Ethereum [ETH]’s Joseph Lubin speaks about Casper, Sharding and everything in between

In a recent interview, Joseph Lubin, the Co-Founder of Ethereum [ETH], spoke about the comparison between the internet surge of the 90s and the blockchain revolution that is going on right now. He also touched upon how Ethereum is planning to solve scalability issues and briefed users about the technologies used in the Ethereum network, mainly Casper and Sharding.

In a question about the proportion of similarities in the internet revolution vs blockchain revolution, Lubin stated that the growth of the blockchain revolution can be compared to a ‘Netflix moment’. He said that the internet was built on zero foundation while the blockchain and cryptocurrency industry had a strong foothold to grow on, crediting the World Wide Web in the process.

Lubin went ahead to say that the sheer pace at which the industry is growing is overwhelming and that the magnitude will only increase. The Co-Founder said that the main focus of the pioneers on the industry is to focus on building a trustworthy infrastructure and internet protocols that will introduce new paradigms into the system. He even added that blockchain technology might lead to the development of a world computer, where systems will interact with one another seamlessly.

Joseph further added that during the internet boom the user experience was more centralized, taking the example of AOL and its servers which were controlled by a single entity. He said that the future will see a massive paradigm shift that will make decentralization the norm.

When asked to describe Ethereum’s basic idea and Vitalik Buterin’s vision in a capsule form, Lubin stated:

“Most people tried to take up scalability and networking on the blockchain as adding a separate button on a calculator and letting users figure out how to use it. Vitalik’s idea was to add  a computer to every  single button on the calculator and open a vista of options.”

Furthermore, he stated that there were a lot of things in the Ethereum pipeline, with over 40 protocol engineers working on different aspects of the Foundation. This, according to him, ranges from working on a new base layer, a new Ethereum client, solving the scalability issue and creating the growth trajectory for Casper and Sharding. Casper was recommended by Buterin to set a hard cap on the coin at 120,204,432 which is exactly twice the amount sold in the original sale in 2014.

Sharding refers to the splitting of the entire state of the network into many partitions called ‘shards’. Each shard contains its own independent piece of state and transaction history. Since this system allows nodes to process transactions only for particular shards, the result is a higher amount of transactions being processed in the same amount of time.

Joseph Lubin also talked about the different layers of the network that are being worked on simultaneously. He said that the first layer of the network is the radically decentralized trust layer which will enable developers to build several protocols on it. This, he said, will be the first step on solving the rampant scalability issue prevalent in blockchain networks.