In an exciting development for the Ethereum and blockchain developer community, Web3j has become the first web3 library to implement support for sending EIP-4844 blob transactions to Ethereum clients. This update brings us one step closer to the future of Ethereum scalability and efficiency, offering a glimpse into what full data sharding could eventually look like for the network ..read more

At the end of 2023, Web3 Labs announced they had joined the Hyperledger Foundation. For us it was an obvious move to make given that we were offering commercial support for Hyperledger Besu and maintainers of the project.   However, our goals within the Hyperledger ecosystem extend beyond Besu. Our intention is to contribute the open source library Web3j to the Hyperledger Foundation too ..read more

In the past couple of years, I've published over 150,000 words of content on web3. Not everyone agreed with what I wrote, but I believe it's important to externalise the ideas and perspectives you have, either through conversation or writing. The good ideas you can refine further, whereas you move on from the bad knowing they aren’t worthy of further explanation.    ..read more

What defines the right blockchain network for your project? I spent some time recently thinking about this off the back of some work we were doing. My big challenge was thinking about how best to convey this information to a more layman audience with understandable metrics.    Blockchain networks are just another tool in the arsenal of technology solutions. However, several useful metrics can help establish how widespread their adoption is ..read more

This is a post that I wrote back in 2021 at the height of the NFT mania. The essence of it still holds true in my mind which is why I decided to share it this week. Some of the projects mentioned may have burned ( such as Jack Dorsey’s tweet), but the idea still resonates with me.    NFTs still need to mature to the point where when you say NFT, people don’t think about frothy overpriced JPG images, but instead a digital asset that represents something tangible. Writing is probably not exciting enough to provide that change, but it’s fun to think about what could be done, as I unpac ..read more

Last week saw a couple of major announcements coming from enterprises with their blockchain initiatives. These are changing the face of TradFi. First, we had  Fnality   close a £77.7m funding round  led by Goldman Sachs and BNP Paribas. Then  J.P. Morgan  announced their latest milestone with project MAS,  where they tokenized funds  with alternative asset manager  Apollo Global .    Both of these announcements demonstrate that enterprise blockchain initiatives are showing no sign of abating. The ongoing work by both of these firms in the spac ..read more

The World Wide Web was once just like Web3. It was abundant with open-source, decentralized protocols with developers and engineers at the forefront of this new frontier. Over time the success of social networks, cloud and other big tech initiatives shifted the landscape in favour of a handful of incumbents, whose platforms came to service the majority of internet users.    It's easy to see how a similar playbook could play out with Web3, and quickly in today's climate ..read more

Our goal with the Chainlens Appchain and Blockchain Explorer is not only to provide a leading blockchain and appchain explorer, but also to help onboard more users to web3. Many of the existing explorer solutions are not thinking big enough in this respect. Instead, they are focusing on one of two areas: Developer-centric information such as blocks, transactions and smart contracts Speculator-centric information such as NFT and token trading activity Web3 has been most impactful thus far in the trading and speculating of on-chain assets. This is not the endgame for the technology in our v ..read more

During 2022 through 2023 we saw a lot of progress being made in scaling Ethereum via layer 2 networks. Optimistic-based rollups such as Arbitrum and Optimism were joined by rollups utilising zero-knowledge technology used by Polygon ZK-EVM, Linea, ZK-Sync, Scroll, Starknet and others. All of the providers of layer 2 networks are aware that scaling blockchain networks doesn't end with layer 2, there is an additional layer to the stack —  layer 3 or appchains which many consider the scalability nirvana for blockchains.    Appchains or application-specific blockchains offer greate ..read more

Application-specific blockchains (appchains) are blockchain-like networks that are created for a specific use case. From the perspective of users, they are similar to any other blockchain network in that they are compatible with existing web3 tools and wallets ..read more