THE MANY LAYERS OF BLOCKCHAIN TECHNOLOGY
Blockchain is a restaurant undergoing franchising.
Can you know the layers of an onion without peeling it? If your answer is yes that means you’ve got some form of supervision. But for ordinary folks, the knife has to meet the onion, but don’t worry, we won’t ask for your secret.
Just as we cannot see the layers of an onion, we cannot see the layers of blockchain technology by looking at it from the outside. We have to look inside to see the different layers.
You have probably come across some posts on social media talking about layer one scalability. Layer two solutions, and you are wondering what they are talking about. Isn’t everything about blockchain peer-to-peer networks and decentralization?
How did we get this far?
You have so many questions but haven’t found the time to research these strange terms yet because, let’s face it, time is money, and is better utilized to make money for those bills that keep piling up.
In this article, let’s see what the knife reveals about the onion.
So I’m going to explain this as a dish, I know! I have been using the kitchen analogy since the start of this article. Well, what can I say? I’m a wizard in the kitchen.
So a blockchain is a dish, a delicious one, and the pots, cooker, spoons, etc. are the hardware that makes cooking the dish possible, and we’ll call this layer 0, and they are the internet and the hardware that blockchain is built with.
The ingredients of the dish we are making are layer 1. When you combine them, they give us our delicious dish, and in blockchain, these ingredients are the peer-to-peer network, the protocol, the consensus, etc.
Examples of layer 1 are Bitcoin and Ethereum, which offer security, decentralization, and scalability.
But our servers are few, and the whole restaurant is filled with people lining up for a piece, and the restaurant can only accept seven orders per second.
Now, we definitely can’t send these people in the queue away because that would be bad for business, so what do we do? We get third-party servers that can fast-track and attend to multiple people’s orders, and this is called layer 2.
In our restaurant, we can only take seven orders per second, but if we hire third-party servers we can attend to more than seven orders per second.
Layer 2 are third-party applications that build on layer 1 to ensure scalability.
We have established that the pots and cooking utensils are layer 0. The ingredients combined are layer 1. The servers are layer 2, and they bring scalability. Layer 3 is the building, the restaurant building.
Layer 3 is the application layer of the blockchain, and it serves as the user interface by connecting the previous layers to the users.
In our restaurant analogy, layer 3 is the restaurant building, and it is the interface that connects the users to whatever they want to order or do on the blockchain. Layer 3 hides the technical aspect of the blockchain, and it connects the users to the blockchain.
Conclusion
The different layers of blockchain technology ensure scalability, security, and decentralization, and these three are known as the blockchain trilemma. Whether we can invent our way out of this trilemma remains to be seen.
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