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RE: Proposal: Bringing Steem Back to the Future with a Decentralized Sidechain for Dapps & Token Economies
A few weeks ago in a thread about a different proposal for a side-chain I posed a skeptical question, so it only feels fair to me to ask a similar one here: Is a new side-chain something that would get enough support in the broader world to actually work well? Given that the Steem mainnet is already struggling with broad acceptance wouldn't it make more sense to find a way to be better connected to other established chains than to try to spin up a new second layer?
(Hopefully this isn't interpreted hostilely, but more as a devil's advocate question to better understand the vision being proposed).
I can answer for both proposals since they share the same core idea, though I wouldn’t call either a true Layer 2. A proper Layer 2 inherits tech and consensus from Layer 1, like Arbitrum does with Ethereum. A sidechain, on the other hand, isn’t supposed to be broader than Steem—that’s not the goal. In the case of Echelon (this proposal), every action requires a Steem account, so by design, it stays within the Steem ecosystem.
Steem has fast, feeless transactions, which is great for developers, but the lack of smart contracts means projects can only rely on the STEEM token for their tokenomics. Most teams want their own token and economy (and I say this as the creator of Drugwars, which was the most played crypto game at one point). Because of this, developers tend to go for blockchains that give them more flexibility. That’s exactly where a sidechain like Echelon comes in. The proposal also includes a EVM Multisig Wallet Relay, which lets sidechain witnesses confirm transactions and pass them to any EVM-compatible chain (Ethereum, BSC, Arbitrum, etc.). What does that mean in practice? A developer or user could interact with Ethereum smart contracts using only their Steem account something that’s nearly impossible to do directly on Steem. We could even take it further by launching a custom EVM chain with zero fees for Steemians, so they can deploy Solidity smart contracts without paying any gas fees.
So I’m not sure if that fully answers your question, but in short:
Yes a sidechain can bring in more dApps and, ultimately, more users to Steem.
Even if people don’t care about the social aspect or the fundamentals of Steem, by using those new dApps they’ll still use Steem.
That being said, I’d be curious to hear your take, how do you see the connection between steem and those established chains, and in what way do you think it could bring real value back to Steem?
I think one of the big problems Steem has is economic isolation. It doesn't have broad support on exchanges or access to things like liquidity pools, and I think most people are more hesitant to care about tokens which are a hassle to sell than they are about tokens where there's a potential path to exchange them for something broadly valuable. Plus being isolated makes Steem more vulnerable to weird stuff, such as whatever was happening with the price of SBDs on Upbit for the past few years which is only now correcting, or exchanges arbitrarily enabling or disabling deposits with little explanation.
Personally I think that the only real long-term value strategy is to lean on Steem's unique value proposition -- chasing trends where other projects are already ahead is probably not going to pay off. So in terms of something like games, I think the way to go would be a way to find a way to build on what's different about Steem, not try to make it easier for devs to do the same things here that they do on other chains (of course figuring out what would actually do that is not easy).
I am not an expert in such things, but I posted this post wondering if using multisig accounts could be a way to have a consensus mechanism that doesn't rely on an independent set of block validators.