EthCC: Privacy and decentralization in web3
Henri Stern
|Jul 22, 2021
"On-chain storage today is extremely costly. A lot of work has gone into off-chain solutions, driven by scalability concerns. But even as L1s and L2s scale, the question remains: what data should be kept off chain in the name of user privacy? Decentralized systems are transparent by nature, not private. On-chain data allows protocol and dapp developers to make provable claims about the systems they are building; but the flip side of this is they expose user data. As the space resolves its current scaling issues and off-chain primitives evolve, how should developers think about what data to put on-chain and how to balance the issues of censorship resistance, data availability and user privacy? This talk aims to discuss the current state of affairs of the on-chain/off-chain divide, trace its likely evolution through the current slew of scaling solutions coming to market, and put forth potential heuristics developers can use when thinking about how to build a modern decentralized product."
