Modular blockchains and SaaS companies - Jay’s Substack

Monolithic blockchains are characterized by an architecture that groups all functions (execution, settlement, consensus and data availability) under one network. There are pros and cons to a monolithic architecture, the most obvious con is when it comes to scaling. As we anticipate a magnitude more users coming into this space, the modular approach (separating the different functions) is coming into fashion given its advantages to scaling blockchains. This evolution reminds me of what has happened in web2 over the past decade. After the first iteration of large, successful tech companies like Facebook and Google (which also took a similar monolithic approach), an explosion in SaaS related start-ups followed: Stripe, Slack, Shopify as examples Big tech companies draw parallels to monolithic blockchains in that they internally built the core infrastructure required to operate any modern day tech company - payments, compute infrastructure, database solutions, and so on. There weren’t good

Monolithic blockchains are characterized by an architecture that groups all functions (execution, settlement, consensus and data availability) under one network. There are pros and cons to a monolithic architecture, the most obvious con is when it comes to scaling. As we anticipate a magnitude more users coming into this space, the modular approach (separating the different functions) is coming into fashion given its advantages to scaling blockchains. This evolution reminds me of what has happened in web2 over the past decade. After the first iteration of large, successful tech companies like