Do we still need state channels?
If you’ve been following the Ethereum ecosystem for a while, you’ve probably already heard of state channels. You probably have already heard about their potential to improve the scalability of the blockchain, as well as their ability to provide “instant finality” for transactions. This is all old news, and you might be wondering where state channels are at, and whether they’re even still relevant in a world of rollups.
In this series of blog posts, we’ll be bringing you up to date with state channels in 2020. Starting from scratch, we’ll be explaining the important concepts, and the latest designs. We’ll also be sharing the work we’ve been doing since announcing the state channels collaboration last year: building a set of tools that will allow projects to add state channels to their blockchain tech stack. As part of this we’ll release a couple of projects that demonstrate the capabilities of state channels, and give an insight into the state channel user experience.
Today, we’ll be looking into the space state channels occupy in the landscape of blockchain techniques, and give a high-level summary of how they work. There’s a good chance the summary won’t be completely new to you, but it should serve as a good refresher of the baseline knowledge required for the rest of the series.
