Recently, Paul Veradittakit, a partner at crypto investment firm Pantera Capital, shared his thoughts on what lies ahead in 2022 for Ethereum’s layer 2 scaling solutions, L2 blockchains competing with Ethereum (such as Solana), blockchain interopability protocols, NFTs, DAOs, and DeFi security.

Veradittakit’s comments were made in the January 2022 issue of his firm’s monthly newsletter (“Pantera Blockchain Letter”).

Below are a few highlights:

  • “As mainstream adoption of crypto continues to grow, Ethereum’s network congestion will only become worse, exacerbating its problems with latency and fees. Rollups are critical to sustaining the growth of Ethereum by ensuring that compute infrastructure is highly scalable, allowing users to interact with dApps with similar or even better expectations around usability as with traditional web apps.“
  • “Both optimistic and ZK rollups (a smart contract that takes hundreds of transactions off the main blockchain and bundles them into a single transaction) will gain even more traction in the coming year, with optimistic rollups likely to dominate in the short term while ZK rollups, which are much more technically complex, advance as a long-term scalability solution.“
  • “Recent activity in the Solana community, including the launches of massive funds for decentralized social media and gaming, suggests that the ecosystem will continue to grow immensely in the coming year.“
  • “Bridges (which enable interoperability between vastly different networks), such as NEAR’s Rainbow Bridge, will help accelerate the growth of non-Ethereum ecosystems by expanding access to liquidity and allowing easier composability of digital assets.  Ethereum virtual machine (EVM) platforms, like Aurora on NEAR, are also making it easier than ever for Ethereum-based dApps to launch on other chains, enhancing cross-chain engagement within DeFi.“
  • “As digital art continues to grow in popularity and physical art becomes increasingly tokenized, to facilitate better verifiability and more liquid markets, NFTs will continue to grow immensely in popularity through the coming year… NFT projects in 2022 will show substantially more diversity in use cases and will reconfigure how we interact with and think about ownership of digital media more broadly.“
  • “Given their heightened prominence, I expect to see DAOs become a mainstream vehicle for online organizing and collective action, helping individuals across the globe get actionably involved with causes they care about.“
  • “Platforms like Syndicate, which simplify the process for establishing DAOs for collaborative investing, and Station, which helps onboard users onto DAOs, are making it easier than ever for folks to get functional DAOs up and running in record time.“
  • “To maintain DeFi’s pace of adoption, it’s absolutely critical that we develop even more protocols and tooling to ensure that users are interacting with safe financial products in crypto… In 2022, I expect to see security become a tremendous focus for DeFi projects, and anticipate several more projects launch around better smart contract auditing, precise runtime monitoring, and consumer protections.“

DISCLAIMER

The views and opinions expressed by the author, or any people mentioned in this article, are for informational purposes only, and they do not constitute financial, investment, or other advice. Investing in or trading cryptoassets comes with a risk of financial loss.

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