Yes. Absolutely. But what we've learned is you can start with some decentralization and keep moving in that direction. So it's not easy to have a hard line on it

malone

yes, that's what I meant by 'committing to decentralization'. For example, Solana has chosen to scale the L1 first then decentralize more later. I do believe they mean it. At some point, teams need to start showing evidence of their commitment. An example here would be for Ethereum L2s. It's simply not acceptable to be an L2 today and not launch at least on stage 1 (https://l2beat.com/scaling/summary). The tech exists to easily do it, so I'd seriously question teams that don't do it.

Nick Ducoff

Thanks for sharing Fred

Zay Ron

Great job my friend

maxgrok

Solid perspective to take. At the end of the day, it can be better to be opinionated than dedicated for one or another chain.

I wrote in Saturday's post that I am "chain agnostic in all things crypto."

That led to a discussion on Farcaster about whether I am truly "chain agnostic."

But as to whether I am truly "chain agnostic", I have to admit that might be pushing it.

As I replied on Farcaster, "There are a ton of chains I don't believe in. But those that have meaningful developer adoption and ultimately end user adoption are all good with me."