Years ago, we went through a DeFi summer where a ton of protocols were built. Then, multiple years of nothing as the summer ended.
Since then, many of the protocols condensed into a few very very active protocols. Turtle has $1.1B deployed in only two campaigns. AAVE has $55B. Morpho has $10B. There are tons more protocols doing just fine.
Say you're participating in a lending protocol utilizing some form of on-chain price oracles (ie smart contracts exposing updating data), such that gaming of some particular third decentralized exchange would manipulate the pricing data and could thereby affect your position (triggering liquidation or whatnot).
Say you're holding some on-chain stablecoin backed by other tokens. Issues with contracts of those tokens could tank their value and thereby affecting your stablecoin value.
It all comes down to introduction of points of trust in interconnected systems. Tale as old as time.
As for upgrades, some protocols are immutable and can't be updated, however, most complex protocols implement some kind of upgrade mechanic.
Smart contracts cannot change their code once deployed, but you can implement a proxy pattern that delegates calls to an implementation contract, and swap out implementation contracts as needed by updating the pointer on the proxy. Some protocols have simple single owner systems for updating the implementation. Some are owned by multisigs and may require a 5 of 9 (or whataver arbitrary majority configuration) committee to sign off on the upgrade. Others require a vote by the token holders of the protocol to approve an upgrade.
If it's an upgradeable protocol then it can be EOLed, otherwise it lives forever onchain.
When businesses with their use cases start using something like this, I'd say watch out, but the reality is it might just be invisible and just print the same receipt we're used to.
It's not that bad, though. The Ethereum chain is about 1.4TB right now.[1] Growth is roughly linear. Bitcoin is under half a terabyte. Those are manageable numbers given current disk sizes.
The size of the Solana blockchain is claimed to be only 10MB. That's tiny. Where is the data stored?
From the article: "Parts of this article were generated with the assistance from AI tools and reviewed by our editorial team to ensure accuracy and adherence to our standards." Right. That's Coinbase trolling for clicks.
[1] https://ycharts.com/indicators/ethereum_chain_full_sync_data...
Based on this answer[1] it was 100TB in 2022.
[1] https://solana.stackexchange.com/questions/146/whats-the-cur...
charcircuit•4h ago
12% and 25% is higher than I would have predicted since I'd suspect most to fail.