Introduction
Last updated
Last updated
Fifteen years since Bitcoin’s release, payments on global peer-to-peer networks are still not mainstream. One part of the problem is exogenous. As Nakamoto noted, “financial institutions cannot avoid mediating [financial-looking] disputes.” Naturally, financial institutions seek to financialize everything that appears to pose a challenge to their dominance: financialization on their terms plays to their home turf advantage, allowing them to further expand market share.
Another part of the problem is endogenous: crypto lacks a streamlined solution for peer-to-peer transactions. Today, single-asset transfers between two participants on the same chain are easy-ish. But mainnet Ethereum transactions can be costly for small amounts, pricing out many aspiring network participants and/or low value transactions. In response, blockchain is currently undergoing a Cambrian explosion of chains and dApps that seek to solve this problem.
Paradoxically, while a very positive trend, the proliferation of chains, dApps, wallets and assets has only made the p2p payment experience more difficult, even for extremely online crypto natives. In its current multichain embodiment, the blockchain experience is deeply fragmented. More chains/tokens does not make adoption easier, but harder due to fragmentation and silos. This makes the blockchain ecosystem, as a whole, far less usable and far less secure than it can and should be. Yodl fixes this.