Discussion on the Scale Law of Crypto Assets Ecosystem

As blockchain technology has developed to this day, we can't help but think about its future development direction and potential limitations. By observing the full node data scale of major public chains, we can glimpse some interesting trends.

Solana leads the pack with its 1,500 nodes and 400TB of full node data size, seeking a balance between decentralization and efficiency. In contrast, since its inception in 2015, Ethereum has a full node data volume of only about 13TB, while Bitcoin, with its compact size of 643.2GB, can be considered a work of art in design.

Satoshi Nakamoto strictly considered the growth curve of Moore's Law in the initial design of Bitcoin, limiting data growth to the expansion capability of hardware. This visionary decision appears particularly wise against the backdrop of the current slowdown in hardware development. Whether in CPU, GPU, or storage, technological advancements have begun to slow down, gradually approaching their physical limits.

In the face of these challenges, different public chains have adopted different strategies. Ethereum focuses on ecological optimization and reconstruction, setting its sights on the trillion-level physical asset (RWA) market. Solana, on the other hand, pursues extreme performance, but its ultra-large scale node requirements have effectively excluded individual participants.

In terms of the token economy system, we can roughly estimate the limit of the public chain economic system to be around 300 billion USD. This is not an absolute upper limit, but a reasonable speculation based on current market performance. The yields in the DeFi sector have gradually declined from early highs to the current lower levels, in line with sub-linear scaling laws.

It is worth noting that the actual tradable scale of the on-chain economic system may be subject to numerous limitations. Even if the total market capitalization of a certain Crypto Asset reaches the trillion-dollar level, the actual circulating scale may be far below this figure.

Looking back at the development of blockchain, we find that the trend of differentiation among public chains continues. Bitcoin is gradually separating from the on-chain ecosystem, while the immaturity of on-chain reputation and identity systems has led to the over-collateralization model becoming mainstream. Stablecoins and the on-chain representation of physical assets are essentially leveraged migrations of off-chain assets, reflecting that off-chain assets still hold a high degree of credibility.

In the current technological and market environment, the blockchain ecosystem seems to have reached a certain scale law or Moore's Law-like limit. It has only been 5 years since the explosion of DeFi, and only 10 years since the birth of Ethereum. The future development path may require us to rethink and innovate.