Thanks for the response.
When I meant “sharding with extra steps”
I was speaking through the perspective of the user.
My intuition is that a Blockchain that supports sharding natively on the protocol would be able to abstract it away from users and developers, in theory.
The current experience with rollups aren’t a nice experience with the bridging and handling of multiple accounts and networks. Also using a rollup based asset as gas and not the main asset is also troublesome to me.
Also my intuition with this approach is that these rollups become large silos of network activity, largely independent of the main chain, where you only pull your assets on the main chain when you intend to sell some assets since your exchange doesn’t support the rollup based asset.
Because of this siloed property, the security of the asset in the main chain boils down to your most insecure layer 2.
I’m also skeptical behind the incentives and game theory running a layer 2, at what point in TVL is the layer 2 incentivized to “overtake” the layer 1? What would the dynamics be when a layer 2 is more popular then the layer 1 and people never leave the layer 2?
It’s not obvious to me that a layer 1 that isn’t the main hub of activity, (not just a settlement layer for third party layer 2 proofs) would have any merit to continue its existence. However this is just speculation on my part.
Of course, this is more a paranoia based point and might not be all realistic in practice.
I also believe that in a non sharded Blockchain, there’s an upper limit of how many layer 2s a Blockchain could support, since the limited gas per block. This essentially clogs up the main chain just to process layer 2s after a certain threshold of high activity.
So it is a possibility where a Blockchain still has high fees and the poor UI/UX of a rollup based Blockchain.
In my opinion, a cryptocurrency no longer becomes a cryptocurrency when you can’t transact on it cheaply without jumping through hoops, (bridging your assets to whatever layer 2 the payee wants to accept).
Also it’s not obvious to me that every layer 2 wrapped native asset will be accepted by all, in the far future where crypto becomes more of a medium of exchange.
I also want to point out that ETH 2.0 actually was juggling the idea of sharding their Blockchain but still run computation on layer 2s. Only sharding state.
This implies to me that after a certain threshold of high activity that sharding is needed, whether or not you use layer 2s.
That being said, I understand the technical merits of a layer 2, especially zero knowledge. I don’t doubt the technology at all but I’m afraid that rollups and layer 2s are hyper-optimizing for the current use case and demographic (a handful of early adopters and enthusiasts) that are willing to bridge and put up with whatever UI/UX pain points.
Obviously my crux of my argument would be destroyed if a rollup(s) based implementation was incredibly user friendly and cheap for all users in any part of the stack (layer 1 and layer 2).
