How to please all the people all of the time: Nuff is ‘Enough’

As the range of decentralised applications has expanded, it has become increasingly apparent that the “one-size-fits-all” monolithic blockchain is unworkable for the many varied use cases to coexist.

Different applications have different non-functional requirements and are willing to trade off some of the inherent properties of an underlying blockchain such as security, immutability, transaction speed, finality, cost, and user experience.

Furthermore, builders choose where to build their applications by considering their own technological questions about a platform e.g. development language, dev environment, dev tools, future-proof scaling, and dev training materials.

There are also financial and social considerations. How much financial liquidity is available; is there a built-in user base; is there access to stablecoins; the strength of the developer community and are there existing protocols and primitives on top of which to build.

To date, builders have had to make these decisions day one, weighing up which of the above were most important, and then locked into that ecosystem for the foreseeable future. For example you couldn’t combine the liquidity and community of Ethereum with the scalability of Near and the throughput of Solana. Builders miss out on technical innovations that happen on other chains, innovations which could significantly improve the performance and experience of their app.

The solution that has emerged is a Modular Blockchain stack — interchangeable pieces that allow developers to pick and choose the tradeoffs that are important to them, with an end result of a vastly improved and more fit-for-purpose user and developer experience. We first encountered Lazy Ledger, now Celestia in 2019, and since then the community began to build specialised offerings that can be categorised into: Presentation; Settlement; Execution; Consensus; Data Availability; Inter-chain Communication. See below.

The advantages of this approach are that applications can be served with the non-functional requirements outlined above but also that developers can take these simplified, less opinionated, modular blockchain components and develop new virtual machines, new architectures, privacy models, and so on, around them.

Since May 2019 Fabric has been investors and strong supporters of NEAR. NEAR pioneered important technical innovations such as sharding, and is leading the way in abstracting away the complexity of both accounts and the underlying chains for developers and users alike.

Nuffle labs brings those technical innovations to the broader blockchain space. Data availability (DA) has long been an obvious bottleneck to scaling blockchains, and Nuffle’s DA solution, using NEAR’s industry-leading sharding technology, is currently the highest throughput and most affordable solution on the market. We have seen this firsthand when our portfolio company RSS3 became Nuffle’s first customer for DA; and saw a 90% reduction in gas costs, from $1-$1.5k per day to $5-$10 per day overnight.

The team are not stopping with DA, working with Eigenlayer to develop a “fast finality” solution which allows for truly cross chain applications that no longer have to compromise either on the economic security of the application, or the speed to finality, allowing for a global, yet secure, settlement state.

All of this moves us closer to the ultimate goal — a flexible, interoperable blockchain stack without the need to build a “new blockchain” to get it done. Nuffle can provide the glue to allow protocol teams to build the applications that use the infrastructure that truly matters for their specific needs.

Most importantly, in its CEO Altan and co-founder Sam, Nuffle have founders with the ambition and vision to drive the company to success. We have known the team for 18 months, from prior to Altan joining Near and watched them deliver. We have no doubt that Nuffle will continue to drive forward to develop and implement innovative approaches to deliver the infrastructure necessary for a truly Open Web.

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