The Future of Web3 Will Be Multichain and Chainless at the Same Time
The argument made here is that Web3 should focus on the user experience and place the technicalitites of the process in the background.
When M$ Windows first appeared, it was not a new operating system, but rather a new user experience built on top of the existing DOS.
When the internet first entered the home, many people signed up to an internet service, such as AOL or Compuserve or Claranet, or whatever. What they were actually signing up for was an intranet that then also gave them a gateway to the world wide web. This had some limitations and many later opted to go directly to the web via an ISP.
So does the above article say anything novel or interesting? It was written by the CEO of a multichain relayer; this is the infrastructure that sends data across two blockchains. Now, imagine 10 blockchains were linked together by two-way bridges; this would require 45 bi-directional relayers. If we double this to just 20 chsins, the number of relayers bloats to 190. Keep scaling up and the relayers increase by the square of the chains. This isn't scalable.
So what Cosmos has done is to create a Hub, that is itself a chain, and that serves as the distribution channel for relayers. This means that a single blockchain can run just one relayer to the Cosmos Hub instead of multiple connection to every chain on the network. This is the Inter-Blockchain Communication (IBC) protocol.
The irony here is that although the user experience might be "chainless", this is due to an extra chain doing the heavy lifting, somewhat like the role of a bus in computing.
However, there are some serious problems with current bridge designs. IBC works pretty well within the Cosmos network of chains, but expanding the idea to multiple networks is proving to be more challenging.