IPLD: Interconnecting All The Blockchains
Fast forward to a future where blockchains Balkanize. Can we get them to communicate with each other? What's the translation protocol among them all. IPLD offers a path forward.
Honestly, this video was a mindfuck.
What’s the big deal?
People have heard of network effects on social media platforms. The greater the number of people already on the network, the more value a new users can experience by joining. Think of it like going to the party. If you are one of the first 2 people there, it can feel awkward and lonely. If you’re the 200th person there, you have so many potential people to meet and bump into.
The same is true for Big Data. There is a term in that space called Data Gravity. Basically, like a black hole, the more data you collect in one place, the more force there is to pull other data towards it. Trying to train an AI algorithm against a billion images? You want to go where there already is the largest set of images available (usually the Amazon AWS US East data center). Ok great, now what if you want to 10x or 100x that? Well, you will want to keep bringing data to where it already is vs try to aggregate it in some random other spot.
What does this have to do with blockchains?
Blockchains are an intersection of network effects (e.g. number of active nodes and active wallets) and big data (e.g. number of transactions across the number of blocks across multiple chains).
Value scales geometrically with all of these parameters. Ethereum and Bitcoin networks are valuable as independent entities, but being able to connect, traverse, and query across both of them opens up new opportunities. Now do that 5x with other major chains and you have more than 20x the potential value and power.
So what does IPLD have to do with any of this?
Ethereum and Bitcoin’s protocols were built independent of each other. That means, there is no native part of each other’s codebase that knows how to parse each other’s blocks. This is not a problem for the independent operation of each chain. But a dApp wanting to connect the two needs a simple way of doing this.
At it’s core, IPLD creates a standard communication protocol for all chains to define their hashing structure. Want and Eth transaction to reference a git commit that references a funding payment from Bitcoin? A few simple translation functions for each chain allows these hops to take place.
To quote the video. This means we go from a single, Merkle tree to a Merkle forest. And if you do this for every hash linked structure in existence, you can literally take network effects to the logic limit: a singular, global namespace to connect all the things.
Probably nothing.