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“Nobody goes to the store to buy a Swiss pocket knife. It’s something you get before Christmas.”
– Jensen Huang
Great companies start as scalpels, no Swiss armymesses.
By choosing one thing to do, companies will rather be good in that one thing – and customers will sooner know that that is what they do.
Here is, for example, the homepage of Yahoo, circa 1999:
There is a lot going on there – search, auctions, news, e -mail, instant messaging – and Yahoo was not very good at it.
Here is the homepage of Google, circa 1999:
It is easy to see why the winner turned out to be: the Single-Purphose website made clear users what Google is doing, and that helped Google to become very good at it.
The fact that in small letters “Google” has since become a verb and Yahoo does not do a little more important than my Fantasy Baseball League host is proof that it is generally great to be with many things.
Does that also apply to block chains?
Bitcoin is a Single-Purupose chain-the only one that does it is Bitcoin sending and its simplicity is perhaps the main reason that it has been such a success.
But Ethereum and Solana are also general chains and they too have had some success.
And none of the two approaches seems to fascinate on the other side: Bitcoin has so far failed at Defi and Ethereum has not become money so far.
So maybe both approaches can co -exist peacefully?
It may be too early to answer, because chains for general purposes will soon have a new, determined competitor.
Last week, Stripe and Paradigma formally announced the development of a blockchain-oriented blockchain, pace, which feels as an immediate favorite to win the emerging crypto payment activities.
Tempo will be specially built for Stablecoins, which offer predictable costs (not paid in a native token, but stables), near-instant finality, “opt-in” privacy and compliance functionality, “avenues” exclusively to payments and high transit all things with which general chains struggle.
Matt Huang, who leads the development of the pace, suggests that it will be closer to enable the chain to develop faster: “We feel urgency to build the question that comes and want fewer dependencies, including the speed of the progress of Ethereum L1.”
Ethereum if that could be proclaimed could suggest that pace will have ambitions that go beyond payments.
Perhaps telling Huang says that, although pace starts with a permitted validator set, the chain will be “permissionless” from day 1 and “will decentralize further from there”.
A fully decentralized and permissionless blockchain that excels in payments sounds a lot to what you would want a general blockchain.
Can tempo pose a threat to Ethereum and Solana, not only in payments, but in everything?
The example of Google suggests that it is possible: they defeated Yahoo while searching and then expanded horizontally to e-mail, cloud computing, smartphones, self-driving cars more a Swiss pocket knife than Yahoo was in 1999.
There are several examples: Microsoft was just simple, Amazon was just booking, Apple was just PCs, Southwest Airlines was just Texas.
But there are also counter -promoting.
To name just one, calculators for one -off purpose were better for doing fast maths than computers of general purposes, but who now owns one?
You have a Swiss pocket knife in a drawer rather than a Texas instruments calculator.
So, if computers of general purposes can make calculators superfluous, maybe general block chains can ultimately also make payments blockchains superfluous.
Max Resnick is convinced that they will do that: “decentralized block chains,” he predicts, “will be superior to centralized in all ways” – including speed, scale, reliability and even compliance with the regulations.
If this is the case, Tempo may have fired the starting gun in a race to make chains for general purposes super fast before a super fast, single chain can be decentralized.
This can be a race without a finish line: it might be impossible to be both decentralized And Optimized for payments.
Mert Mumtaz, for example, thinks that pace will not even be a blockchain, let alone a general purposes: “How can you possibly have something that is only a payment chain?”
For Mumtaz, block chains are by definition decentralized and a decentralized blockchain is by definition unable.
Tempo says they will claim in the direction of decentralization.
But Mumtaz thinks that inevitably will flood the chain with frivolous things such as Fartcoin, hidden things and humiliating the performance of the chain in payments.
There are only two ways to be a payment chain, he says.
One is to make the chain ‘not Turing’, such as Bitcoin, ‘where you can do nothing but to send money’ – and the other is to ‘allow the chain’.
If so, Ethereum and Solana can easily rest that they don’t become Yahoo for Temo’s Google.
But what if all users get as a pace without Decentralizing?